Bummer For Behe As Science Proves Him Wrong Again

Credit: Sonja-Verena Albers

Attaching the propeller: How the motility structure of unicellular archaea is fixed to their surface -- ScienceDaily

Scientists working at Freiburg University, Germany, have worked out the structure of the flagellum used by archae. Archae are regarded as the most primitive prokaryotes - the group of single-celled organisms which don't have a cell nucleus and which includes bacteria.

And it's bad news for devotee of creationist loon and virtual designer of the Intelligent Design fraud, Michael J. Behe.

Readers may recall how Michael J. Behe was recently exposed as a liar by molecular biologist, Professor Kenneth R. Miller who showed that specific claims and mathematical models he used in his book, The Edge of Evolution were false and bogus, and that further claims by his Discovery Institute which is promoting ID and trying to subvert the US Constitution and have it taught as valid science in US public schools, that scientific papers supported him were also lies.

Readers may also recall how Behe first came to prominence when, as a biochemist posing as a microbiologist, he wrote Darwin's Black Box, which contained a number of inaccuracies which have never been corrected in subsequent editions because they would wreck the argument if omitted. The argument being that because no-one could explain how the E. coli flagellum could arise by evolution because it is 'irreducibly complex', it must have been designed by an Intelligent Designer.

The main factual inaccuracy was, of course, that no-one could explain how E. coli's flagellum could have arisen by evolution, but he was marketing his book at people who could be relied on never to have heard of exaptation or gene duplication. The rest of his book consisted of a carefully disguised, ludicrously verbose argument from ignorant incredulity and gap-filling with a god, worthy of any home-schooled creationist 12 year-old.

And now those awful scientists have shown how an even less complex structure can function as a perfectly functional flagellum. Unlike the bacterial flagellum which needs up to fifty proteins, the archae they studied does it with a mere seven subunits. So much for irreducibly complex.

So, I wonder how the Discovery Institute are going to spin this one so it looks like it supports Behe's argument that the E. coli flagellum is irreducibly complex. Good job they're only proper scientists so can be safely dismissed as 'sciencists', in other words, those nutty people who believe reality is real and use unreliable stuff like evidence and facts and logic and other elitist stuff they get from books, and who claim science is a better method for telling what's true and what isn't than guesses, ignorant intuition, primitive superstitions and believing what mummy and daddy said was true.

Reference:
Ankan Banerjee, Chi-Lin Tsai, Paushali Chaudhury, Patrick Tripp, Andrew S. Arvai, Justin P. Ishida, John A. Tainer, Sonja-Verena Albers. FlaF Is a β-Sandwich Protein that Anchors the Archaellum in the Archaeal Cell Envelope by Binding the S-Layer Protein. Structure, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.str.2015.03.001

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