Evolving electricity 9 Aug 2009 Evolution by natural selection never does quite what you expect. In an attempt to harvest electricity from bacterial biofilms, researchers at UMass Amherst subjected bacterial populations to selection for conductivity. The result was the evolution of flagella in a species that previously didn’t have them. Hmmm… is that complex specified information, or not? See also Lynch’s post, with a pic. HT to Richard Hoppe. Evolution
Evolution The two Wilsons on sociobiology 18 Nov 200718 Sep 2017 It’s not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining the nature of sociobiology (Wilson and Wilson 2007). As I have… Read More
Evolution The ontology of biology – interlude and podcast 5 Dec 2008 The General Ecosystems Thinking (GET) Group centred at Queensland University of Technology (or as we at UQ like to call it, the “city university”) invited me to come give a talk on the ontology of evolution. I gave it yesterday. As it will be part of this series of posts… Read More
Book Sterelny reviews book on Gould 14 May 2010 Kim Sterelny is perhaps the most significant philosopher of biology working today, although he is not I think much of a fan of Stephen Jay Gould, who many think is significant too. This review of a book about Gould indicates the lay of the land in this dispute. Kim previously… Read More
Off topic, but since you’re a philosopher I thought you’d want to see this. Richard Dawkins’ website posted some selections from William Dembski’s courses on ID at Southwestern Baptist Theology seminar. But what really caught my eye was the syllabus and sample exam from a “critical thinking” course he teaches there. Just look at this: [The following questions is worth 50 points. Answer it in 500 words or less.] 13. You are the head of a large public relations firm in New York. A consortium of Christian businessmen and foundations is fed up with the godlessness of our society and approaches you to run a “rhetorical campaign” to make Christianity and its moral values credible again to the wider culture. You have $100,000,000 a year for five years to make the campaign work (i.e., half a billion dollars total over five years). What programs are you going to institute and how are you going to allocate that money to restore Christianity as a credible world view? What objectives could you realistically hope to accomplish? [Example of a zero-credit answer: give all the money to the ACLU or to the UN.] http://www.designinference.com/teaching/2007_spring_crit_thinking/Final_Exam_PHREL_5373A_Spr07.pdf Course Description: How do we get people to believe things? This course examines the means by which we convince ourselves and others that something is true. Of special interest here are the pitfalls to logical thinking that prevent us from coming to the truth. Course Objective: The goal of this course is to help students become adept at making a persuasive case for the truth of the Christian worldview. http://www.designinference.com/teaching/2007_spring_crit_thinking/syllabus_crit_thnk_spr07_SWBTS_5373A.pdf
Wes, thanks for the materials from Dembski’s courses. It turns my stomach when exponents of pseudo-science appropriate the name of “critical thinking” for their quackery. But it is hilarious to see how dismally they fail to sustain the pretense. Dembski’s application of the term “critical thinking” to “making a persuasive case for the truth of the Christian worldview” is a fine illustration. It puts the “moronic” in “oxymoronic.”
We discussed this finding here: http://talkrational.org/showthread.php?t=17578 and one poster pointed out that other species of geobacter express flagella and pili in response to substrate availability. So that’s a likely explanation.
I think you are misunderstanding or misstating the paper. The organism almost certainly had flagella before, it just didn’t express them under laboratory or MFC (microbial fuel cell) conditions. What changed in this mutant is a regulatory gene (or genes) that controls expression of flagella and pili (interestingly, in many organisms these are inversely regulated, ie the bacteria produce one or the other, not both). I think your statements about what this means for creationists are a bit far afield. This has essentially nothing to do with the actual evolution of flagella.
Of course not. It was a joke. But there already is a perfectly useful story about flagellar system deriving from TTS Systems. Here we have a species that has some prior states that get activated under natural selection. According to the IDists, even this is impossible, because all parts of a flagellum are irreducibly complex, and so selection cannot bring the entire system into being. Here it does. It doesn’t matter for the ID IC argument that it was potentially expressible – even that is impossible. That it can happen, even like this, undercuts their argument. Of course there are ways you can evolve flagella; of course it can be controlled by regulatory genes. Nothing evolves from no prior state whatsoever. Here’s a simple case where you get flagella where there were none.
Sorry John, my sarcasm meter was malfunctioning today! I should have gotten the joke…Serves me right for being a know-it-all 🙂 Apologies.