Out for a Spin

Mark Perakh over at Talk Reason is discussing the flagellum.

Actually, he's discussing several flagella, with particular emphasis on the distinction between real ones and fictional ones.

It is this image of the flagellum which Behe displayed on the wall of Larry Kane's studio. Pointing to that image, Behe triumphantly claimed that the flagellum looked exactly like a man-made "machine." Since all machines we know about have been designed, Behe confidently asserted that the flagellum bears features doubtlessly pointing to Design. QED.

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If I had seen Behe's pictures, I could have simply repeated what I wrote in a post to the Panda's Thumb blog on June 15, 2004 regarding the Dembski-Shanks debate [17]. Here is a quotation from my post:

[Dembski] has devoted a considerable attention to the discussion of what he referred to as the mascot of intelligent design - the bacterium flagellum. He insisted that the flagellum is in fact a machine, and to support this statement, he displayed that standard picture where the flagellum is shown in a geometrically perfect shape, fully symmetric and consisting of geometrically perfectly formed parts. Of course, such a presentation was misleading as the real flagellum is far from having such a perfect geometric shape. Unlike machines, which may be close replicas of each other (say, all Jeeps of the same year have almost exactly the same shape) the flagella, first, have shapes with many deviations from a perfect geometric symmetry, and, second, there are no two flagella exactly identical. Individual flagella differ in various respects, like the entire biological organisms vary from an individual to individual. If Dembski's picture were closer to reality, it would be much less effective in supporting his claims. Since he did not offer a disclaimer pointing to the idealization used in his depiction of the flagellum, we are entitled to conclude that he was interested not in an honest discussion based on facts, but rather on winning the debate regardless of means.

The above words can be addressed to Behe as well as to Dembski.

In fact the images Behe, Dembski, and their ID colleagues are showing are not pictures of real flagella but rather pictures of imaginary (usually computer-generated) machine-like contraptions remotely reminiscent of real flagella, pictures composed in a way artificially creating a false impression of flagella's machine-like appearance.

To illustrate my thesis, let us survey some examples of flagella images found in various publications.

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One more picture of the molecular structure of a flagellum is shown in Fig. 7, in this case representing a filament's cross-section view.

Instead of machine-like parts with a smooth surface, we see in these pictures garlands of protein molecules constituting the elements of the flagellum assembly. Which man-made machine has anything in common with these images? These structures rather look like typical bacteriophage viruses.

(Some of the pictures can be seen here: http://sciencenotes.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/whos-zoomin-who/)

ID advocates often point (see, for example, [18]) to the allegedly fraudulent "icons of evolution" supposedly utilized by the "Darwinists" for their nefarious purposes. One of such allegedly fraudulent "icons" is the images of embryos by Haeckel. In fact, Haeckel's embryos images were shown to be erroneous not by any creationists but rather by the "Darwinists" themselves. On the other hand, ID advocates, including Dembski and Behe, incessantly reproduce images of flagella which are heavily doctored, without any disclaimers as to the great degree of idealization inherent in these images. Indeed, look again at the real electron photographs of flagella and/or at the images of their actual molecular structure, as shown above in Figs 4, 5, 6, and 7, and it becomes obvious that real natural flagella are far from looking like man-made machines like those whose artificially constructed images are shown in Figs 1, 2, and 3.

It seems that Behe, Dembski, and their companions in the anti-science endeavors, may be with a much better justification accused of resorting to frauds, because the images of flagella they endlessly reproduce are in fact fraudulent insofar as they are not accompanied by disclaimers admitting the substantial degree of idealization, resulting in those mages being misleading made-up representations of real flagella.