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Comment on I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment) - Smarter Every Day 308

Well, I don’t think it’s worth repeating the debate again. You can go back and look at what was posted back when it came out.

But he tells a very one sided story and keeps telling to keep an open mind. He presents this thing as if it’s totally unique and amazing, where there are very similar structures in nature out there. He also heavily focuses on the idea of it being a motor in the way that a human designed motor works, giving the same names to parts which are kind of similar on a surface level but really aren’t. He also repeats all of the bible thumper talking points around this subject, as if it’s a mystery nobody can explain and couldn’t have come to be without some kind of intelligent design at the helm. But the reality is, this is not representing the reality at all. This whole flagella thing was an exercise of goal post moving in the first place. The ID people kept pointing out weird things and missing links. Then when science explained exactly how that thing came to be, without ID involved, they just pointed to the next thing at one point ending up at flagella.

There is a whole Wikipedia page talking about how flagella evolved and how it came to be. The intelligent design people have been shouting about this for 3 decades now and there is so much info out there to find about how this came to be. If Destin wanted to approach this from a scientific standpoint, he would focus on that information, instead of presenting it like some kind of mystery we are still figuring it out today. And not keep telling people to have an open mind and how he can’t figure it out. He could have even gone into why people might think it was ID and then explain the science why it is not. Something other online science communicators often do, give people the points they have been hearing from the “wrong” side and then go into those points and explain them.

Basically the whole subject itself is very hard to present without going into the whole ID versus evolution standpoint and the way he represented it was straight out of the ID playbook. And keep in mind all of this was thoroughly debunked back 20 years ago. Him bringing this up now is inexcusable.

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aidan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

He also repeats all of the bible thumper talking points around this subject, as if it’s a mystery nobody can explain and couldn’t have come to be without some kind of intelligent design at the helm.

He literally does not say that though, he says there’s a lot of research into it and encourages people to read it.

This whole flagella thing was an exercise of goal post moving in the first place. The ID people kept pointing out weird things and missing links. Then when science explained exactly how that thing came to be, without ID involved, they just pointed to the next thing at one point ending up at flagella.

Yeah I agree, but I also think that you can’t exactly blame someone else who was uninvolved with the initial argument for arguing a different thing at a different time. If one person criticizes a politician for not providing enough social services and another separate person complains about taxes that’s not moving goal posts, those are just two different people.

There is a whole Wikipedia page talking about how flagella evolved and how it came to be.

Yes, but, did you read it? Its not exactly too resoundingly confident in any one theory.

And keep in mind all of this was thoroughly debunked back 20 years ago.

All of what? It is true that the flagella isn’t unique if that’s what you mean.

I’m not even sure there is research still being done on this, the research was done decades before, there is no mystery.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mmi.14658

Here’s a relatively recent study that says basically what the wikipedia says:

Homing in on the T3SS, the exact evolutionary relation between injectisomes and flagella1 is debated. Phylogenetic analyses and functional arguments led to two models: (a) The evolution of modern flagella and injectisomes from a common ancestral protein export machinery (Gophna et al., 2003; Pallen and Gophna, 2007), or (b) The evolution of injectisomes from a flagellum-like ancestor (Abby and Rocha, 2012; Denise et al., 2020; Nguyen et al., 2000).

But it also says:

The T3SS is one of the most complex bacterial molecular machines, incorporating one to over a hundred copies of more than 15 different proteins into a multi-MDa transmembrane complex (Table 1). The system, especially the flagellum, has, therefore often been quoted as an example for “irreducible complexity,” based on the argument that the evolution of such a complex system with no beneficial intermediates would be exceedingly unlikely. However, it is now clear that, far from having evolved as independent entities, many secretion systems share components between each other and with other cellular machineries (Egelman, 2010; Pallen and Gophna, 2007).

I ofc am just a layman reading this, I agree it seems better understood that how I interpreted what he was saying, but it also doesn’t seem nearly as well understood as you’re saying.

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- Thorry84@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I’m not going to debate Intelligent Design in 2025, that’s just dumb.
  
  The whole thing boils down to: Just because we don’t fully understand it, doesn’t mean it’s proof of god.
  
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  - aidan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    You’re thinking I’m saying something I’m not. And I think that was the case with your interpretation of the video too.
    
    Nothing I’ve said here (or ever said in my life) is pro-intelligent design
    
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    m0darn@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I’m a different person weighing in here:
    
    When you said:
    
    The T3SS is one of the most complex bacterial molecular machines, incorporating one to over a hundred copies of more than 15 different proteins into a multi-MDa transmembrane complex (Table 1). The system, especially the flagellum, has, therefore often been quoted as an example for “irreducible complexity,” based on the argument that the evolution of such a complex system with no beneficial intermediates would be exceedingly unlikely. However, it is now clear that, far from having evolved as independent entities, many secretion systems share components between each other and with other cellular machineries (Egelman, 2010; Pallen and Gophna, 2007).
    
    I ofc am just a layman reading this, I agree it seems better understood that how I interpreted what he was saying, but it also doesn’t seem nearly as well understood as you’re saying.
    
    IMO it’s a problem with the article. The article says that T3SS is cited as an example as something that’s “irreducibly complex”. I suppose that it’s true that it is cited as that. But the second part of the paragraph explains why it isn’t true that it’s “irreducibly complex”. The paragraph isn’t explicit enough because the paragraph has probably evolved to be something that’s true and equally dissatisfying to both sides.
    
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