Re: [asa] serious talk about ID and TE

Nick Matzke announced exciting new findings supporting his 2003 predictions
about the bacterial flagella.

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http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/09/mark-pallen-on.html
Mark Pallen on Namba on the flagellum/ATPase homologies…and me
By Nick Matzke on September 19, 2008 6:24 PM
Mark Pallen, author of the Rough Guide to Evolution and expert on Type III
Secretion Systems (and producer of the famed Darwin in Dub), has a new blog.
He just put up two posts about the third UK Type III Secretion meeting:
Dispatches from the cutting edge of flagellar biology, part
1<http://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com/2008/09/dispatches-from-cutting-edge-of.html%20>
Dispatches from the cutting edge of flagellar biology, part
2<http://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com/2008/09/dispatches-from-cutting-edge-of_17.html>
The short version: In the 2003 Big Flagellum Essay I reviewed the known
homology and similarity between the flagellar export apparatus and the
F1Fo-ATPase. I made a general prediction that there were likely more
homologies waiting to be discovered between the two systems.
Being brave (and having no reputation to lose), I also made some specific
suggestions for what the homologies might be. The mostly likely match, I
thought, was between the flagellum protein FliH and the F1Fo-ATPase protein
Fo-b (this was not a completely novel idea, there were a few hints in the
literature and online databases). Another, admittedly more speculative,
suggestion was that FliJ was homologous to the protein F1-delta. At the
time, prominent ID proponents who commented on the Big Flagellum Essay –
notably William Dembski and Mike Gene – dismissed, based on irreducible
complexity arguments, the idea of further homologies as mere evolutionary
storytelling. Mike Gene even wrote a whole detailed essay about why I was
wrong.
Read more at PT http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/09/mark-pallen-on.html
Compare these exciting findings to ID's contributions
Dembski <http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_biologusubjunctive.htm>:
Matzke makes an unconvincing argument for homologies between the type III
system and an ATP synthetase system.
Here's a nice quote <http://www.idthink.net/biot/flag6/index.html> from Mike
Gene:
"Since the complete lack of F0F1 IC interactions are missing from the TTS
machinery of the flagellum, it is unlikely that the F0F1 complex is
homologous to the TTS machinery, and thus cooption of the F0F1 complex is
not a plausible explanation."
If these results hold up, then this is another major win for science, and a
another major defeat of the scientifically contentfree arguments that we
have come to know as 'Intelligent Design'
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