Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Scientists are beginning to forget Darwin, whether they admit it or not.

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For example, in “Machine Revolution: More Details Emerge on ATP Synthase and Its Exquisite Design” (Evolution News & Views July 10, 2012), we learn:

One of ID’s unofficial mascots, the bacterial flagellum, has a counterpart 10 times smaller that also provides strong evidence of intelligent design. Your life — all life — depends on this highly efficient rotary motor. Since its rotary mechanism was first suggested in 1993, details of its exquisite design continue to come to light.

ATP synthase is a rotary motor made of proteins, embedded in the membranes of mitochondria. Plants also have them in their chloroplasts. The two-part machine has a spinning carousel-like rotor labeled F0 that runs on protons, and a catalytic structure labeled F1 where ATP synthesis takes place, producing three ATP per cycle. (ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is the universal energy currency of life.) Cells in all kingdoms of life contain this “marvelous rotary engine of the cell” as Yoshida et al. described it in 2001.

A couple of months ago we touched on this fascinating engine in some detail. Since then, four more papers about ATP synthase have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). All of them speak in machine terms (nanomachine, rotation, motor, mechanism, architecture) but none of them have much to say about evolution. They are indications of a major scientific revolution in our time that is transforming the nature of the origins debate. The power is in the details.

UD News ventures a prediction: We will soon be hearing from Darwin’s Christian theologians that this is a “”mechanistic” view of the world that makes God a “tinkerer”, far inferior to Darwin’s God who doesn’t even really know or care how it will all turn out.

Wait, wait. That’s a post-diction. (Consult notes.) Turns out, they’ve been saying that for years.

Comments
"this is a 'mechanistic' view of the world" - News What could lead anyone to believe that? Surely it couldn't be the perspective promoted by DI-IDM-IDers that 'organisms *are* machines,' could it? Does this article possibly suggest that the "major scientific revolution in our time" is to be found in some peoples' insistence that 'organisms' actually *should* be called 'machines'? "Sky-Net is self-aware" would seem to be much, much more of a 'scientific revolution' than that. Or 'nature is divine technology,' a point made by someone outside and independent of DI-IDM-ID. One might wonder when the line between biological sciences and mecha-morphic language could possibly be crossed.Gregory
July 12, 2012
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Right on. Evolutionism did take out of biology the ideas of biology being elaborate machines. Randomness of mutations made machine structures not an option fopr describing biology. I think biology most likely has the same principals behind it as physics. This because there is the same thinker behind it. Biology is just so much more complicated then physics. by the way even in geology they now see physics as happening as opposed to very simply physics of slow processes.Robert Byers
July 11, 2012
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