Biological Machines
First, sorry for the delay in the posting of your topic. First-time posters are held in moderation to ensure they are not spammers.
Unfortunately, the rhetorical tactic you mention is becoming quite common among Darwinists. Instead of attacking ID directly they are attacking the scientific foundations that ID builds upon. Here is a recent conversation on UD where a Darwinist denied that DNA is a language and that the flagellum is a machine:
A Simple Gene Origination Calculation
Unfortunately, I never followed up on Daniel King's assertion. about machines. The rest of the conversation focused on languages and abstracted information.
DNA is without a doubt a quaternary code at minimum (there probably is more to it than scientists currently are missing). Daniel King insisted that the WHO, the Designer(s), must be known in order for this type of information to be identified as a language. I would say that is the wrong question to begin with. “WHAT is doing the abstracting” can be answered readily: it’s the physical mechanisms that know the conventions of the abstracted information and converts from one state to another.
I would suggest reading the conversation in full.
Here is a blog by me that attempts to explain the historical background and practical applications of ID theory:
Informational Bits in a PB Sandwich
deny the existence of an unknown number of designers who MUST have once existed but MAY no longer be with us. Such poor souls, Paul Zachary Myers, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins with their thousands of devoted followers are, like pure white cats, stone deaf to what Einstein called the "music of the spheres." There is nothing that can be done for them.
I love it so!
Within my philosophy class my teacher started talking briefly on the subject of the argument for design (usually an argument for God). He stated that some people say that cells and/or parts of cells mimic very closely machines made by man, and so some people think therefore they are intelligently designed.
However he also said that these views are subjective, in the sense of: do these cells/parts of cells really look like machines and/or parts of machines?
Basically, I think he's trying to downgrade the design argument. It might be just part of his whole way of teaching the class, but I'm suspicious of his real reasons for saying this.
Anyway, because of this, I was wondering if you guys could point me to obvious molecular machines, and if you could give me some quotes by IDists and Evolutionists alike supporting this idea of molecular machines.
I have two quotes from two references referring to the bacteria flagellum as a "nanomachine" and with parts such as a "drive shaft, bushings, mounting plate, and a switch complex."
One from Current Biology Vol 18 No 16, by Howard C. Berg:
“The flagellar motor is a remarkably small rotary electric motor that includes a stator, drive shaft, bushings, mounting plate, and a switch complex. The motors are powered by protons or sodium ions, that flow through channels from the outside to the inside of the cell. Depending upon the configuration, the rod, hook, and filament are driven clock wise or counter clock wise. Other components include a rod cap, discarded upon rod completion, hook cap, discarded upon hook completion, hook-length control protein, and a factor that blocks late-gene expression.”
and another from Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 6 June 2008 p 455:
“The bacterial flagellum, one of the most remarkable structures in nature: a complex self-assembling nanomachine” where “dozens of proteins, many of which have intrinsic self-assembly properties, need to come together in an ordered assembly process to complete these molecular nanomachines.”
Note: I got these quotes from uncommondescent.com in the article "Spin Flagellum, Spin", but they still quoted the above sources.
Anyway, I've got two quotes referring to the bacteria flagellum as a nanomachine, and a motor. Both written by evolutionists. But is there any other quotes you guys can give me, by both IDists and Evolutionists, quoting cells/parts of cells, as machines, motors, etc.? If you had any quotes about the complex specified information of DNA coding too, that'd be awesome. I'm thinking about printing them off so, if I feel like I should, I can quote them off in my philosophy class. lol
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