A Science Article by Yogesvara Das
The bacterial flagellum “motor”
In 1996 Michael J Behe, a professor of biology at Lehigh University in America, shocked the scientific world with his international best seller “Darwin’s Black Box.” Voted one of the 100 most
influential books of the twentieth century, it describes the amazing biological world found within the cell. 150 years ago when Darwin published his “Origin of Species” it was thought the cell was a simple blob of protoplasm, an array of elements brought together by natural forces. 150 years later, through electron microscopes and x-ray crystallography, the “box” has been opened and scientists are now investigating a whole lilliputian world of nanotechnology.
Apparently, the human cell is more complicated than New York city. Now if you imagine the pipework, sewage systems, electrical wiring, railways, roadways, subways, tramways, telecommunications, houses, skyscrapers, etc, and yet a cell is more complicated. And what’s more there is enough information in one cell to fill over 8000 books, each book containing over 500 pages.
An honest man armed with all the knowledge available to us now could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost like a miracle
Nobel prize winner Francis Crick
The more we know about the cosmos and evolutionary biology, the more they seem inexplicable without some aspect of design.
Nobel prize winner Charles Townes
I do not wish to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe in that which I know to be scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.
Nobel prize winner George Wald
Human cells are reproduced in a way similar to reproducing cars. In a factory there are raw materials, machines, information and machines which can read and apply the information. Within the cell we find the same things, a factory, raw materials, machines, information and machines which can read and apply the information. Now if someone suggests that the technology and mechanisms for reproducing cars came from blind, purposeless, chance driven processes they would be laughed to scorn. However if someone explains how the technology and mechanisms for reproducing cells came from blind, purposeless, chance driven processes they win the Nobel prize.
Do you have enough blind faith to believe that life just popped into existence from non-life, and that such life just happened to have the ability to take in the nourishment it needed, the ability to expel waste and the ability to reproduce itself, all the while having everything it needed to survive in the environment it just happened to find itself.
Michael Snyder
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.
Philosopher and journalist M. Muggeridge
It is for example impossible for evolution to account for the fact that one single cell can carry more information than all the volumes of encyclopaedia Britannica put together.
Philosophy Professor Anthony Flew
In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe describes a biological machine known as the bacterial flagellum. Within our intestines there are perhaps millions of bacteria known as e-coli. Some of them have a kind of tail which enables them to propel themselves through the intestinal waterways. Magnified some 30,000 times under an electron microscope, the mechanism of this “tail” has shocked and astonished the scientific world.
There is a motor, a propeller, a fuel line which provides acid as fuel, there is a rotar, a stator, a U-joint, a driveshaft, it is two speed, it can go forward or reverse, it is water cooled and it rotates at an astonishing 1,500 revolutions per second. It is a marvel of biological engineering, a biological outboard motor which Howard Berg, a scientist at Harvard University describes as the most efficient machine in the universe.
The motor of the bacterial flagellum
The flagellum enables the bacteria to travel along the intestinal waterways.
For more info visit – Bacterial Flagellum – A Sheer Wonder Of Intelligent Design – OrthodoxNet.com Blog
Charles Darwin once said “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
How is it possible to go from a bacteria which does not have a flagellum to one that has. How does a blind, purposeless, chance driven process make slight modifications to produce a biological outboard motor. Where do you start. The obvious starting point is the motor, but how and why does a bacteria start mutating a motor, and what happens next, a propeller, a fuel line which powers the motor with acid, and then the flagellum starts rotating at an astonishing 1,500 revolutions per second, and all from blind, purposeless, chance driven processes. Today we have expert technicians working purposely in accordance with a well worked out plan, yet they themselves cannot match the engineering and technology of the bacterial flagellum. No man can create an outboard motor which rotates at 1,500 revolutions per second and whats more these bacteria can stop on a dime, and immediately reverse or turn left or right, what man made machine can do that.
During the 19th century, scientists believed there were two fundamental entities, matter and energy. But as we enter the 21st century, there’s a third fundamental entity that science has had to recognise, and that is information. And so as we encounter the biology of the information age, the suspicion is growing that what we are seeing in the DNA molecule is actually an artifact of mind, an artifact of intelligence. Something that can only be explained by intelligent design.
Stephen C Meyer
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been waiting there for centuries.
Robert Jastrow
It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research has provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument for design.
Philosophy Professor Anthony Flew
Dr Don Johnson has PHDs in computer and information sciences and a PHD in chemistry. He has spent some twenty years teaching in colleges throughout America and Europe, and this is what he says about the cell. “The cell is not “just” like a computer, the cell has thousands if not millions of computers, real computers, biological computers. They read the digital memory and transfer digital information, all the functionality of computers is built into every cell of every organism, and so there really is a network of computer systems in every cell.”
If evolution is correct and life began some 2-3 billion years ago, with the appearance of the first self replicating cell, then all of the machinery which enables a cell to reproduce itself must have been present. In other words the amazing combination of lightning striking a mud puddle produced not only a cell membrane, but machines, information, machines capable of reading information and thousands if not millions of computers. The only reason we are able to recognize these mechanisms, is because of the industrial and technological revolution which is only some two hundred years old, before this we would never have known what we were looking at. To imagine that computers, information and machines capable of reading information have been around for millions and billions of years is mind boggling. What scientists have found within the cell is every much as astonishing as finding life on mars and to explain that all of this came from lightning striking a mud puddle is even more astonishing.
When Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species”, the cell was seen as a simple blob of protoplasm, and so his theory carried the day. The black box of Michael J Behe has revealed an unimaginable world of biotechnology, and in keeping with the science he promoted, Charles Darwin and his outdated theory is incapable of surviving the science of the twenty first century.
Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.
Louis Pasteur
The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation … His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
Albert Einstein
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of a powerful and intelligent being.
Sir Isaac Newton
USED WITH PERMISSION
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