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Once again, we return to Exhibit A in the case of Evolution v. Intelligent Design: the bacterial flagellum.
A highly influential YouTuber with 11.9M subscribers posted a video that gushed over the incredible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, and impressed on his audience that it just could not have come about through evolution … “it just had to have been designed.”
Science educator Jon Perry gently pushed back on that claim, making a few rebuttals and clarifications in the comments section. That ignited a bit of on-line conversation and resulted in Jon creating a whole series of videos that took on many of the main ID arguments and explained how evolution is so fully capable of producing the stunning complexity of this molecular machine.
Those videos in turn caught our own eyes, and motivated us to have our own conversation with Jon. The three of us discussed various aspects of the evolutionary journey of the bacterial flagellum, as well as the stubborn persistence of the Intelligent Design arguments (it seems that, while the flagellum itself has been evolving to ever greater complexity and efficiency, the ID argument plods onward unchanged). We concluded that much of that persistence stems from the compelling influence of the emotion of awe (which triggers input from the “hypersensitive agency detector” and “promiscuous teleology” centers in our Homo sapiens brains) as well as the engineering-laden language that we use to describe the flagellum.
It was a great conversation that we think will lead to further collaborations down the road. And we highly recommend Jon’s YouTube channels StatedClearly and StatedCasually.
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “Intelligent Design.”
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