IC challenge: Evolve a bicycle into a motorcycle!

AP challenges: AP, you and Behe have things a little confused here. The bike doesn't move by itself. It requires a human rider to mobilize it. Therefore, the correct analogy is for the human rider to evolve into the motorcycle engine. You may question whether the evolutionary process can result in a human evolving into a mindless piece of machinery, but you need only pay a visit to Bob Jones University to observe this process in operation.Actually, the motorcycle did evolve from the bike, but not through a gradual series of allelic gene mutations. It was an instance of endosymbiosis. If you are not familiar with this term, you should read Lynn Margulis' "Symbiotic Planet". It is a very short book and lays out the concept and evidence for endosymbiosis in a straightforward manner. Just be careful not to take her seriously when she proposes this mechanism for all speciation events. She has the mind of a great biologist, but the soul of a crackpot creationist, seeing her solution as the only possible one and all criticism as part os a great conspiracy.Endosymbiosis was the process whereby modern plants first aquired green chloroplasts for photosysnthesis when one of their ancient ancestors ate a small blue-green algae, and instead of digesting it, started a beautiful relationship.. It is also the process whereby we 'better than thou' eukaryotes acquired our mitochondria when one of our ancestors ate without digesting an efficient aerobic bacterium.But getting back to bikes and motorcycles: when this red herring analogy was put forth by the blue nosed Behe in his yellow journalism tract he (being a professor of biology) knew full well that it was a total non-sequitor designed to distract the uninformed, which it did in your case. While mankind's (peoplekind's, he/shekind's?) technological evolution certainly has a large Darwinian aspect to it with a lot of small, random modifications filtered through an environmental selection process, it tends to be dominated by Lamarkian processes that make analogies drawn between technological and biological evolution more confusing than enlightening.Regards, AnInGe

Yes, you are quite right. That was too harsh and uncalled for for such a productive and interesting scientist. My only excuse is my pencant to sacrifice accuracy for alliteration. Her "Garden of Microbial Delights" has always been one of my favorite books. But in the book I reference, I was very disappointed in her paranoia and refusal to accept that there are many mechanisms, all Darwinian at their basis, that contribute to evolution. Endosymbiosis, while certainly one of the most intriguing, is just one of those mechanisms. But I do like to idly speculate if certain leucocytes might have started out as invasive amoeba with a taste for bacteria that adapted to life in the mammalian blood stream and somehow acquired their hosts genome. Probably a silly idea.

Brad, thank you for your response. I'm glad to see that you focused on the heart of my post and am encouraged that you totally agree with my position in this matter. I'm a little confused though about your reference to Williams' work. Would that be Venus or Serena?

We don't have to go traipsing about the garden to appreciate the ubiquity and diversity of bacteria. The typical human body has about 100 trillion cells, but only about 50 trillion of these are 'us' in that they started from our original egg and contain our genome. The rest, making up over half our cells, are an extensive menagerie of critters, mostly bacteria. We are not individuals. We are walking ecosystems. Most of these co-critters serve functions that are useful or even essential for our survival. And of course we serve functions that are essential to their survival.Lynn Margulis, in her delicious book: "Garden of Microbial Delights" describes this in detail and suggests that perhaps the bacteria are the Intelligent Designers that evolved the so called higher animals like us humans just so they would have a nice temperature stabilized and constant moisture environment and also have someone to bring home the bacon.