Beretta writes:
So? Those precursors are needed for the secretory system -at what point did they stop secreting and get in line to motor and gradually get organized into a flagellum. Isn't there still a secretory function ongoing in the bacterium? You have to be an evolutionist to imagine the natural selection pathway that kept a non-functional part way flagellum going while it organized itself into something that worked. Did the bacteria decide that it needed to go somewhere? Did its inner working parts randomly mutate according to its desire to head out there? If my ancestors and I all really felt that flying would be a useful function, would our random generational mutations eventually make that happen. And when our wings were just getting started, of what value would they be? Is natural selection likely to select them if they are halfway there and have no purpose yet.
Your objections all have easy answers, but this isn't the proper thread for a discussion of the basics of evolution. Your core problem is obvious: whenever called upon to present the evidence for ID, you instead criticize evolution.
What's more, your criteria for which scientific information you accept is contradictory. You accept that scientists can decipher biological processes like the type III secretory system, but not that they can decipher the mechanisms behind hereditary change.
You need to provide a description of what ID scientists understand about the design and construction of things like the bacterial flagellum. For example, just as scientists explain the development of the bacterial flagellum in terms of a process involving descent with modification combined with natural selection, IDists need to explain things like how the designer makes the change within the genome, whether the change was sudden or gradual over some number of generations, whether there is evidence of the change in the genes, whether the modification happens as part of the reproductive process or to a mature organism, and whether the change happens to just one individual or to many.
For sexual species it would involve questions like whether the change is made for a male and female simultaneously, and if so what mechanisms does it use to make sure the modified male and female breed with each other. Does the change involve only genetic modifications to sperm and egg, or to the genome of mature individuals, in which case you'd have to ask if it affects morphology. And lastly, of course, there's the question of evidence for the actual designer.
But right now there's nothing for ID to teach except that God did it, and of course, science doesn't believe that, and it makes no sense to teach that something is science when it isn't.
--Percy
™ Version 4.2
