Microcosm_ E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer [80]
For the flagellum, Behe offered evolutionary biologists an idea for an experiment to overturn irreducible complexity. “To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure, for mobility, say, grow it for 10,000 generations, and see if a flagellum, or any equally complex system, was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven.”
Behe was cross-examined by Eric Rothschild, one of the lawyers for the Dover parents. Rothschild pointed out the inconsistencies riddling his testimony. Behe’s proposal for evolving a flagellum in the lab revealed an indifference to the scale of evolution. A 10,000-generation experiment might last two years, whereas bacteria have been evolving for well over 3 billion years. In a typical experiment a scientist might study several billion microbes. But the world’s population of microbes is inconceivably larger. A microbe’s failure to evolve in a laboratory would offer no evidence of intelligent design.
While Behe issued absurd demands to evolutionary biologists, he demanded little of himself. He felt no need to offer his own step-by-step account of how an intelligent designer created the flagellum (or when, or where, or why). Intelligent design, he informed the court, “does not propose a mechanism in the sense of a step-by-step description of how those structures arose.” The only feature that Behe needed to find in those structures to call them intelligently designed was the appearance of design. “When we see a purposeful arrangement of parts, we have always found that to be design,” he testified. “What else can one go with except on appearances?”
This sort of testimony persuaded Judge Jones that intelligent design was scientifically empty. In December 2005, he ruled that Of Pandas and People had no place in the Dover classroom. “The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID [intelligent design] is nothing less than the progeny of creationism,” Jones declared in his decision. He chose the flagellum as an illustration of how seamlessly creationism and intelligent design were connected. “Creationists made the same argument that the complexity of the bacterial flagellum supported creationism as Professors Behe and Minnich now make for ID,” he wrote.
The Dover trial was a creationist disaster. The Dover School Board members who had brought Of Pandas and People into the school were defeated by a slate of opponents to the policy even before the trial was over. Other intelligent design–friendly board of education members have lost their seats in Kansas and Ohio. Judge Jones’s decision was so thorough that it will probably set a precedent for any future cases on the teaching of creationism in whatever guise it takes.
Remarkably, though, creationists still love E. coli. Access Research Network, another organization that promotes intelligent design, has plastered its flagellum on T-shirts, aprons, beer steins, baseball jerseys, coffee mugs, calendars, greeting cards, calendars, tote bags, and throw pillows. All these creationist items can be purchased on a Web site. The site declares: “The output of this mechanism is used to drive a set of constant torque proton-powered reversible rotary motors which transfer their energy through a microscopic drive train and propel helical flagella from 30,000 to 100,000 rpm. This highly integrated system allows the bacterium to migrate at the rate of approximately ten body lengths per second. Would you please find out who filed the patent on this thing?”
The message you’ll actually get on your flagellum apron will be far simpler. Above