Matzke on Flagella, Etc.

Nick Matzke of the NCSE, and regular contributor to The Pandas Thumb, has been a busy guy. He played an important role (behind the scenes) in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, and I want to highlight some things he has written recently.

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1. Having been profiled in Seed Magazine, Matzke gives a few additional insights into his role in the Dover case, including how they learned that the book at issue in the case had been originally written as a creationism text. This evidence undercut the defense's case that intelligent design is science, not religion.

2. He recently gathered up published measurements for hominin cranial capacity and made a couple of nifty charts. (Original posts here and here.)



3. He has co-authored a paper in the current issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology where he takes on ID arguments about bacterial flagella. Unfortunately a subscription is required to read the article, but Nick has posted additional comments here.

Having read the paper, I will just list some of the key points made.

a. ID arguments tend to treat the flagellum as an essentialist type, however there are a diversity of flagella.

Therefore, there is no point discussing the creation or ID of 'the' bacterial flagellum. Instead, one is faced with two options: either there were thousands or even millions of individual creation events, which strains Occam's razor to the breaking point, or one has to accept that all the highly diverse contemporary flagellar systems have evolved from a common ancestor.

b. Some of the core flagellar proteins show sequence similarity that indicates common ancestry via gene duplication. In some cases, related proteins are involved in other non-flagellar processes, suggesting that flagellar proteins could have been co-opted from other functions.

c. While the exact (historical) steps to building a flagellum through variation and natural selection are impossible to know, looking at the range of differing flagella may provide clues.

d. Ideas for research are put forward, like--for example--using phylogenetic analysis to reconstruct ancient proteins and evaluating them for function.

An alternative, more radical, option would be to mdel flagellar evolution prospectively, for example, by creation random or minimally constrained libraries and then iteratively selecting proteins that assemble into ever more sophistocated artificial analogues of the flagellar filament.

4. Finally, I just couldn't help but point this out--I think it may be one of the silliest things I've read all year. (If you're in a hurry, head to the quote at the bottom.)