A reader asks about an essay by Nick Matzke on the evolution of the flagellum:

I just stumbled across a detailed proposal for the evolution of the bacterial flagellum by Nick Matzke. This is the first time I’ve seen any such stepwise proposal for a major evolutionary change. Most of it was written in 2004, and he conspicuously avoids you in his bibliography. I note that Matzke didn’t get his PhD until 2012. I was wondering if any ID people ever responded.

Let me give a brief response. When the essay first appeared over ten years ago there was no good place for me to answer since I had no blog of my own and neither Evolution News & Views nor Uncommon Descent was up and running. So I didn’t reply and then forgot about it over the years. Looking back, I would say its chief problem is that it’s terminally fuzzy, bases most of its speculation on sequence comparisons, and glides over difficulties that would have to be dealt with in nature. One problem in particular is that it assumes that components of other systems would be readily available to be used in the new system it is contemplating. I discussed this type of maneuver in Darwin’s Black Box in regard to Russell Doolittle’s invocation of gene duplication to build the blood-clotting cascade:

Following Professor Doolittle’s example we could propose a route by which the first mousetrap was produced: The hammer appears as the result of the duplication of a crowbar in our garage. The hammer comes into contact with the platform, the result of shuffling several Popsicle sticks. The spring springs forth from a Grandfather clock that had been used as a timekeeping device. The holding bar is fashioned from a straw sticking out of a discarded Coke can. The catch is unleashed from the cap on a bottle of beer. But it just doesn’t happen that way unless someone or something else is guiding the process.

Unless other parts are first modified to fit their new role, such scenarios don’t work.

The big problem for ID advocates in pointing out the extreme difficulties of putting together complex biological systems such as the flagellum or clotting cascade by unintelligent processes is that the other side sees it simply as a challenge to invent a facile story. That’s one reason I wrote The Edge of Evolution — to say that we no longer have to rely on our imaginations, that we have good evidence to show what Darwinian processes are capable of doing. When we look to see what they do when we are watching, we never see the sorts of progressive building of coherent systems that Darwinists imagine. Rather, we see tinkering around the edges with preexisting systems or degradation of complex systems to gain short-term advantage.

Image: � olly / Dollar Photo Club.