flagellum

Judge Jones might not realize it, but in a recent article in the York Dispatch he admitted that his ruling in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case amounted to judicial activism. He stated: “The decision seems to be holding up well … No other school district has engaged in this kind of a battle. I hope that’s a product of the decision and perhaps the way that I wrote the decision.” As Lawrence Baum writes in his book American Courts: Process and Policy, “[w]hen judges choose to increase their impact as policymakers, they can be said to engage in activism; choices to limit that impact can be labeled judicial restraint.” By admitting that he sought to impact the policy decisions of Read More ›

It’s been long known that the bacterial flagellum can spin in one direction and then quickly reverse directions and spin in the other. A recent issue of Nature has an article titled, “Structure of the torque ring of the flagellar motor and the molecular basis for rotational switching” which elucidates some of the biomechanical properties of the FliG motor protein that allows this rotation switch to occur: The flagellar motor drives the rotation of flagellar filaments at hundreds of revolutions per second, efficiently propelling bacteria through viscous media. The motor uses the potential energy from an electrochemical gradient of cations across the cytoplasmic membrane to generate torque. A rapid switch from anticlockwise to clockwise rotation determines whether a bacterium runs Read More ›

Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture GuidePermission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1: Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”?• Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design• Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution• Part 4: The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils• Part 5 (This Article): Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum• Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade• Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Ken Miller has been making the same objections about irreducible complexity and the bacterial Read More ›

In 1998, Darwinian biologist David J. DeRosier stated in the journal Cell, “More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human.” Firstly, it functions like a human-designed rotary engine that propels a bacterium through a liquid medium in the same way a propeller powers submarine through the ocean. A website devoted to rotary engine enthusiasts has observed that when it comes to the Rotary engine, “Nature always does it first.” The flagellum is basically a rotary engine, with a motor, a rotor, a stator, a bearing, a u-joint, and a propeller. Now it turns out that the flagellum has a clutch. According to recent Research Highlights from Nature: “A protein that allows the soil bacterium Read More ›