Posted: Jul 22, 2010 7:26 am
Calilasseia wrote:And of course, Behe's claim that removing parts break the flagellum fatally is refuted by one of the scientific papers I presented in the other thread, where scientists demonstrated experimentally that removing one flagellar gene stopped flagellar biosynthesis, but removing a second gene resulted in flagellar biosynthesis restarting, with the new flagellum functioning as a motility system just as well as the original.
Game. Fucking. Over.
Well to be fair, Behe in another display of manifest dishonesty has now changed his claim to "if you remove a certain key part it will stop functioning as a flagellum".
For example, if you take away the filament the flagellum will obviously no longer function... as a flagellum. (It just so happens to be an effective virulence system now). If you remove other specific parts which would also have broke the motility function, you also get another functional unit. What is interesting here is that many of these alternative constructions have homologues (not individual proteins, but whole-system homologues) in related flagellar-absent species.
So the claim is still a strawman though, as I have explained now several times.