Irreducible #1

A documentary, "Revolutionary," was made about biochemist Dr. Michael Behe of Lehigh University. He doesn't look like a radical, but his openness to the supernatural makes him different among his professional colleagues.



He studied the "bacterial flagellum," a whip-like tail of a single-cell bacteria. It's anchored in the cell's membrane, and it's made of protein molecules. (To get the scale of it, the bacteria is so small that hundreds of thousands of them could fit in the period at the end of this sentence.)

It's constructed like an outboard motor. Did it assemble by random chance? Evolutionary theory claims that all living organisms develop their systems when minute random mutations give an advantage that is passed on to the next generation.

Could random mutations build these proteins and assemble them into a functioning machine? Behe is skeptical.

(cont'd tomorrow)