Bakteri kamçısı (bacterial flagellum) üzerine

Uzunca bir süre akıllı tasarımcıların favori moleküler yapısı olan bakteri kamçısı yeni araştırmalar sonucu elde edilen bilgilerle akıllı tasarımcıları zor durumda bırakmaya başladı. Başta Michael Behe olmak üzere William Dembski, Scott Minnich, Stephen Meyer ve Casey Luskin gibi AT (Akıllı Tasarım) hareketinin en önemli savunucularının flagellum ile ilgili bildikleri ve söyledikleri önemli şeylerin yanlış olduğu yeni araştırmalarla ortaya çıktı.

Nature Reviews Microbiology dergisinin Ekim 2006 sayısında yayımlanan, Mark Pallen ve Nicholas Matzke tarafından yazılan From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella başlıklı makale (bu makalenin tam metnine buradan pdf dosyası olarak ulaşabilirsiniz) bakteri kamçısıyla ilgili önceden bilinmeyen önemli noktaları ortaya çıkarıyor. Mesela Michael Behe Darwin'in Kara Kutusu (Darwin's Black Box) kitabında bakteri kamçısının 40'tan fazla proteine gereksinim duyduğunu söylemektedir. Yani 40'tan fazla "olmazsa olmaz" protein olduğunu iddia etmektedir. Halbuki Pallen ve Matzke'nin araştırmaları sonucunda vardıkları sayı 23'dir. Yani incelenen birçok bakteri kamçısının tamamında olan 23 adet farklı protein vardır. Geri kalan proteinlerin bazıları farklı bakteri türlerinin kamçılarında bazıları daha farklı bakteri türlerinin kamçılarında bulunmaktadır fakat tüm kamçılı bakteri türlerinin kamçılarında olan toplam 23 protein vardır. Bu proteinlerin bulunduğu bir listeye buradan da ulaşabilirsiniz. Bu bilgi elbette Behe gibi diğer tüm akıllı tasarım savunucuları tarafından da kullanılmaktaydı ve yanlış olduğu ortaya çıktı. Ayrıca akıllı tasarım savunucuları 40 adet vazgeçilmez (olmazsa olmaz) proteinin 30 tanesinin hiç homologu olmadığını iddia ediyorlardı. Pallen ve Matzke yaptıkları incelemelerde farklı bakteri kamçılarında toplam 42 farklı protein buldular ve bunların 15 tanesinin bilinen bir homologu yok. Ama yukarda da belirttiğim gibi bakteri kamçısında vazgeçilmez 23 protein var ve bunların sadece 2 tanesinin homologu yok. Yani Behe, Dembski, Minnich, Meyers ve Luskin gibi en önemli AT savunucuları kitaplarında ve yazılarında 30 adet homologu olmayan proteinin bakteri kamçısı için vazgeçilmez olduğunu ve bu sebeple başka bir yapıdan evrimleşmiş olmasının mümkün olmadığını savunmaktaydı. Fakat bu bilginin dramatik bir şekilde yanlış olduğu ortaya çıktı. Aslında bakteri kamçısı hakkında pek de birşey bilmedikleri gün yüzüne çıktı. Bakteri kamçısının diğer biyolojik yapılarda bulunmayan 30 proteine gereksinim duyduğunu düşünüyorlardı ama bu sayı bir anda "2"ye düştü. Bu da akıllı tasarımcıların bu kadar ateşli bir şekilde savundukları bir konuda bile ne kadar bilgisiz olduklarını göstermesi açısından oldukça önemli diye düşünüyorum.

Bu konu oldukça uzun ve geniş onun için çok uzatmadan yazımı bitirmek istiyorum. Bu yeni gelişmelerle ilgili daha fazla bilgi edinmek isteyenlere aşağıdaki linkeri incelemelerini öneririm:

• Flagellum evolution in Nature Reviews Microbiology
• Alert! Alack! I have been quote mined!
• Luskin interviews Behe on NRM flagellum article; neither admit errors; film at 11

William Dembski'ye cevaplar

• Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates by Richard Wein
• Review of No Free Lunch (pdf) by Jeffrey Shallit
• A Free Lunch in a Mousetrap by Mark Perakh
• Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and
  Dembski's "Complex Specified Information" by Wesley R. Elsberry and Jeffrey O. Shallit
• The Evolution of Biological Complexity by Finn Pond

• Meyer’s Hopeless Monster by Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry

• Design Yes, Intelligent No: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory and Neocreationism by Massimo Pigliucci
• On the origin of information by means of intelligent design: a review of William Dembski's "Intelligent Design" by Gert Korthof
• DNA by Design?: Stephen Meyer and the Return of the God Hypothesis by Robert Pennock
• Creationism and Intelligent Design by Robert Pennock
• What Is Wrong with Intelligent Design? by Elliott Sober
• Desperately Evading the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design: A Review of Dembski's The Design Revolution by Jeffrey Shallit
• Dembski's Profound Lack of Comprehension of Information Theory by Mark Chu-Carroll

Akıllı tasarımın dinle ilgisi var mı?

William Dembski:

• Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory. (1)
• But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed...And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done - and he's not getting it. (2)
• And another thing I think we need to be aware of is that not every instance of design we see in nature needs to be directly attributed to God. Certainly as Christians we believe there is an angelic hierarchy - it's not just that there's this physical material world and there's God. There can be various hierarchies of intelligent beings operating, God can work through what can be called derived intelligences - processes which carry out the Divine will, but maybe not perfectly because of the fall. (2)
• Intelligent design is modest in what it attributes to the designing intelligence responsible for the specified complexity in nature. For instance, design theorists recognize that the nature, moral character and purposes of this intelligence lie beyond the competence of science and must be left to religion and philosophy. (3, p. 42)
• Theism (whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) holds that God by wisdom created the world. The origin of the world and its subsequent ordering thus results from the designing activity of an intelligent agent—God. Naturalism, on the other hand, allows no place for intelligent agency except at the end of a blind, purposeless material process. Within naturalism, any intelligence is an evolved intelligence. Moreover, the evolutionary process by which any such intelligence developed is itself blind and purposeless. As a consequence, naturalism makes intelligence not a basic creative force within nature but an evolutionary byproduct. In particular, humans (the natural objects best known to exhibit intelligence) are not the crown of creation, not the carefully designed outcome of a purposeful creator, and certainly not creatures made in the image of a benevolent God. Rather, humans are an accident of natural history. (3, p. 8-9)
• Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration. (4)
• If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i.e. the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient. (5, p. 206)
• Theology is where my ultimate passion is and I think that is where I can uniquely contribute. (6)
• My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ. (5, p. 206)
• Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him. (5, p. 210)
• Accordingly, intelligent design should be understood as the evidence that God has placed in nature to show that the physical world is the product of intelligence and not simply the result of mindless material forces. This evidence is available to all apart from the special revelation of God in salvation history as recounted in Scripture. (12)

Phillip Johnson:

• God is our true Creator. I am not speaking of a God who is known only by faith and is invisible to reason .... I speak of a God who acted openly and who left his fingerprints all over the evidence. Does such a God really exist, or is he a fantasy like Santa Claus? That is the subject of this book. (7, p. 23)
• If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this....We call our strategy the 'wedge'. (7, p. 91-92) (Burada bahsi geçen 'wedge' stratejisi için Akıllı Tasarım: Bilim mi din mi? başlıklı yazıya bakın.)
• Second, I wanted to redefine what is at issue in the creation-evolution controversy so that Christians, and other believers in God, could find common ground in the most fundamental issue -- the reality of God as our true creator. (7, p. 92)
• We're not trying to prove the character of God through science. That's a bad idea. What I'm trying to do is clear away the misunderstandings, the debris that prevent people from accepting that God who wants to accept them. (8)
• The subject is not just the theory of evolution, the subject is the reality of God. (8)
• This isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science, it's about religion and philosophy. (9)
• Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools. (10)
• The Intelligent Design movement starts with the recognition that "In the beginning was the Word," and "In the beginning God created." Establishing that point isn't enough, but it is absolutely essential to the rest of the gospel message. (11)

1. William Dembski, Signs of intelligence: A primer on the discernment of intelligent design, (1999), Touchstone 12(4) (Jul/Aug): 76-84.)
2. A March 7, 2004 talk at the Fellowship Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, link
3. William Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design (2004)
4. William Dembski, Intelligent Design's Contribution To The Debate Over Evolution: A Reply To Henry Morris (2005), link
5. William Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999)
6. http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=19115
7. Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (1997)
8. Phillip Johnson, Hank Hanegraaf's "Bible Answer Man" radio program, 12.19.2004
9. Phillip Johnson, World Magazine, November 30, 1996
10. Phillip Johnson, American Family Radio, January 10, 2003
11. Phillip Johnson, Forward to Creation, Evolution, & Modern Science, 2000
12. William Dembski, Why President Bush Got It Right about Intelligent Design, 2005