ID Isn’t About Size or Speed
It’s getting a little tiring to hear, over and over, that such-and-such molecular machine is a “marvel of nano-engineering,” and watch ID’ers ooh and aah over how fast or agile it is. So what. Here are a few sickening quotes:
This is absolutely mind-boggling, to perceive at this scale of size, such a finely tuned apparatus... —Dean Kenyon, “Unlocking the Mystery of Life”
A typical cell from you or me, called a eukaryotic cell, is probably a tenth of the size of the head of a pin, and yet in that single cell there are about three billion units of DNA... —Michael Behe, “The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution: The Molecular Machines of a Cell”
The flagellum ... spins at tens of thousands of rpm, [and] can change direction in a quarter turn... —William Dembski, “Does Evolution Even Have A Mechanism?”
News flash: The logic of ID has nothing to do with being awed by tininess, and there’s nothing particular impressive about how fast the flagellar motor can spin or how quickly it can start and stop. It can do those things just because it’s so small. It’s the same reason a small desk fan can get up to full speed in about one second, but a huge electric turbine takes several seconds (at least) to do the same. It’s also the reason why a pencil falls over in fraction of a second, but a huge building takes several seconds to fall down. It’s the reason, when they’re making a movie using scale models of planes, buildings, spaceships, etc., they usually run the film through the camera at a higher-than-normal rate — this slows down the effect in the finished movie, and makes it thus appear larger. Larger objects act more slowly simply because they have greater distances to move.
Even the popular press (not in defense of ID) is guilty of similar (and similarly pointless) awe at what small things can do. Have you seen the news stories that claim that if a cockroach was as big as a horse, it could run at a speed of 500 mph? No, it couldn’t. Or if a flea was the size of a human, it could jump as high as a skyscraper? No, it couldn’t. It could jump about six feet off the ground. Just like humans do. Just like kangaroos do. And yes, just like actual fleas do. Bigger jumping muscles means a bigger body to lift. A smaller body to lift means smaller jumping muscles. It all adds up to the same launch velocity for all jumping animals, and once you leave the ground, you’re a free-fall projectile. Same launch speed = same height: six feet.
A failure to understand this has led to some wildly unrealistic sci-fi films. Mark Wahlberg fights against intelligent, human-sized apes who can leap twenty feet in the air. And the new King Kong can leap several stories off the ground. Sorry, guys — six feet.
Let’s all take a deep breath and stop thinking that tiny objects could somehow be enlarged to the size of a desk without also receiving a big time-scale adjustment. And please — let’s try especially hard to keep such imaginary fantasies out of scientific arguments for Intelligent Design. Somebody in the Darwinist camp is going to clue in to this nonsense and start using it to their advantage.
Update 2008.02.08 — More of the same as noted in SlashDot’s Birds Give a Lesson to Plane Designers:
From the [University of Michigan] news release: “The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second.”
OK... so just build your A-4 the size of a barn swallow, and see if it can’t do the same. Yawwnn.
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