alt Hacker NewsFor those who remember, the flagellum was a major site of the Intelligent Design debate that gave us Christopher Rufo (via the Discovery Institute)
The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the gaps retreats further
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The article states that the rotor very much evolved. But if you follow the linked evidence, various flagellar motors appear to have evolved from an original ancestor. This is exactly consistent with intelligent design and creationism. It does not demonstrate the origin of the flagellar motor in the first place. Everyone, whether creationists, theistic evolutionists, or materialistic evolutionists all agree that mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow etcetera occur. This paper advances the debate about origins no further distance. The debate is not about the survival of the "fittest", the debate is about the arrival of the fittest.
this was addressed directly in TFA with a link to https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.03824-24
Doesn't "irreducible complexity" here mean "it wouldn't function in any reduced form", e. g. "it would not be possible to build this up in tiny parts useful for other things and then have those things transformed into these things by tiny accretions and removals over the course of the lifespans of these creatures."? The article doesn't cite anything that would suggest that this argument is any less relevant now that we understand how the system works than it was before we understood it at this level.