Reductionist science is often blamed with ‘unweaving the rainbow’, as the English poet John Keats once put it, taking the awe out of life and nature as a result of “conquering all mysteries by rule and line”. But in many ways, the more science breaks down the building blocks of life itself, the more wonder we observe.
Take for example the latest discoveries about the ‘flagellar motor’ – an assembly of molecules that helps to propel microscopic cells such as bacteria and sperm by powering the whip-like structures that project from them. On the excellent Smarter Every Day YouTube channel, host Destin discusses these discoveries (published in Nature Microbiology in April 2024, “CryoEM structures reveal how the bacterial flagellum rotates and switches direction“), talking to the paper’s authors about how the ‘motor’ works, and how they uncovered the latest details and mapped its structure:
Now, if you’re like me, this is the sort of thing that does make you wonder if we really understand how the building blocks of life actually work – how does such a complex machine assemble through blind evolution (FWIW, scientists have offered some answers)? It’s not a new question: the eminent British astronomer Fred Hoyle once suggested the emergence of life from non-living matter as being equivalent to a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard and assembling a Boeing 747 from the materials within – which has since been used as an argument by proponents of ‘intelligent design’ (both the religious and panspermia variants).
So first time viewers of Smarter Every Day might be surprised that Destin – an engineer by training – addresses this in the video, querying “if this motor system is composed of complex individual parts, and all these parts work together to perform the overall functionof rotating, then how did the individual parts come to be?” But it’s worth pointing out that Destin is a self-professed Christian, and in this video you can certainly pick up that he isn’t ruling the ‘intelligent design’ explanation out – even if he never says the actual phrase.
However, he is smart enough to suggest to viewers that instead of leaning hard into either an intelligent design view or reductionist science, instead a better path might be to avoid ‘planting your flag’ in either camp:
The complexity and origin of the bacterial flagellar motor is a really interesting conundrum. As I was a younger man, and I would read things on the internet I would find people saying, “Hey, you’ve got to believe all this over here.” Or [other] people would say, “Hey, you’ve got to believe all this over here. There’s a big war going on. It’s between science and faith. You’re either in one camp or the other. Get your flag and figure out where you’re going to put your flag.”
And the more I have matured and started to not really care about defending where my flag is, the more I’ve been able to learn from people no matter where they are. I’m still working on this.
Regardless of how you think these structures came to be, the flagellar motor is only one more example in a range of mind-boggling microscopic machinery – perhaps my favourite is the way in which DNA is replicated by cells through a complex factory-like process (and it’s made even more incredible by the fact that it is able to replicate close to 1,000 base pairs every second!).
Once you pay truly close attention to life, you can live in an almost perpetual state of wonder!
