CELLS ARE AMAZING. EVEN TO A NON-BIOLOGIST, THEY CONVEY THE impression of being very special objects with extraordinary capabilities. No one who has observed a leucocyte (a white blood cell) purposefully—one might even say single-mindedly—chasing after a bacterium in a blood smear would disagree. To see this in action, watch the brief online video by David Rogers, “Neutrophil Chasing Bacteria.”
Denton, Michael. The Miracle of the Cell , 2020, p.15, Discovery Institute.
White blood cells are a part of your immune system that protects your body from infection. These cells circulate through your bloodstream and tissues to respond to injury or illness by attacking any unknown organisms that enter your body. You can see a white blood cell chasing a bacteria here. In addition to their various life-giving functions, cells must also nourish themselves and replicate.
What one witnesses there seems to transcend all our intuitions: A tiny speck of matter, invisible to the naked eye, so small that one hundred of them could be lined up across the top of a pin, is seemingly endowed with intention and agency. It’s like watching a house cat chasing a mouse, or a cheetah chasing a gazelle on the African savanna, or indeed a man chasing down a kudu in the Kalahari.
It does not lessen the amazement to conclude that this ability must arise somehow from the atomic complexity that lies within this wondrous speck of matter. For the complexity in which this behavior is instantiated is also far beyond ordinary experience. A cell consists of trillions of atoms, representing the complexity of a jumbo jet and more, packed into a space less than a millionth of the volume of a typical grain of sand. But unlike any jumbo jet, unlike any nano-tech, or indeed unlike even the most advanced human technology of any kind, this wondrous entity can replicate itself. Here is an “infinity machine” with seemingly magical powers. In terms of compressed complexity, cells are without peer in the material world, actualized or imagined. And there is likely far more complexity still to uncover.
Michael Denton. The Miracle of the Cell.
Purposeful arrangement of parts
How do we perceive the work of a mind/intelligence? Minds (and only minds) have purposes. Thus, to the extent that a Mind can manipulate things, a Mind can arrange parts to achieve its purposes. Of course, we ourselves have minds. And it is a fundamental power of mind that it can discern purposes. Thus we can recognize that a mind has acted by perceiving a purposeful arrangement of parts. That is actually the only way we recognize other minds. For the purposes of detecting other minds, “parts” can be the purposeful arrangement of sounds in speech, words and letters in writing, or mechanical parts in machinery. The cell has just such a purposeful arrangement of parts.
The information enigma
In the cell, the nucleus is the control centre, and at its heart is the DNA blueprint that stores the information needed to nourish and replicate the cell, as well as allowing it to perform a variety of functions.
The genetic code consists of strands of DNA composed of a long chain of letters or nucleotides. DNA is itself a four-letter code for passing along information about an organism. DNA molecules are made from four types of bases, or nucleotides, each identified by a letter: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). They are the basis of all DNA code, providing the instruction manual for building every living thing on earth. The configuration of the DNA molecule is highly stable, allowing it to act as a template for the replication of new DNA molecules, as well as for the production (transcription) of the related RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecule. Translation is the process in which machines called ribosomes in the cytoplasm or endoplasmic reticulum synthesize proteins which are the workhorse machinery that allow the cell to function.
How does all that information and machinery in the genetic code arise? The Rosetta stone did not come about by wind and erosion. How did the first simple cell arise from dead chemicals? Darwin thought that cells were just simple lumps of protoplasm. This is information enigma.
Below is an image of the amazing kinesin motor protein in the cell.
Harvard University developed an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell, illustrating mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus.
In a video below, we will see remarkable internal architecture of the cell, made up of the cytoskeleton similar to the structural elements that’s holding up the ceiling over your head, but with dynamic functions which also allows them to serve as highways.
There is constant motion inside of your cells. There’s new construction, demolition, and, most importantly, transporting goods from one place in the cell to another. Cells transport goods along cellular roadways. To transport cargo along these routes, the cells use motor proteins. Kinesin is one of these motor proteins made up of more than 900 amino acids. If you didn’t have kinesin and other motor proteins, you simply wouldn’t be alive. In the video below, there is an amazing animation of a motor kinesin protein walking on microtubule transporting cargo. The track is called a microtuble, and you can see the walking action of these motor proteins. They are four times more efficient than your car in converting chemical energy into motion.
What is the probability of one protein 150 amino acids long arising via chance natural processes in a prebiotic soup?
To put these numbers in perspective:
- There are only 1080 basic particles (electrons, protons neutrons) in the known universe.
• Even according to postulates of Big Bang Cosmology, the universe is about 13.8 billon year old, which means it is much younger than 1025 seconds.
• Via the theoretical Planck time the whole universe can only do 1045 reactions per second. So a universal probability bound for the universe is 10-150 (ten raised to the power of (80 + 45 + 25).
The whole universe does do have the probabilistic resources to generate one mildly complex protein, let alone the vast machinery of a the simplest cell.
The empirical evidence from common sense[1]For a common sense approach see the apple. refined by cutting edge substantiates intelligent design by a transcendental Creator and Guide. In The Miracle of the Cell, Michael Denton provides compelling evidence that long before life emerged on our planet, the design of the carbon-based cell was foreshadowed in the order of nature, in the exquisite fitness of the laws of nature for this foundational unit of all life on Earth. Nowhere is this fitness more apparent than in the properties of the key atomic constituents of the cell. Each of the atoms of life—including carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, as well as several metal elements—features a suite of unique properties fine-tuned to serve highly specific, indispensable roles in the cell. Moreover, some of these properties are specifically fit for essential roles in the cells of advanced aerobic organisms like ourselves. Man is the Purpose of Creation.