Posted on 12/08/2014 1:03:50 PM PST by SeekAndFind
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings with find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus of itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine – that is one single functional protein molecule – would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.
We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology.
What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an awe-inspiring spectacle.
To gain a more objective grasp of the level of complexity the cell represents, consider the problem of constructing an atomic model. Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms. Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter, with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid.
Copying nature, we could speed up the construction of the model by using small molecules such as amino acids and nucleotides rather than individual atoms. Since individual amino acids and nucleotides are made up of between ten and twenty atoms each, this would enable us to finish the project in less than five million years. We could also speed up the project by mass producing those components in the cell which are present in many copies. Perhaps three-quarters of the cell’s mass can be accounted for by such components. But even if we could produce these very quickly we would still be faced with manufacturing a quarter of the cell’s mass which consists largely of components which only occur once or twice and which would have to be constructed, therefore, on an individual basis. The complexity of the cell, like that of any complex machine, cannot be reduced to any sort of simple pattern, nor can its manufacture be reduced to a simple set of algorithms or programmes. Working continually day and night it would still be difficult to finish the model in the space of one million years.
- Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985)
And let me add my two cents to this astounding picture. The model that you would complete a million years later would be just that, a lifeless static model. For the cell to do its work this entire twenty kilometer structure and each of its trillions of components must be charged in specific ways, and at the level of the protein molecule, it must have an entire series of positive and negative charges and hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts all precisely shaped (at a level of precision far, far beyond our highest technical abilities) and charged in a whole series of ways: charged in a way to find other molecular components and combine with them; charged in a way to fold into a shape and maintain that most important shape, and charged in a way to be guided by other systems of charges to the precise spot in the cell where that particle must go. The pattern of charges and the movement of energy through the cell is easily as complex as the pattern of the physical particles themselves.Also, Denton, in his discussion, uses a tennis ball to stand in for an atom. But an atom is not a ball. It is not even a ‘tiny solar system’ of neutrons, protons and electrons’ as we once thought. Rather, it has now been revealed to be an enormously complex lattice of forces connected by a bewildering array of utterly miniscule subatomic particles including hadrons, leptons, bosons, fermions, mesons, baryons, quarks and anti-quarks, up and down quarks, top and bottom quarks, charm quarks, strange quarks, virtual quarks, valence quarks, gluons and sea quarks…
And let me remind you again, that what we are talking about, a living cell, is a microscopic dot and thousands of these entire factories including all the complexity that we discussed above could fit on the head of a pin. Or, going another way, let’s add to this model of twenty square kilometers of breath taking complexity another one hundred trillion equally complex factories all working in perfect synchronous coordination with each other; which would be a model of the one hundred trillion celled human body, your body, that thing that we lug around every day and complain about; that would, spread laterally at the height of one cell at this magnification, blanket the entire surface of the earth four thousand times over, every part of which would contain pumps and coils and conduits and memory banks and processing centers; all working in perfect harmony with each other, all engineered to an unimaginable level of precision and all there to deliver to us our ability to be conscious, to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to experience the world as we are so used to experiencing it, that we have taken it and the fantastic mechanisms that make it possible for granted.
My question is, “Why don’t we know this?” What Michael Denton has written and I have added to is a perfectly accurate, easily intelligible, non-hyperbolic view of the cell. Why is this not taught in every introductory biology class in our schools?
- Matt Chait
Of course it a red Herring.. that time-frame is not biblical.. i have always view the “days” as epochs.... as for Adam.. the creation of man is the moment of first self awareness man.. the endowment of a “soul” to become made in the image on God..a three part being.. ... God image is not an image of flesh.. God image is being a self aware three part being ...
God: I AM WHAT I AM..... Man: I think therefor I am
Totally humbling and totally obvious work of the Creator. That is why it is not taught.
Interesting post.
Yes. And “a day” can mean nothing to an eternal conscious awareness existing outside of time and space - except as He imagines it, and imagines Himself subject to it. All of Creation is an imaginal act.
The Bible is for man; God doesn’t need it. I think ‘the days’ refers to our material sense that creation is the result of an order of process.
-JT
I’ve seen a study - and I’m not sure of all the facts - but it demonstrated that time changes even within several thousand feet of elevation (the world’s two atomic clocks are not exactly the same speed - the difference is minute, but it’s measurable and predictable).
When you extrapolate out the size of the cosmos, the math showed that six days on the other side would be about 16 billion years on this planet. No contradiction at all....not for a God outside of time and space constraints...
I think this is the article I read a few years ago...a bit over my head.
http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48951136.html
I remember it was an interesting read...
Not so stupid, but very clever.
They phrased the questions precisely to achieve the answers they wanted.
I even suspect they had the conclusions and percentages all determined beforehand.
The only people I ever recall being obsessed over creationism, 7 days and 10,000 years are professional atheists, activists, pro-sodomy crowd and the pervert GLBTMDY crowd.
I am impressed.
Charles Darwin himself, in his celebrated book, spent many pages articulating his personal professional doubts about the uncertainties of many elements and uncertainties which formulated his theory.
You either haven't read his book or did not read it thoroughly.
The professional perverts and activist atheists, on the other hand, don't have the mental resources to profit from reading it. No great surprise there.
You are right. The stupid thing is expecting most polls to be unbiased and truthful.
Yes; but God doesn’t live somewhere in the ‘Cosmos’. (Please correct me, if I am misunderstanding you.)
I believe that God, as eternal conscious awareness, lives entirely outside of his Creation, while at the same time experiencing *within* it, as originating Spirit. The Universe is something that He created for his enjoyment and experience, and his desire to share his Love, and love for Beauty; and this is also Love for his creation, as any Father loves his child, or any artist loves his creation.
His spirit is in us; just as sperm, ova, and genes are, on the material plane.
We are the result of that: God enjoying Himself, and experiencing Himself; and loving us as his Children; and we are consequently potential co-creators. We live by His spirit, within us; we are made of Him.
And, It goes on forever.
Psalm 82:6 (KJV)
“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.”
-JT
You are aware of the great advances in biology and geology since Darwin died I hope. The gaps Darwin saw or thought he saw have been largely filled in. There are still many processes that we don’t thoroughly understand but that is the nature of science. Biology has shown us just how mutations and genetic drift drive speciation and, thus, evolution. Geology has, since 1967, embraced plat tectonics which explains most of what we see in geology. I don’t criticize either Darwin or Hutton but we have learned things that correct, fill in the gaps or correct the pioneering work they did.
I don`t see as it matters how long it took to do the creating, all I need to know is that God created it and have no doubt that he did..
I think you missed the point......the point is that He is outside of our notion of time and space constraints....and also that time is NOT a constant, as weird as that may seem.
Given the way time bends and that time and space are a continuum - my point is that there isn’t necessarily any conflict between a six day creation and a 16 billion year old planet, or whatever.....
I think we agree. Sorry if I misunderstood.
-JT
cool....these are mysteries we will not figure out in this temporal existence....Freegards - CEW
Yes; as long as we are encased in matter, and moving in time and space, we can’t understand what God is.
We can only try to understand some things *about* God; and trace a bit of the outline.
That alone is an incredible journey, and blessing; and I believe it’s the reason that we are here in the first place.
My best to you,
-JT
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