The Miraculous Cell – 10/1/2023
where can i order isotretinoin online About one-fifth of the atoms of the Periodic Table are vitally employed in life, specifically in the machinery of the cell. The “mutual fitness” of these atoms, “provides more convincing evidence of design in nature and purpose in the universe.” Michael Denton, in his 2020 book, The Miracle of the Cell, views the fine tuning of the design of carbon and the other key elements as “irresistible” evidence that the fundamental atomic building blocks of the universe were contrived to enable life.
Michael Denton is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, a nexus for the Intelligent Design movement, and holds the PhD in biochemistry. I have essayed previously on two of his previous books, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Natures’s Destiny. The Miracle of the Cell is a marvelous exposition of some of the technological wonders of cellular life and would be a worthy addition to your personal library. A cautionary note, though, which I’ll amplify at the end of this essay: Denton is not a biblical creationist; rather, he is firmly ensconced in the ID camp. Accordingly, he wobbles in his conclusions, rather than decisively identifying the Designer of life as the Lord Jesus Christ. Converting the reader to support for ID is woefully short of saving a soul. Clearly, Denton has not experienced this salvation himself. But let’s pull some nuggets from this scientifically illuminating book!
Denton cites Erica Hayden who writes in the journal Nature about how research continues to reveal layers of complexity in the design of life: “Delving into it has been like zooming into a Mandelbrot set . . . that reveals ever more intricate patterns as one peers closer at its boundary.”
Denton himself observes that life’s complexity is akin to a third realm of infinity, the first as the infinite reaches of the cosmos, and the second as the realm of the infinitely small subatomic realm. As for a third realm: “The cell feels infinitely complex.”
The basic design of the cell is adapted to a seemingly infinite variety of functions. Consider, he suggests, contrasting a neuron with a red blood cell, a liver cell with a skin cell, a leukocyte with a muscle cell. All fill vital functions within the human body, which is a coordinated complex of about 100 trillion cells. Cells build humans and whales and butterflies and redwoods. But then we find a vast diversity of independent, single-celled protozoans and radiolarians – look up photos of these creatures and the shells they produce.
Cellular movement is diverse, too. Some travel via their flagellum’s propeller-like action, a system far superior to any human technology. Some move via cilia action. Some crawl and some exude pseudopedia to grab onto objects in their path. Some have internal clocks and some can usefully sense electric or magnetic fields or chemical signals. All can replicate, a technological feat also far beyond human tech.
Cells are not stupid. Observing amoebas, behaviorist Herbert Jennings commented, “If Amoeba were a large animal . . . its behavior would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute these things to the dog.” Jennings wondered whether the amoeba might just be sentient.
The ultimate building blocks for cellular design are atoms, of course. Carbon stands alone in its capacity to form a vast array of complex organic compounds with diversely useful properties. The number of known carbon compounds is about ten million, far more than the total of all other non-carbon compounds.
The strength of carbon bonds is ‘just right.’ The bond must be strong enough to survive molecular collisions, but must be weak enough to allow enzymes to deform and break the bond during cellular processes. The careful control and regulation of chemical processes within the cell enables life. In short, biochemistry is possible because carbon compounds are uniquely metastable in the temperature range of life. No other atom compares.
The key structural components of life, like amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars, involving many types of atoms, employ covalent bonds, the sharing of electrons. Yet the higher-order structure of proteins (how they fold into 3-D shapes) and DNA (the double-helix), depend on van der Waals forces, electrostatic interactions about ten to twenty times weaker than covalent bonds. Especially in DNA, this ‘weakness’ is vital to allow the strands to separate during replication and transcription, and then to reattach afterwards . . . and all very quickly!
This principle of optimal weakness also applies to the attachment of an enzyme to its substrate. Enzymes enable the hundreds of specialized metabolic reactions to occur quickly at body temperatures. Enzymes speed up metabolic reactions by factors of millions to trillions. Namely, the reactions of life could not occur without just the right structure and just the right weak-bond interactions.
Denton notes that if the weak bonds were just ten times stronger, then the biochemistry essential to cellular life would be impossible. But they can’t be much weaker without being disrupted by simple molecular collisions.
Carbon works together with hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen to form cell membrances and to fold proteins. The charge asymmetry of oxygen-hydrogen bonds leads to the hydrophobic (water-fearing) force, both to clump hydrocarbons into membranes and to clump particular amino acids into the center of protein molecules, determining the functional shape of the protein. Alternatively, the symmetry of carbon-hydrogen bonds gives long hydrocarbon chains their hydrophobic, water-avoiding behavior.
Cell membranes are electrical insulators, and so a charge can be built up across the membrane. This enables the transmission of nerve impulses along the axons of neurons (nerve cells). Nerve impulse speeds up to one hundred meters per second involve the sudden influx of millions of sodium ions (Na+) into a cell in less than a millisecond. The precise values of the charges and insulating potentials of these systems enable the very possibility of large beings like ourselves. Typing, playing the piano, judo . . . we couldn’t do these things without extremely efficient intercellular communication systems.
Life is a continual process of acquiring energy, storing energy, and using energy for a wide variety of tasks. The ATP molecule (adenosine triphosphate) plays the central role. An early researcher wrote, “It is no exaggeration to say ‘without phosphorus: no life.’”
Denton explains that the phosphate bond’s energy levels are well-matched to enable cellular chemical processes. He cites Rob Phillips, who likens ATP to a 20 dollar bill. Spending cash in $100 increments is clumsy because the bill is hard to break. Spending $1 bills is annoying because it takes so many of them to buy something useful.
Unfortunately, Denton then pays homage to evolution – “In four billion years of evolution, the many forms of life on Earth have repeatedly testified to what chemists have recently affirmed: phosphate radicals are the best means of storing and transferring energy for the activities of the cell.” Idiot. What evidence does Denton have that evolution ever happened? He invests his authorship in several books that scream design, but then he doesn’t want to be so controversial as to avoid kneeling at Darwin’s feet, after all. Yuk.
Back to the good stuff . . . ATP is synthesized by using food energy to pump protons across cell membranes. Denton cites Nick Lane who describes just one part of the process: “Protons are passed from one water molecule to another through dynamic clefts, opening and closing in swift succession, a perilous route through the protein that slams closed instantly after the passage of the proton, preventing its retreat. . . . All that power, all that ingenuity, all the vast protein structures, all of that is dedicated to pumping protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane.” Each cell has these mitochondria, power plants to drive the energy-demanding processes of the rest of the cell. Our 40 trillion cells hold about a quadrillion mitochondria, with a total surface area equal to about four football fields. About 1021 protons are pumped across these membranes every second, nearly as many protons as there are stars in the universe.
Perhaps not taught in high school biology is the importance of metal ions in cellular life. About 1/3 of all enzymes employ a metal ion in an essential way. Iron and copper are part of ATP synthesis. In respiration, iron atoms are used to bind oxygen to hemoglobin, allowing us to breathe. Some metal ions are used in a chain to draw electrons along, as if on a wire, to enable other processes. The spacing of the ions is critical, typically 15 Angstroms apart so electrons can hop from one ion to another without getting lost. (Lost electrons produce unwanted negative ions which can damage the cell.)
Denton cites Robert Williams and J.J.R. Frausto da Silva: “Man makes his wires from metals such as copper; biology makes hop conductors from metal ions embedded in proteins.”
We know of at least ten different metal atoms essential to life, and therefore essential parts of your diet: sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc.
Sodium and potassium bind weakly and so are mobile and can move to maintain charge balance across membranes. Their mobility is also unmatched to enable nerve impulse transmissions. Magnesium is a key part of chlorophyll, which converts photons from sunlight into energy for plant metabolism. Peter Atkins: “Without chlorophyll, the world would be a damp warm rock instead of the softly green haven of life that we know, for chlorophyll holds its magnesium eye to the sun and captures the energy of sunlight, in the first step of photosynthesis.”
I recently watched a debate between atheist Peter Atkins and John Lennox on the existence of God. To so appreciate the brilliance of creation and yet to deny the Creator . . . how foolish!
Denton states that the reversible binding we see in the attachment of oxygen to hemoglobin (when we breathe) “is close to a miracle.” Indeed. When you look superficially at the structures and process involved in binding and transporting oxygen from the lungs to all of the tissues, it might seem more complex than necessary. The challenge, though, is that the incredibly useful oxygen atom binds tightly in its compounds. To extract oxygen, for example, from H2O, CO2, or Fe2O3 (iron oxide), requires extreme physical or chemical procedures. Whereas oxygen is bound delicately to hemoglobin and then “comes off effortlessly in the tissues merely because of a drop in the concentration of O2 molecules.” And so we can breathe.
I’ll note that the hemoglobin protein (like any protein molecule) is ridiculously too complex to arise from random, spontaneous chemistry . . . even if you filled the universe with amino acids and bound them repeatedly and rapidly in chains, desperately hoping to hit on the right sequence. Similarly, any protein is far too complex to arise from random mutations from one generation to another, no matter how many billions or trillions of years you imagine the age of the universe to be. Evolution, therefore, is sunk without a trace. (See my book on Creation / Evolution in the free ebookstore on this site.)
Molybdenum is part of four key enzymes in our bodies. It’s also part of the enzyme nitrogenase which ‘fixes’ nitrogen in the soil for plants to use. Nitrogenase breaks the N2 bond in atmospheric nitrogen, resulting in ammonia, NH3. That’s fertilizer!
The different metal atoms are designed for different, but vital cellular processes. God designed the elements of the Periodic Table specifically with life in mind.
Denton makes the case that the most staggeringly complex process in creation is the development of the human embryo, as cells divide and relocate, sensing each other and communicating electrically and chemically. This involves precisely timed expression of particular genes and “exquisitely ordered movements of actin filaments, molecular motors, and microtubules, which act together to generate continual changes in the cells’ architecture.” At the end of the process we see neurons, red blood cells, photoreceptors, muscle cells, etc., all arranged into tissues and organized into a single fully functional creature.
Construction of a supercomputer is trivial in comparison. For one thing, your growth from fertilized egg to adult human did not require continuous intelligent oversight and hands-on craftmanship. The awesomely brilliant intelligent design and craftmanship was ‘programmed in’ way back in Genesis chapter 1. Also, life is integrated nanotechnology, far advanced from the microtechnology of human-designed high tech.
There are innumerable other design issues for life. The size of cells, the maximum possible size, is constrained by the diffusion rate of molecules in water. (We are made mostly of water by weight.) Oxygen, for example, diffuses quickly (enough) in cells, but if the cells were larger, it wouldn’t work at all. Diffusion times increase with the square of the distance, and required quantities with the cube. And so the physics of diffusion tightly constrains cell design. “If diffusion rates were ten times less than they are, then maintaining the same oxygen consumption would required the volume of a roughly spherical cell to shrink by a thousand-fold.” A much tinier cell could not contain all the other necessary machinery.
Denton spends some time talking about the uniqueness of water, the solvent which enables the interaction of the huge number of biomolecules that are essential to life. Water is such a good solvent that it is very difficult to find pure samples and it takes considerable effort to artificially produce pure quantities. No other liquid comes close to water’s performance as a universal solvent.
And yet, oil and water don’t mix. Oil forms a layer on the surface of water. Oils have long hydrocarbon chains, electrically non-polar – electrons are distributed uniformly so that you don’t have ‘hot’ positively or negatively charged regions around the neutral molecule. Accordingly, water molecules don’t bond; rather, they ‘bead’ away. This exception to water’s solvent skills enables membranes to form and proteins to fold. Perfect exceptions!
Something I had not run across before . . . Proton pumping for cellular energetics makes use of water’s hydrogen-bonding character – adjacent water molecules tend to line up, the hydrogen side of one (positive) attracted to the oxygen side of the next (negative). Whereas electrons have to move physically to transport themselves, a proton attaches to one end of a water-based ‘proton wire,’ and in a split second, each of the hydrogen bonds spin in sequence and a proton drops off the water molecule at the other end of the ‘wire.’ The initial proton has not traveled, but its charge and energy have been transferred off the other end.
As Denton works his way toward philosophical conclusions, he admits, “The origin of life remains as arguably the biggest unsolved problem in science.” That is only because he and those committed to materialistic / atheistic evolution reject the eyewitness account of the Creator himself in Genesis. I would rather insist that science, with vast theoretical constructs and enormous resources invested in chemical and physical experiments, has proven that life cannot arise without top-down design and omnipotent creative action. It is obvious and even axiomatic that information can be produced only by the action of a mind. Life is the ultimate example of information, coded not just in the DNA of billions of living creatures, but also in the 3-D structure of specialized cells and the incredibly complex machinery wired into cell membranes . . . the latter two systems coding more information than is found in DNA. But I’ve already written much on this for this site.
Denton confesses his own position: “. . . there are new laws, or novel properties of matter yet to be discovered, which enabled the path from chemistry to the cell.” But this is just blind faith, a blind faith that says that we don’t understand the science of chemistry much at all. Baloney. We do understand chemistry and mechanics extremely well, well enough to know definitely that the complex systems in life’s nanotech machines require design. You’ve got to be very stubborn to deny what is so obvious.
Denton cites Robert Shapiro, who has researched and written much on the supposed naturalistic origin of life: “Self-replicating systems capable of Darwinian evolution appear too complex to have arisen suddenly from a prebiotic soup. This conclusion applies to both nucleic acid systems and to hypothetical protein-based genetic systems. Another evolutionary principle is needed to take us across the gap from mixtures of simple natural chemicals to the first effective replicator.”
Denton cites several other atheistic evolutionary scientists who profess a blind hope to discover entirely new physical principles. Namely, that all we know about the relevant science must be trashed.
Interestingly, he cites a paper by a team led by Tommaso Bellini that characterizes the traditional Darwinian ideas as “fantastic luck theories.” (I’ll note that Darwinism is not presented to school kids as a “fantastic luck theory.”) Their hope is that something mysterious is woven into the deep structure of Nature (yes, they capitalize ‘Nature’).
Anything but God will do.
Denton does allow for some vague possibility of God when he concludes, “Only someone committed to rejecting out of hand all evidence of teleology (purpose) in nature could fail to see in these ensembles of fitness and in this elegent parsimony evidence of design.”
He also concludes, naively, that if “it is eventually established that there is no natural path across the great gulf from non-life to life, and that only the additional exertion of an intelligent agent could have assembled the first cell on Earth, that will be equally a watershed in human thought.”
The satanic, atheistic worldview will never admit there is no way to explain life without God. Fellows like Denton are already doing just that when they dream of a physics and chemistry yet undiscovered. No, the evidence is already in.
Rather than start with science, which requires and therefore is built atop rationality and personhood – namely, we humans are more than just clods of molecules and our thoughts are more than just materialistic brain chemistry – we should start with the Bible and see if that makes sense of biology, geology, astronomy, and the human experience which includes logic, rationality, integrity, love, and other aspects of nonmaterial personhood.
Indeed, it does.
- drdave@truthreallymatters.com