The complexity of the living cell 1
The argument of increasing knowledge about the complexity of the cell
1. Almost 30 years ago, in 1985 Michael Denton in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 328 compared a cell to a large city, filled with “supreme technology and bewildering complexity.” Nowadays we have not only much more detailed information about the complexity of the cell and how life works, but also every week in the reports/writings of science, new findings are made about regulators, teams, quality controls, checkpoints, conductors, players with starring roles. Let’s see a few examples:
a. Bricks that build: “Researchers have found in mice that supporting cells in the inner ear, once thought to serve only a structural role, can actively help repair damaged sensory hair cells, the functional cells that turn vibrations into the electrical signals that the brain recognizes as sound.”[1]
b. Master regulator: Whether or not a cell grows is decided by a remarkable protein kinase enzyme called mTOR. As part of two complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2, mTOR integrates and interprets all sorts of factors that influence cell growth — including nutrients, stressors (=agents that causes stress to an organism) and the outputs of signal-transduction networks (=biological circuits that pass along information) — by targeting a multitude of substrates that drive processes such as protein translation, metabolism and cell division. Research into mTOR-mediated signaling has taken on added urgency since it was discovered that most cancers contain mutations that inappropriately activate this protein.[2]
The newly-uncovered structure of mTOR, made up of 1,500 amino acids, shows that it has a “gatekeeper mechanism that controls substrate access to the active site.”
c. Checkpoint charlies: “MTBP acts with Treslin/TICRR to integrate signals from cell cycle and DNA damage response pathways to control the initiation of DNA replication in human cells.”[3]
d. Damage repair: One latest study, performed on yeast cells, describes cooperation between translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), single-stranded DNA repair (ssDNA), and homologous recombination, which rebuilds a damaged strand from the intact strand. “These findings suggest that ssDNA that might originate during the repair of closely opposed lesions or of ssDNA-containing lesions or from uncoupled replication may drive recombination directly in various species, including humans.”[4]
2. All these examples indicate the irreducible complex system of the cell’s life and structure. If not assembled all together at the same time even the simplest cell could not survive. There would be no life on this earth.
3. Intelligent design and creation by a superior intelligent person all men call God is the truth..
4. God exists.
The argument by cell complexity
1. By the advancement of microbiology, the great complexity of the cell is discovered in more and more details.
2. It is also more understood that for the harmonious coexisting of the different particles of the cell all parts are needed.
3. All this reveals the fact that these parts of the cell could not develop independently one by one.
4. No one of them is useful without the existence of another; particles like chromosomes, DNA, RNA, the Amino acids etc.
5. Man did not create such complex cells since according to Darwin’s theory there were no people at the very beginning of life’s coming into being.
6. Thus, the only option is God – the great creator, the one ultimate source who ever exists and gives facility for life for all different kinds of living entities.
7. God exists.
Our first objective in this chapter is to get some idea of the vast complexity of the living cell and then to concentrate our attention on one aspect of it –
the nature of the complexity of DNA. According to geneticist Michael Denton, the break between the nonliving and the living world ‘represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature.
Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.’ Even
the tiniest of bacterial cells, weighing less than a trillionth of a gram, is ‘a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of 100 thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world’. Furthermore, according to Denton, there seems to be little evidence of evolution among cells: ‘Molecular biology has also shown us that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical.
The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore, no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.’
This view is supported by Nobel Prize-winner Jacques Monod, whom Denton cites. ‘We have no idea what the structure of a primitive cell might have been. The simplest living system known to us, the bacterial cell… in its overall chemical plan is the same as that of all other living beings. It employs the same genetic code and the same mechanism of translation as do, for example, human cells. Thus the simplest cells available to us for study have nothing “primitive” about them… no vestiges of truly primitive structures are discernible.’ Thus the cells themselves exhibit a similar kind of ‘stasis’ to that referred to in the previous chapter in connection with the fossil record.
Irreducible complexity
‘We have always underestimated cells,’ says Bruce Alberts, President of The National Academy of Sciences of the USA. ‘The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines… Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function, protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly co-ordinated moving parts.’ It is hard for us to get any kind of picture of the seething, dizzyingly complex activity that occurs inside a living cell, which contains within its lipid membrane maybe 100 million proteins of 20,000 different types and yet the whole cell is so tiny that a couple of hundred could be placed on the dot in this letter ‘i’.
The cell is restlessly productive as its many micro-miniature assembly lines produce their unending quotas of protein machines. The existence of these exquisitely constituted molecular machines is powerful evidence for some scientists of a designing intelligence. Prominent among them is biochemist Michael Behe, who studies such machines in a book that has generated a lot of critical discussion.
1) John Lennox, has science buried God ? pg.122
The argument of increasing knowledge about the complexity of the cell
1. Almost 30 years ago, in 1985 Michael Denton in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 328 compared a cell to a large city, filled with “supreme technology and bewildering complexity.” Nowadays we have not only much more detailed information about the complexity of the cell and how life works, but also every week in the reports/writings of science, new findings are made about regulators, teams, quality controls, checkpoints, conductors, players with starring roles. Let’s see a few examples:
a. Bricks that build: “Researchers have found in mice that supporting cells in the inner ear, once thought to serve only a structural role, can actively help repair damaged sensory hair cells, the functional cells that turn vibrations into the electrical signals that the brain recognizes as sound.”[1]
b. Master regulator: Whether or not a cell grows is decided by a remarkable protein kinase enzyme called mTOR. As part of two complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2, mTOR integrates and interprets all sorts of factors that influence cell growth — including nutrients, stressors (=agents that causes stress to an organism) and the outputs of signal-transduction networks (=biological circuits that pass along information) — by targeting a multitude of substrates that drive processes such as protein translation, metabolism and cell division. Research into mTOR-mediated signaling has taken on added urgency since it was discovered that most cancers contain mutations that inappropriately activate this protein.[2]
The newly-uncovered structure of mTOR, made up of 1,500 amino acids, shows that it has a “gatekeeper mechanism that controls substrate access to the active site.”
c. Checkpoint charlies: “MTBP acts with Treslin/TICRR to integrate signals from cell cycle and DNA damage response pathways to control the initiation of DNA replication in human cells.”[3]
d. Damage repair: One latest study, performed on yeast cells, describes cooperation between translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), single-stranded DNA repair (ssDNA), and homologous recombination, which rebuilds a damaged strand from the intact strand. “These findings suggest that ssDNA that might originate during the repair of closely opposed lesions or of ssDNA-containing lesions or from uncoupled replication may drive recombination directly in various species, including humans.”[4]
2. All these examples indicate the irreducible complex system of the cell’s life and structure. If not assembled all together at the same time even the simplest cell could not survive. There would be no life on this earth.
3. Intelligent design and creation by a superior intelligent person all men call God is the truth..
4. God exists.
The argument by cell complexity
1. By the advancement of microbiology, the great complexity of the cell is discovered in more and more details.
2. It is also more understood that for the harmonious coexisting of the different particles of the cell all parts are needed.
3. All this reveals the fact that these parts of the cell could not develop independently one by one.
4. No one of them is useful without the existence of another; particles like chromosomes, DNA, RNA, the Amino acids etc.
5. Man did not create such complex cells since according to Darwin’s theory there were no people at the very beginning of life’s coming into being.
6. Thus, the only option is God – the great creator, the one ultimate source who ever exists and gives facility for life for all different kinds of living entities.
7. God exists.
Our first objective in this chapter is to get some idea of the vast complexity of the living cell and then to concentrate our attention on one aspect of it –
the nature of the complexity of DNA. According to geneticist Michael Denton, the break between the nonliving and the living world ‘represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature.
Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.’ Even
the tiniest of bacterial cells, weighing less than a trillionth of a gram, is ‘a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of 100 thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world’. Furthermore, according to Denton, there seems to be little evidence of evolution among cells: ‘Molecular biology has also shown us that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical.
The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore, no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.’
This view is supported by Nobel Prize-winner Jacques Monod, whom Denton cites. ‘We have no idea what the structure of a primitive cell might have been. The simplest living system known to us, the bacterial cell… in its overall chemical plan is the same as that of all other living beings. It employs the same genetic code and the same mechanism of translation as do, for example, human cells. Thus the simplest cells available to us for study have nothing “primitive” about them… no vestiges of truly primitive structures are discernible.’ Thus the cells themselves exhibit a similar kind of ‘stasis’ to that referred to in the previous chapter in connection with the fossil record.
Irreducible complexity
‘We have always underestimated cells,’ says Bruce Alberts, President of The National Academy of Sciences of the USA. ‘The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines… Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function, protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly co-ordinated moving parts.’ It is hard for us to get any kind of picture of the seething, dizzyingly complex activity that occurs inside a living cell, which contains within its lipid membrane maybe 100 million proteins of 20,000 different types and yet the whole cell is so tiny that a couple of hundred could be placed on the dot in this letter ‘i’.
The cell is restlessly productive as its many micro-miniature assembly lines produce their unending quotas of protein machines. The existence of these exquisitely constituted molecular machines is powerful evidence for some scientists of a designing intelligence. Prominent among them is biochemist Michael Behe, who studies such machines in a book that has generated a lot of critical discussion.
1) John Lennox, has science buried God ? pg.122
