Although it seems like evolutionary determinism, there’s some weight to the idea that cells are constrained to a certain evolutionary path, no matter the environment they appear in. Certainly, the charge-transfer reactions central to metabolism on Earth, more broadly known as reduction/oxidation (redox) reactions, are known to produce electric current even in the absence of biology. Take for example the galvanic cell, invented in the 1700s by Alessandro Volta. The redox reactions central to his invention remain vital to the ubiquitous modern-day battery. What biologists have found since his discovery is that similar redox reactions are at the center of metabolism. Except instead of the charge being derived from metals, nature provides a wide range of different substances that can be eaten and breathed.
Thousands of meters down, bacteria electrify themselves by eating simple geofuels.
All kinds of compounds, everything from hydrogen gas to sulfate—can serve as the terminals of a metabolic circuit. Despite this flexibility, the depth of structural and functional similarity in the ETC across a multitude of life forms suggests only a few degrees of freedom during the system’s evolution. Annette Rowe is head of the Electromicrobiology Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, where she studies the often unusual ways that organisms power their metabolic circuits. Some of her research has focused on bacteria capable of breathing current carried by electrodes.2 Reached by phone, Rowe points out that while the metabolic systems of two organisms may “have protein architecture that looks really similar, most of them are uniquely derived, evolutionarily speaking.” This means that the same solution to the problem of distributing the electric harvest throughout the cell has appeared over and over again throughout history. The name of that solution? Adenosine triphosphate.
Adenosine triphosphate, ATP for short, is one of those incredible pieces of biology that appears to be universal. There is no exception to the rule that to live is to work, and no exception to the rule that all known cells use electrochemical gradients to do work.
Anastasia Bendebury & Michael Shilo Delay, “Uncovering the Spark of Life” at Nautilus
Biology is beginning to sound more like physics all the time. Laws and all.
This article got me thinking about the possibility of trying to clone things using crispr and de-extinction
Now I have scoured the Internet
And have found no answer to this
But is it possible to take a human cell per se Replace the human nucleus with another animal nucleus and turn the human cell into that animal instead
Another words reprogram one cell to become a totally different cell for another species
Is that possible
As to:
Translation, “Then a miracle occurs” many times over.
Or as Bernard d’Abrera put such “Darwinian” reasoning, “For it to happen in a single species once through chance, is mathematically highly improbable. But when it occurs so often, in so many species, and we are expected to apply mathematical probability yet again, then either mathematics is a useless tool, or we are being criminally blind.,,”
In other words, it is, for all intents and purposes, mathematically impossible for ATP to evolve just once. Thus to believe it ‘accidentally’ evolved ‘many times over’ is simply ‘criminally’ insane.
Moreover, the more we learn about just how complex ATP synthase is, the more insane Darwinian explanations are found to be
Of related note, in terms of energy efficiency, ATP synthase trounces anything man has ever designed.
Also of interest:
It is because of such evidence as this that I, like Ernst Chain, ““would rather believe in fairies than to ever believe in such wild speculation of Darwin.”
Verse: