Some quantitative biologists say they have uncovered a common mechanism regulating gene expression during development:
“From these studies, we are learning rules for how genes can be made more or less noisy,” Carthew said. “Sometimes cells want to harness the genetic noise — the level of variation in gene expression — to make randomized decisions. Other times cells want to suppress the noise because it makes cells too variable for the good of the organism. Intrinsic features of a gene can imbue them with more or less noise.”
While engineers are excited by the ability to control and manipulate biological systems, Mani said, more fundamental knowledge needs to be discovered.
“We only know the tip of the iceberg,” Mani said. “We are far from a time when basic science is considered complete and all that is left is engineering and design. The natural world is still hiding its deepest mysteries.”
Northwestern University, “Toward principles of gene regulation in multicellular systems?” at ScienceDaily
Paper. (open access)
Physics was “hiding its deepest mysteries” thousands of years ago too before anyone uncovered laws for how it works. There are still mysteries in physics, of course, but they are now more basic. The laws are now known. Let’s hope the same proves true for biology.
The statement “We have always underestimated cells” is still as true today as it was when Bruce Alberts first stated it back in 1998:
In 1998, Bruce Alberts, who was a two time president of the National Academy of Sciences, stated that “We have always underestimated cells.”,,, “But at least we are no longer as naïve as we were when I was a graduate student in the 1960s.”,,, “instead of a cell dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules, we now know that nearly every major process in a cell is carried out by assemblies of 10 or more protein molecules.”
And even though Dr. Alberts wrote that article 22 years ago in 1998, Darwinists, because of the ‘randomness’ presupposition held within their reductive materialistic framework, are still very much reluctant to let go of their belief that the cell is “dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules”.
For a prime example of this fact, in 2013, Harvard BioVisions made a video entitled ‘Inner Life of the Cell: Protein Packing’. In the 2013 video, as you can see, Harvard Biovisions tried to make the inner workings of the cell look as random, chaotic, and haphazard as possible.
In fact, in 2014 New York Times itself ran an article on the ‘Protein Packing’ video. In the article Carl Zimmer stated that ‘the molecules of the cell ‘flail blindly in the crowd.” And that “Our cells work almost in spite of themselves.’
Thus, even though Bruce Alberts himself. all the way back in 1998, had largely dispelled the myth that the cell was “dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules”, none-the-less, Darwinists as late as 2014, motivated primarily by their bias against Intelligent Design, were still widely disseminating the false claim that the cell was “dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules”.
Yet, regardless of their overt bias against anyone daring to see Intelligent Design in the cell, the fact of the matter is that we now have several lines of evidence firmly establishing the fact that the cell is not nearly as random, chaotic, and haphazard in its makeup as Darwinists would prefer people to believe
For instance, in the following article from 2014, Dr Jonathan Wells takes direct issue with Carl Zimmer’s claim that biological molecules are ‘flailing blindly in the crowd’ and states,, But that’s not what the biological evidence shows. In fact, kinesin moves quickly, with precise movements, to get from one place to another,,,
Moreover, in the following 2016 paper, it was found that “crowding in cells doesn’t hamper protein binding as much as they thought it did.” In fact, finding a lack of ‘collisions’ in the crowded cell was a ‘counterintuitive surprise’ for the researchers: Specifically one of the researchers stated: “This was a surprise,” “It’s counterintuitive, because one would think collisions between a protein and other molecules on DNA would slow it down. But the system is so dynamic, it doesn’t appear to be an issue.”
Moreover, instead of proteins randomly colliding into each other, as the Harvard Biovisions video falsely portrayed them, proteins instead are found to be “analogous to the way wine glasses tremble”,,, “If you tap on a bell, it rings for some time, and with a sound that is specific to the bell. This is how the proteins behave,”
In fact, instead of a biological systems being “dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules”, the fact of the matter is that biological systems are now shown to be extremely resistant to random background noise. As the following article on photosynthesis stated, ‘These biological systems can direct a quantum process,,, in astoundingly subtle and controlled ways – showing remarkable resistance to the aggressive, random background noise of biology and extreme environments.’
Likewise the following article on human vision stated that, “Research,, has shown that humans can detect the presence of a single photon, the smallest measurable unit of light”.,,, “it is remarkable: a photon, the smallest physical entity with quantum properties of which light consists, is interacting with a biological system consisting of billions of cells, all in a warm and wet environment,”,, and the researched added, “The response that the photon generates survives all the way to the level of our awareness despite the ubiquitous background noise. Any man-made detector would need to be cooled and isolated from noise to behave the same way.”,,, “What we want to know next is how does a biological system achieve such sensitivity? How does it achieve this in the presence of noise?”
And in the following article, the authors even go on to state that ‘this reverses the previous orthodoxy, which held that quantum effects could not exist in biological systems because of the amount of noise in these systems’,,, Environmental noise here drives a persistent and cyclic generation of new entanglement.
Thus instead of the molecular machines of the cell being dominated by random noise in the cell, as Carl Zimmer had falsely claimed in his New York Times article, the molecular machines of the cell are instead shown to have ‘remarkable resistance to the aggressive, random background noise of biology and extreme environments.’ Moreover, molecular machines are apparently designed in such an ingenious way so as to feed off the noise in the cell. Quote unquote, “Environmental noise here drives a persistent and cyclic generation of new (quantum) entanglement.”
To say finding ubiquitous quantum processes in the cell is counter-intuitive to Darwinian presuppositions is an understatement.
Namely, since quantum mechanics, in and of itself, falsifies materialism,,,
and since quantum information is found to be ubiquitous within molecular biology,
and since Darwinian evolution is forever wedded to reductive materialism,
, then that means Darwinian evolution, with its reductive materialistic foundation, is not even on the correct theoretical, i.e. “quantum”, foundation in order to properly understand molecular biology in the first place.
If Darwinian evolution were a normal science that were subject to falsification, instead of being, basically, an unfalsifiable pseudoscience, even a religion, for atheists, these findings should count as yet another devastating, even fatal, falsification of Darwin’s theory.
Verse:
The whole idea of differing mutation rates struck me as a mechanism employed by living organisms for their own benefit. The related idea here would be: directed mutations–a combination of purposefulness and randomization. These ideas now appear to be a “rule” for living organisms. In other words, what seemed to be the upshot of why mutation rates differ turns out to be the actual reason for their differing: that is, simple reason leads you to the right answer. How can such simple reasoning lead to the correct answer in a purely “randomized” world? Would Darwinists like to answer.
PaV, I think you said there’d be like 27,000 deaths worldwide from this disease. There’s been half a million now. Why would anybody on earth listen to you?
Retired Physicist, in response to PaV’s observation that Intelligent Design is a better heuristic, i.e. guiding principle, in science than Darwinian evolution is, states,
HUH??? And exactly what does that have to do with what PaV wrote about ID being a much better heuristic in science than Darwinian evolution is? And if I recall correctly, the initial estimates, from the so called ‘experts’, for deaths from Covid 19 in the USA alone, put the number of deaths in the USA alone at around 2.2 million. Thus, numerically speaking, PaV’s back of the envelope prediction turned out to be far closer than what the experts initially predicted.
Moreover, PaV is completely correct in his observation that Intelligent Design is a much better heuristic, i.e. guiding principle, in science than Darwinian evolution is. You don’t have to take PaV’s word for it, Jerry Coyne himself admitted that, ““Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits.”
Darwinian Evolution is simply useless as a guiding principle in science. As Marc Kirschner stated, “over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, and physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.”
And as the late Philip Skell noted, “Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.”
And as Adam S. Wilkins noted, “most (biologists) can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas.”
In fact, besides Darwinian evolution being completely useless as a guiding principle in science, in so far as Darwinian ideas have guided research in biology, those ideas have only misled, not helped, researchers. Two semi-famous examples of researchers being severely misled by Darwinian ideas were the false Darwinian predictions of vestigial organs and junk DNA.
Those false predictions of junk DNA and vestigial organs are not just a couple of anomalous examples of false predictions coming from Darwinian presuppositions, Darwinian evolution has been found to be wrong, time after time, across the spectrum in foundational predictions that are at its core.
Thus, using Retired Physicist own criteria of a false prediction rendering someone unworthy to ‘listen to’, and since Darwinian evolution itself has made spectacularly false predictions time after time, why in blue blazes does Retired Physicist himself continue to ‘listen to’ Darwinists? Indeed, why does he attack PaV, and thus ID advocates in general, as somehow being unworthy to listen to?
Verse
Retired Physicist- Your time here has done nothing but prove that you are incapable of reading for comprehension and also incapable of forming a coherent argument.
That’s why no one listens to you.
According to RP’s “logic” no one should listen to anyone who got a 99 on a test. After all they did get something wrong. What a clueless loser RP is…
Retired Physicist:
Try to get your facts straight. At the time I made the prediction, there were already that many deaths in the world. My estimate was for the US alone. It was based on what I saw happening in Europe and in China–it was all the data we had available. It assumed that China had not lied, or, if they had lied, it was not an outrageous lie.
Well, it turns out China’s lie was an outrageous lie. Their true deaths and cases were off by at least a factor of 6. As well, the steep incline, but, most critically, the steep decline they showed, were both wrong. Had I known that their decline was a big lie, then number would have been closer to 40 to 45,000.
Also, if you look at Worldometers.info/coronaupdate, you will see that the pattern of rise and decline in Italy and Spain, the basis of my prediction, does not look at all like the pattern we’ve seen develop here. As to why this might be, well, we can conjecture.
Part of that conjecture has to include the known fact that our deaths are being exaggerated for the purpose of obtaining extra federal dollars. So, lies are being told here in the US. This wasn’t the case for Italy since the health system there is government run. No extra federal dollars to entice!
Dr. Birx has publicly stated that she thought the death figures were off by 25%. I’d say it’s likely the figures are off by at least 30%. And then there is ineptitude of Cuomo and deBlasio, a complete disaster on their part in handling the outbreak (nothing done to cleanup the subway and sending Covid positive patients back into nursing homes), which also skews the numbers. For example, subtract the New York harbor numbers (NY and NJ) and the numbers for the US are 84,000 deaths.
So, take 84,000 deaths, decline this by 30%, and you have 48,800 roughly. That’s not far away from 27,000.
Or, take 27,000 and mulitply by 6 (the correcting for the Chinese numbers) and, guess what, you get 162,000. That’s likely what our total will end up being.
So, next time you want to throw something in somebody else’s face, try getting the facts straight.
How good was Neil Ferguson’s numbers? How good was the initial IHME numbers?
I failed to mention in my last post that here in the US, because of “Hate-Trump” politics, hydroxychloroquine was not being prescribed whereas in Italy this became rather standard treatment early on. Who knows how many lives were needlessly lost because of political hatred. These are all factors.
Was my estimate wrong? Yes, obviously. But there were many reasons for that, including fraud, malfeasance, greed and politics. A rather powerful brew, eh?
I certainly wish that my estimate/prediction had been accurate!
PaV,
My rule of thumb is to not make predictions about numbers that are presented by institutions and bureaucracies. They invariably support what the institution and bureaucracy wants their message to be, not what could be reasonably guessed at by one of the great unwashed.
Andrew
Biology was once far simpler and “well understood” when cells were made of protoplasm. Same was true for Newtonian mechanics, which some physicists are desperately clinging to in order to maintain their deterministic ideology.
Similarly, spontaneous generation is now the goal of research in both biology and cosmology. It’s far more scientific to generate billions of universes every second than believe in God. Right?
-Q
Then again, why anyone with any mental ability left would treat any over-saturated uber mass-media Covid scoreboard numbers and charts as anything but marketing, is something to ponder.
Andrew
“One of the problems is that information proffered by health officials doesn’t paint a complete picture — and people are beginning to realize that.”
Beginning to realize?
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2020/07/02/what-are-they-hiding-ohio-health-dept-says-foia-requests-can-be-delayed-until-90-days-after-covid-emergency-ends-n597273?fbclid=IwAR0TNvQ_YtN4gfEyXDT48L9k57fXKuGnE8dnhHfDgnaHUZN-6wVesVEfhYo
Andrew
‘The natural world is still hiding its deepest mysteries.”
I disagree.
Biology research discoveries are increasingly revealing the deepest mysteries which undoubtedly point to designed biological systems. Note that a growing proportion of the discoveries are in the area of multi-level regulation.
However, those who don’t want to accept the design explanation, still wait for other discoveries that provide naturalistic explanations. That’s why they claim that the mysteries remain hidden. It’s kind of an attitude of denial.
Interesting comparison, Jawa.
Let me suggest that understanding the natural mechanisms in how something or some process works doesn’t detract from the design behind it, nor does it diminish the superiority in assuming intentional design rather than assuming random junk that somehow works.
-Q
This piece gets off to a bad start with, “cells want to harness the genetic noise — the level of variation in gene expression”. To relegate the precision choreography of the homeostasis that goes on inside most cells, to mere “noise” is a poor way of starting to address the mysteries in biology. That would be like walking into a busy factory with its production line, and referring to the variations in sounds as an important aspect of how the factory works.
“cells want to harness the genetic noise”
“cells want”?
Do cells have will?
These authors use interesting language to express their blurry ideas.