“Not a random boo-boo on evolution’s part”? If the field of biology had not organized itself around Darwinian evolution (insert preferred terminology for the same sort of thing here) in the mid-twentieth century, would anyone think that up just now to account for all this?
Cell biology
Claim: The tree of life may have only two major branches
The slingshot of life? According to this version of the tale, the eukaryotes are descended from the Asgard archaea.
Drug developers try producing chirality
But when they do it, it doesn’t sound very random at all.
What? Harmful bacteria “masquerade” as red blood cells?
She explains: “Once we kind of came to that idea, it all sort of fell into place.” Indeed, Madam Professor! You follow brilliantly in the footsteps of Miss Marple. We need intelligence to uncover this because intelligence underlies it.
“Paraspeckles” are another complex system recently discovered in the cell, responding to stress
Of course, paraspeckles just happened randomly (“There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Darwin, “Life and Letters,” i, p. 278). Even though they somehow work seamlessly with everything else.
The bacterial flagellar hook as a universal joint
A friend points out that the paper just describes the intricate machinery of the hook, adding to what we know, without any resort to Darwinspeak. It seems to be getting safer all the time to just not talk that way any more.
Cilia are more complex than thought
“Before this work, everyone assumed these proteins inside cilia just stabilize the structure, which is true for a subset of the proteins, especially when you consider the forces produced by the continuous beating of the cilia,” Zhang said. “But based on how they are arranged inside this structure, we believe these proteins are doing many more things.”
Cellular recycling system gets put on hold while cells divide
Clever little accidents, aren’t they?
Natural biomolecule measured while acting like a quantum wave
From the Abstract: The successful realization of quantum optics with this polypeptide as a prototypical biomolecule paves the way for quantum-assisted molecule metrology and in particular the optical spectroscopy of a large class of biologically relevant molecules.
How do liquid organelles coexist without merging?
They know what they are without a membrane, just by being gelatinous.
Cells’ feedback circuitry is all in the math
At Quanta: “What math and engineering and biology have in common, at least modern engineering, is enormous hidden complexity,” Doyle said. Take, for example, a cellphone. It seems simple to operate, but underneath, many layers of control circuits are built atop one another.
James Tour: 1 hr lecture on OoL
on the mystery of the origin of life: From the blurb: Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists. He has authored 680 scientific publications and holds more than 120 patents (here is a partial list). In 2014, Thomson Reuters named him one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” and in Read More…
An organism takes shape in 6 min time lapse vid
Watch a single cell become a complete organism in six minutes of timelapse. Hat tip Aeon: See also: Before you go: DNA uses “climbers’ ropes method” to keep tangles at bay DNA as a master of resource recycling The amazing energy efficiency of cells: A science writer compares the cell to human inventions and finds Read More…
Researchers identify a new sensory organism that detects pain
Assuming this holds up, everywhere we look, more systems, more organization, and it all just sort of happened by magic, oops, Darwinism. One wonders, at what point will the inability to distinguish between Darwinism and magic lead to some sort of re-evaluation of the origin of complex specified information in life forms?
Culturing a tentacled archean in a lab shows eukaryote-like genes from 2 billion years ago
Also, here’s a 2017 Abstract from Nature, noting that “Our results expand the known repertoire of ‘eukaryote-specific’ proteins in Archaea, indicating that the archaeal host cell already contained many key components that govern eukaryotic cellular complexity.” Thus they had that complexity back then. Not so good for Darwinism unless Darwinism is magic.