If we are committed to the idea that there is no design in nature, there is no comprehensive answer to this question:
So what are the timers that keep things trucking along at the right rate for any given organism, ensuring that it grows to the proper size and with all its parts in place? It’s a question that James Briscoe, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, would love to answer. Take one lone example among many: motor neurons, the nerves that make muscles contract. These develop from precursor cells over a few days in mice but a week or two in humans — and the same thing happens when the cells are grown in a dish. “We can look at this carefully and demonstrate it’s the same genetic process, the same gene activities, the same mechanisms involved, and it’s just running slower in humans than in mouse embryos,” Briscoe says. “We’re trying to tackle that problem.”
Eryn Brown “How does the embryo make all its parts at just the right moments?” at Knowable Magazine
The research group can iterate in the greatest detail all the examples of the perfect timing throughout nature, via exquisitely designed controls, but dogma requires them to insist that it is all just an accident. A question arises: Will that requirement become a conceptual handicap?
This is an excellent topic. Very much ID on steroids.
Here’s a video of a recent presentation Dr James Briscoe gave in the US.
Note at time 00:40 Dr Briscoe says:
“as a developmental biologist what I’m interested in is understanding how tissues make the right cells in the right place at the right time and in the right numbers”
Control Systems Engineers drool at the sight of so much wonder. Simply incredible.
Not only are “Embryos Timed Correctly” but they are also found to be “optimal.”
As the following recent 2019 article stated, “It’s now known that some form of positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location.,,, that cells extract as much useful information from their complex surroundings as is theoretically possible.,,, when researchers have been able to appropriately determine what cells are doing, many have been surprised to see clear indications of optimization.,,,”
“Optimal” is not just some word that they are carelessly tossing around. When they describe a biological system as being in a ‘optimal’ state, they mean exactly what they are saying. As the following article states, “In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants.”
Moreover, as the following article states, “There are a surprisingly limited number of ways a network could be constructed to perform perfect adaptation.”,,, Moreover, the “amazing and surprising” outcome of the study is applicable to any living organism or biochemical network of any size.,,,”
I agree. The intricacy and delicacy of those mechanisms is mind-boggling.
According to evolutionists: “nah, random trash”.
The most astonishing thing about neurons is that they are manufactured in one factory, then shipped to the correct destination via railroads that are built for the task. Each neuron is tagged (somehow) with its intended destination before the shipping.
http://polistrasmill.blogspot......first.html
The more we know, more is there for us to learn:
The Epitranscriptome
Session Topics
RNA modification I (m6A)
RNA modifications in stem cells and development
RNA modification II (m5C, m1A, 3’ terminal additions, etc)
RNA modification pathways in physiology and pathology
Emerging concepts
What does time mean in development?
As to embryological development in particular.
EricMH recently brought up the topic of “final causality” vs. “efficient causality”
Amazingly, “final causality” vs. “efficient causality” plays more or less directly into embryological development.
The following article states that without final causality, efficient causality is “worse than helpless” in regards to explaining ‘the whole’
Along that same line of reasoning, here is an interesting comment from Pastor Joe Boot,
The fact that ‘the whole’ can never be reduced to ‘the parts’, as is assumed within the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution, also plays out with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem as well it plays out with quantum mechanics:
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem can be stated succinctly as such: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove.”
In fact Gödel stated, “For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind.”
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is not just some abstract mathematical proof but has now been extended to quantum physics.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
And indeed this ‘insurmountable difficulty’ plays out in biology. We find that Darwinian mechanisms are simply at a complete loss to explain how the basic ‘form’ of any particular organism may take is achieved.
For instance, contrary to what Darwinists presupposed, DNA is not a ‘blueprint’ for an organism,
Indeed, DNA does not even control its own shape, much less does it control the final shape of a organism,
As Dr. Jonathan Wells states, “I now know as an embryologist,,,Tissues and cells, as they differentiate, modify their DNA to suit their needs. It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism.”
Nor is the basic form of any organism reducible to any of the other material particulars in biology that Darwinists may wish to invoke,
Thus we are stuck with the question of, ‘Since the ultimate and final biological form that any organism may take is not reducible to any of the material particulars of that organism, just how does an organism achieve its final shape during embryological development?”
Fortunately, due to advances in science, specifically due to advances in quantum biology and in quantum information theory, we are not in the dark as to answering this question. We now know that an immense amount of ‘positional information’ and/or ‘quantum information’ is coming into the developing embryo ‘from the outside’ by some ‘non-material’ method.
At about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Wells, using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, information must somehow be added to the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method.
Moreover, the amount of ‘positional information’ that is somehow coming into a developing embryo from the outside by some non-material method is immense. Vastly outstripping, by many orders of magnitude, the amount of sequential information that is contained within DNA itself. As Doug Axe states in the following video, “there are a quadrillion neural connections in the human brain, that’s vastly more neural connections in the human brain than there are bits (of information) in the human genome. So,,, there’s got to be something else going on that makes us what we are.”
And as the following article states, the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
On top of all that, as far as quantum information theory itself is concerned, this immense amount of positional information that is somehow coming into the developing embryo from the outside, by some non-material method, in order to bring the developing embryo to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, and in order to achieve its final ‘form’, is found to be quote-unquote, “a property of an observer who describes a system.”
In other words, some ‘outside observer’ who, (due to the quantum non-locality of the quantum coherence and/or entanglement of biological molecules), must necessarily exist outside the space-time of the universe, is now required in order for us to give an adequate causal account so that we may coherently explain how it is even possible for this immense amount of positional information to somehow be coming into the developing embryo ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method.
As should be needless to say, Darwinian materialists have no clue who this ‘outside observer’, who must necessarily be outside space-time itself, could possible be. Whereas, on the other hand, Christians have predicted such a ‘beyond space and time’ observer to be intimately involved in embryological development for thousands of years,
Supplemental notes:
Forget the neurons. We don’t even know why a stand-alone neuTron takes ~15 minutes to decay. Why not just 1 minute and why not 50 hours? We have no idea.
Eugene @9:
It takes that long because that’s how it is.
The scientists at CERN should know why. You may want to ask them. They will explain it to you.
Remember that science is where you can find the answer to all your questions.
PavelU
Ummmm. Our questions regarding the OOL have not been answered.
150+ years of nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Only speculations and non-sense. Fairy-tales and just-so stories.
Your scientistmist gospel is false.
Buh.
PavelU
Absolute non sequitur!
Evolution theory is good for some laughs.
What a pleasure to see this discussion. It is a reminder how much absolute free will we have been given.
God never forces us to see or acknowledge anything. We always have the choice to believe or disbelieve anything as we want to. However, we do not have the choice to decide what the consequences of the actions that we take based on our beliefs will be. Reality rules in the end.
Blaise Pascal put it this way. There is enough information that the seeker will find God, but not enough to force the non-seeker to find Him. All our scientific knowledge is ultimately evidence for God.
The person who finds random chance in everything has the right to believe that. I personally find it more of a miracle for the remarkable things in nature to be from an unguided process than from an intelligent designer. In a similar way I believe that a medieval “forger” making the Shroud of Turin (with all the intricate details) would be more of a miracle that Jesus resurrecting from the dead while wrapped in the cloth.
I would end with one warning. Failure to accept reality has consequences – whether you are crossing the street or facing immanent death.
God Bless
What a pleasure to see this discussion. It is a reminder how much absolute free will we have been given.
God never forces us to see or acknowledge anything. We always have the choice to believe or disbelieve anything as we want to. However, we do not have the choice to decide what the consequences of the actions that we take based on our beliefs will be. Reality rules in the end.
Blaise Pascal put it this way. There is enough information that the seeker will find God, but not enough to force the non-seeker to find Him. All our scientific knowledge is ultimately evidence for God.
The person who finds random chance in everything has the right to believe that. I personally find it more of a miracle for the remarkable things in nature to be from an unguided process rather than an intelligent designer. In a similar way I believe that a medieval “forger” making the Shroud of Turin (with all the intricate details) would be more of a miracle that Jesus resurrecting from the dead while wrapped in the cloth.
I would end with one warning. Failure to accept reality has consequences – whether you are crossing the street or facing immanent death.
God Bless
Truthfreedom, there is nothing quite like seeing, in the original, statements, such as :
‘Remember that science is where you can find the answer to all your questions,’ to make you LOL.
I just did, when I checked on PavelU’s post #10, just above yours, after reading your quote, instead of before it, and it took me quite by surprise. A new ‘law of increasing returns’ or, maybe a mysterious form of ‘anti-entropy’. It’s true I do never tire of reading their more inane ‘apercus’. It’s a pleasure that never dims with time or familiarity.
Coaching from the sidelines: the nuclear periphery in genome regulation
The more we know, the more is there for us to learn.
And as science dig deeper into the cell, with the help of more advanced technology, the big picture looks more designed than before.
These are not encouraging news for the Darwinian folks.
@16:
Note that the first sentence in the abstract is quite intriguing:
nonrandomly? directed, guided?
to promote? purpose-driven?
Full text PDF
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6355253/pdf/nihms-1007511.pdf