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Neuron Development Involves Cell Severing Itself

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If you thought the brain and central nervous system are complicated, then consider its development. New researchshows that the creation of a single nerve cell, or neuron, involves the precursor cell severing itself from the embryo’s neural tube. The neuronal precursors do not merely separate and withdraw. Instead, they are attached to the tube by long tentacles which constrict and then break off. This allows the precursor cell to move to where it needs to be without taking with it the machinery for constructing a new neuron. It is a very detailed and complicated choreography that just got more complicated.  Read more

Comments
nightlight: I hope that any new design theories would be helped by a knowledge of where and how evolutionary theories fail. We wouldn't want to go down the same road again.Cornelius Hunter
January 11, 2014
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"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." —C.S. Lewis Mind and Cosmos - Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False - Thomas Nagel Excerpt: If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199919758.dobornagain77
January 10, 2014
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Errata: "like a factor to build cars" Should read: "like a factory to build cars" As always, nice observation, but attacking generic term "evolution" is a dead end since the only point the example illustrates is that the neo-Darwinian random mutation mechanism is clearly inadequate to explain the the complex design. The example does not show that the the feature couldn't have been computed by some anticipatory algorithms running on cellular biochemical networks (aka 'intelligently designed'). Presence of evolution is a strong argument in favor of the intelligent designs since it takes more intelligence to build a system that can improve itself in response to challenges than just to build system fit for single, static environment. Evolution is observed in all fields of human activities, from evolution of technologies, sciences, arts, fashions, languages, religions, etc. In all instances where the driving force of the evolution is understood, it turns out to be action of intelligent agents. Hence the most plausible conjecture is that the evolution of biological systems is also a result of actions by intelligent agents. The only questions is what and where are these agents? They are the same intelligent agents that organize and carry out the development of organism from fertilized egg into the full mature organism -- the cellular biochemical networks. These networks with adaptable links, exposed to punishments and rewards are the same kind of distributed, self-programming computers as human brains. They use the same kind of anticipatory, look-ahead and what-if internal modeling of their environments and themselves as humans brains do. Therefore, despite uncovering numerous interesting examples of biological complexity challenging neo-Darwinist theory I think your crusade against generic process of "evolution" (instead of aiming against the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution) is misguided and harmful to the acceptance of intelligent design in science and in broader culture.nightlight
January 10, 2014
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