Now they are a tightly orchestrated dance:
For decades, biologists had assumed that activity in the cytoplasm was essentially random; the cellular world churned with such dramatic speed that the right proteins would eventually bump into one another. But it turned out that some molecules in the cytoplasm weren’t randomly circulating. They were swirling in ways that brought related parties together. Suppose an important reaction involved five proteins out of ten thousand; the five tended to hang around one another, loosely attracted. (They sometimes had floppy regions that exerted a mutual pull, and which had been missed in images made of the proteins when they were in crystallized form.) Brangwynne and others found that, under the right conditions, groups of proteins could “phase separate,” like bubbles of oil in a salad dressing, forming structures. For decades, researchers had known that complex biochemical reactions tended to happen faster in living cells than in test tubes. Now they knew why: the lava-lamp-like conditions inside a living cell allow chemicals to take advantage of subtle attractive forces more efficiently than is possible in the looser and more uniform environment of a tube or a dish. We’ve long imagined a spark of life—but it could be the physical structure of cytoplasm that’s the key.
This new understanding has begun to open doors. In 2017, Glass helped found the Build-a-Cell consortium—a steering committee for hundreds of labs that are trying to build a working cell from scratch. Researchers in the consortium began combining nonliving parts—proteins, ribosomes, RNA, and other molecular constructions—into membranes that resembled cells, hoping that the mixture would come to life by expressing genes, doing metabolic work, and eventually dividing. Drew Endy, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford who is one of Glass’s co-founders, described the group as trying to solve the Humpty Dumpty problem: could the parts add up to a whole? Such artificial cells could be used as living factories for the production of biofuels or drugs, or as hyperefficient sites of artificial photosynthesis. But although the right parts are there, none have crossed the border from nonliving to living. Endy’s group was experimenting with slightly different ingredients; if that failed, the problem might be in how they’re physically arranged. He told me, “I think there’s a milestone right in front of us. I don’t think it’s that far away.”
James Somers, “A Journey to the Center of Our Cells” at New Yorker (February 28, 2022)
But if the researchers do create living cells, that’s intelligent design, not natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism).
Another friend draws our attention to this effort to create a minimal cell (depiction by David Goodsell).
You may also wish to read: Why do many scientists see cells as intelligent? Bacteria appear to show intelligent behavior. But what about individual cells in our bodies?
“There’s a milestone just in front of us” is standard swindler talk. Every IPO and utopian community and bitcoin vendor and Nigerian Prince talks the same way. We need money so we can get through those last few obstacles!
From the article,
Here is the Roche Biochemical Pathways diagram he is talking about,
A Darwinists once challenged me to show him any evidence of Intelligent Design in the cell. So I showed him the preceding diagram.
His response upon seeing that diagram was to go into ‘denial mode’ and say something along the lines of, ‘Just because it is ‘horrendously complex’ does not prove it was designed.’. ,,, To which I responded something along the line of, “Well such ‘horrendous complexity’ certainly does not support the VERY extraordinary Darwinian claim that such ‘horrendous complexity’ can possibly be the result of ‘selected chemical accidents’ either! Intelligent Design is, by far, the better conclusion to draw!
The author in the article goes on to claim, “Each (cell of the human body) has been shaped to fit its niche by aeons of evolution.”
This is a patently false claim. There is zero evidence that evolution has ‘shaped’ anything within the human body.
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, don’t even know how any individual cell might achieve its particular form and/or ‘shape’. Much less do they, with their reductive materialistic framework, have any realistic clue how the human body itself achieves its particular form and/or ‘shape’.
In the following article entitled ‘how do rod-like bacteria control their geometry?’, in the concluding paragraph, the authors conceded that, ‘We are still far from unravelling the fundamental “engineering” challenges that biology has to overcome in shaping single cells as well as multi-cellular tissues.,,,’
And in the following study, the researchers fully expected to confirm a widely-held belief, backed by strong theoretical predictions,, that (the) shape and motility (of bacteria) had co-evolved. (Yet, the researchers remarked,) to our great surprise we didn’t find any association between the two traits.”
In the following article it was found that ‘cousins’ of a type of single cell organism had the same morphology despite having very different DNA. Specifically they stated, “ placozoan genome was about as different from that of T. adhaerens as human DNA is from mouse DNA. “It was really striking,” Eitel said. “They look the same, and we look completely different from mice.”
To repeat, molecular biologists don’t even understand how a single cell might achieve its basic form and/or shape, much less do they understand how a multicellular organism might achieve its basic form and/or shape.
As the following 2020 article clearly stated, “At present, the problem of biological form remains unsolved.”
In the article they go on to give an overview of their work,
What is left completely out of the preceding description of their work is just how ‘un-Darwinian’ the results from Venter’s research into the ‘minimal cell’ actually were.
For instance, one researcher commented that “If we’re already playing God, we’re not doing a particularly good job of it,” ,, “Simply streamlining what’s already in nature doesn’t seem very God-like and, if anything, is a very humbling exercise.” Even Craig Venter himself stated, “We’re showing how complex life is even in the simplest of organisms,”,,, “These findings are very humbling in that regard.”
This ‘humbling complexity’ was simply completely unexpected under Darwinian presuppositions.
Darwinists originally held that the minimal gene set would probably be around 265 to 350.
And while 265 to 350 genes was already an impossible ‘probabilistic hurdle’ for Atheistic Naturalists to overcome,,,
Yet, via Venter’s research, the minimal gene set turned out, in reality, to be around 473 genes, not around 250 genes as Darwinists had originally thought. Thus making what was already impossible for Atheistic Naturalists, to be that much more more impossible still.
As Dr. Cornelius Hunter noted, “Now, this latest research has upped the ante. It is just getting worse. A minimal organism consisting of 473 genes is many orders of magnitude beyond evolution’s capabilities. Simply put, the science contradicts the theory. What the science is telling us is that evolution is impossible, by any reasonable definition of that term.”
Moreover, Venter’s research also revealed the very ‘un-Darwinian fact that “The genome is not some one-and-only minimal set of genes needed for life itself. For one thing, if the researchers had pared DNA from a different bacterium they would probably have ended up with a different set of genes.,,,,,,”
In short, there simply is no genetic ‘tree of life’ to be found from, or to, ”simple’ life (or for anything else for that matter), as Darwinists had presupposed.
In the article they go on;
Talk about imagination being untethered to any sense of empirical reality.
You just can’t make this up. They’ve already metaphorically described the minimal cell as being “an engine bolted to some wheels.” (And even that metaphor is a gross understatement as to the complexity actually being dealt with). Then, after the metaphorical parts, i.e. ‘engine, wheels, and bolts’, failed to spontaneously assemble themselves into “an engine bolted to some wheels”, they come to the ‘brilliant’ conclusion, “the problem might be in how they’re physically arranged.”
Well, DUH! Do you really think so?
Any mechanic on the face of earth knows that engines, bolts, and wheels NEVER spontaneously assemble themselves into “an engine bolted to some wheels”. It ALWAYS takes an ‘intelligent designer and/or mechanic’ to purposely arrange the parts in such a fashion so as to create the final product of “an engine bolted to some wheels.”
In fact, according to Michael Behe, and I agree with him completely, it is precisely by the purposeful arrangement of parts that we recognize another intelligent mind has been at work
Much more could be said about thermodynamics and the tremendous amount of ‘positional information’ that is required to explain ‘simple’ life, but I will leave that for another time.
So thus in conclusion, IMHO, the article did a huge disservice to science by severely glossing over what Venter’s work on the ‘minimal cell’ actually revealed in regards to disconfirming what Darwinists had originally expected to find for ‘simple’ life.
Why? Surely these researchers are smart enough to recognize that the Darwinian emperor has no clothes on? What are they scared of?