Short film still remarkable after seven years:
Cells are inhabited by molecular motors and engines with precision parts operating under tight regulations. Now you can watch our video animation with a little more appreciation for what these amazing molecular machines do for all life, including your own.
David Coppedge, “Walking Wonder: More to Appreciate About Kinesin, the “Workhorse of the Cell”” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 28, 2022)
No one really thinks natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) really explains this stuff, right? It’s a political position, really.
Out of the myriad of precisely engineered molecular machines in the cell,
Out of the myriad of precisely engineered molecular machines in the cell, (that far outclass any machine man has ever built in terms of efficiency), the Kinesin, in particular, has a bit of history in giving Darwinists headaches.
For instance, In 2006 Harvard University, via a production company called “BioVisions”, made a video entitled The Inner Life of the Cell. At 1:18 minute mark of the video, the Kinesin is featured prominently in the video:
The video by Harvard BioVisions was one of the first videos on the web that animated some of the amazing molecular machines that are now being found in cells.
As you can see, the overwhelming impression of the intelligent design of the cell literally leaps out of the video.
Since the Intelligent Design of the cell, (and the Kinesin in particular), is readily apparent for all to see, Dr. William Dembski, one of the pioneers of the Intelligent Design movement, would, circa 2007, show the Harvard video in some of his talks to his students on Intelligent Design:
When Harvard BioVisions found out about Dr. Dembski using the video in his lectures as an example of intelligent design to his students, they ‘warned him’ not to use the video anymore.
Their effort to stop Dr. Dembski was futile since the video went viral on the web and anyone with access to a computer could download the video and watch it whenever they so desired, and see for themselves some of the amazing design that is now being discovered in the cell at the molecular level.
The Darwinists at Harvard Biovisions did not like this development one bit. And in 2013, (and apparently trying to undo the damage that was done to Darwinian thinking by their original video), Harvard BioVisions then made a subsequent video entitled ‘Inner Life of the Cell: Protein Packing’. (The Kinesin is featured at the 1:14 minute mark)
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, (i.e. as Darwinian as possible), so as to try to dispel any impression of intelligent design in the cell that they had ‘inadvertently’ created in their first video.
In fact, in 2014 New York Times itself ran an article on the ‘Protein Packing’ video. In the article Carl Zimmer stated that. “In the 2006 version, we can’t help seeing intention, (i.e. teleology), in the smooth movements of the molecules” but of the 2013 video he said that the molecules of the cell ‘flail blindly in the crowd”, and also said that “Our cells work almost in spite of themselves.’
Those were simply patently false claims for Carl Zimmer, via Harvard Biovisions, to make.
In the following article from 2014, Dr Jonathan Wells takes direct issue with Carl Zimmer’s false claim that biological molecules are ‘flailing blindly in the crowd’ and that “Our cells work almost in spite of themselves.’
Specifically, Jonathan Wells 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,,,”
Indeed, the empirical evidence itself strongly militates against the false Darwinian claim that the molecules of the cell “flail blindly in the crowd.”
For instance, 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.”
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?”
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,”,,, “Many scientists have previously thought a protein is more like a wet sponge than a bell: If you tap on a wet sponge, you don’t get any sustained sound.”
Moreover, in direct contradiction to Carl Zimmer’s claim of molecules flailing blindly in a crowd, in the following article subtitled ‘how bio-molecular machines can generate nontrivial quantum states’, the authors state that entanglement can be maintained even in the presence of very intense 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.
As well, the bacterial flagellum itself is shown to achieve its amazing rotational speed, (100,00 rpm), by utilizing ‘thermal noise’ on the quantum realm.
Of related note, (and via knowledge of a particle’s position), researchers recently built an ‘Information engine’ that achieves “power comparable to molecular machinery in living cells, and speeds comparable to fast-swimming bacteria,”
As the Harvard Biovisions ‘protein packing’ video made clear, this ‘utilization of thermal noise” quantum finding is completely unexpected under the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolutionists.
In fact Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply are not even on the correct theoretical foundation in order to properly understand these quantum principles that are now found to be at play on the molecular level of life.
As Jim Al-Khalili explains, “,, Physicists and Chemists have had a long time to try and get use to it (Quantum Mechanics). Biologists, on the other hand have got off lightly in my view. They are very happy with their balls and sticks models of molecules. The balls are the atoms. The sticks are the bonds between the atoms. And when they can’t build them physically in the lab nowadays they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge molecule.,, It doesn’t really require much in the way of quantum mechanics in the way to explain it.”
The thing that is so devastating to Darwinian presuppositions with the (empirical) finding of pervasive quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement within molecular biology, is that quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement is a non-local, beyond space and time, effect that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its existence. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, and especially with the falsification of ‘hidden variables’, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence and/or entanglement that is now found to be ubiquitous within biology.
Whereas on the other hand, the Christian Theist readily does have a beyond space and time cause that he can appeal to so as to explain quantum entanglement, and has been postulating a ‘beyond space and time’ cause for thousands of years. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Besides beyond space and time quantum ‘non-locality’, it is also important to realize that quantum information, unlike classical information, is physically conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, (beyond space and time), and ‘conserved’, (cannot be created nor destroyed), quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence proving that we do indeed have a transcendent, immaterial, component to our being, a “soul”, that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies.
As Stuart Hameroff succinctly stated in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Personally, (besides falsifying the reductive materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution), I consider these recent findings from quantum biology to rival all other scientific discoveries over the past century. Surpassing even the discovery of a beginning of the universe, via Big Bang cosmology, in terms of scientific, theological, and even personal, i.e. ‘spiritual’, significance.
As Jesus once asked his disciples, along with a crowd of followers, “Is anything worth more than your soul?”
OT:
Anyone want to do analysis on this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BskwEUEg0oA
It addresses other ways of proposed evolution…implying Darwin is wrong. Thoughts from the peanut gallery?
https://www.davidabel.us/papers/Self-Organization%20vs.%20Self-ordering.pdf
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/polanyi/Polanyi_Life_Structures.pdf