December 13, 2022 | David F. Coppedge
How do you get from a linear code to a three-d, energetic physique?
A brand new e book says no person has discovered the reply.
Many assume that the genetic code directs the development of all elements of the physique, however that’s like pondering {that a} elements checklist builds a automobile. One thing extra should direct the places of all of the elements and match them collectively in the fitting locations and on the proper time.
Discovery Institute, 2022
The brand new e book Your Designed Physique by engineer Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD (Discovery Institute, 2022) raises attention-grabbing questions in regards to the connection between genomics (DNA) and the form of an energetic, working physique (i.e., its morphology). In a sidebar on web page 78, after a dialogue of bone and cartilage within the part on connective tissue, they level out important design issues that science has not solved. We quote:
What does it take to construct a home? The place are the shapes for these bones specified?
Since bones are made by many particular person (and unbiased) bone cells, constructing a bone is an inherently distributed drawback. How do the person bone cells know the place to be, and the place and the way a lot calcium to deposit? How is that this managed over the physique’s growth cycle, as the configurations and dimensions of most of the bones develop and alter? Absolutely the specs for the shapes, their manufacturing and meeting directions, and their progress patterns have to be encoded someplace. There should even be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the directions to make sense.
In dwelling building, we all know that builders have blueprints and verbal and written directions. These alone, nevertheless, can’t construct a home. A venture supervisor is first wanted to order all of the elements and pay the worth. As soon as delivered, although, they are going to simply sit there until acted upon. Foremen and employees have experience in all of the sides of dwelling building: concrete, lumber, drywall, plumbing, electrical, roofing and all; this know-how takes the elements and suits them collectively in the fitting order and time (see an episode within the Illustra Media movie Unlocking the Thriller of Life that makes use of the house building analogy). However the place is that this know-how in a cell, or a whole organism? Laufmann and Glicksman proceed:
Is the data positioned in every bone cell, or centrally positioned and every particular person bone cell receives directions? If every bone cell accommodates the directions for the entire, how does it know the place it’s within the general scheme? How do all these bone cells coordinate their actions to work collectively quite than at odds with one another?
Because the e book explains elsewhere, these are hierarchical issues. Particular person cells should clear up them. Tissues should clear up them at a better stage. Organs should clear up them, too, and at last, total organisms should clear up them. The liver has to reach on the proper place behind the rib cage on the proper time simply as a lot as a protein in a blood cell should arrive at its operational location on the mobile freeway to operate. Epithelial cells should “know” the place to line up alongside vessels and organs, to make sure a good match. And all of the elements must determine this out at the hours of darkness, with out eyes and ears.
Now multiply these questions by all of the organisms which have ever existed: flatworms, honeybees, dinosaurs, eagles, pangolins and human beings. Hundreds of thousands of physique sorts come up from linear code that appears insufficient to account for the outcome. How does life get from DNA to morphology?
As but, nobody has solutions to those questions. One factor we are able to anticipate, although: whoever solves these mysteries will doubtless win a Nobel Prize—which invitations a query: If it takes somebody of Nobel-caliber brilliance to reply such questions, why wouldn’t it have taken comparable or larger intelligence to engineer it within the first place?
The observable actuality of working, dwelling, respiration, energetic giant organisms like ourselves requires clarification. We all know that each useful system of built-in, hierarchical complexity for which we noticed its origin was designed. However in life, the designer of the human physique and all different situations of morphology should have unfathomable intelligence. And so as to add to the awesomeness of life, contemplate even increased ranges of hierarchical design: ecosystems that depend on networks of different organisms, and a planet with the fitting composition, environment, and vitality supply—the solar—to energy the entire biosphere.
Typically asking the fitting questions generates appreciation for the magnitude of the superior wonders that encompass us. In mild of the above questions, watch once more the brief video in regards to the human skeleton by Illustra Media that we featured on 17 Oct 2021. Right here it’s once more:
The one organism that doesn’t instinctively fulfill its designed goal, however often rebels towards it, is the human being: the one creature made within the picture of God. That’s why we’d like one thing greater than a genome, a morphology and a physiology. We’d like forgiveness, mercy, and beauty. That’s the explanation for Christmas: Jesus Christ grew to become human to pay the worth for our sins and supply a brand new nature that may (and must) align itself with our goal for existence. Solely a life aligned with its goal can expertise achievement.
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