From the website of Marc Kirschner, systems biologist at Harvard Medical School and ID critic:
In the development of an organism, as in the theater, timing is everything. Imagine if, one night, the actors in a play were to miss every single cue, delivering each line perfectly, but always too early or too late. The evening would be a disaster. The same is true in embryonic development. Starting at the moment when sperm and egg meet, cells in the embryo send signals to each other to coordinate the growth of organs, limbs, and tissues. Not only do the signals have to be correct, they also must be perfectly timed. Otherwise, disasters like cancer can result.
The Kirschner lab studies, among many other things, the way a developing frog embryo orchestrates numerous signals to yield the final, complex organism. Just as multiple cues would destroy an actor's ability to deliver his lines at the right time, it would seem like the existence of multiple signals ought to result in cellular cacophony. But, somehow, the cells in the embryo can sort out the meaning of the different signals that are bombarding them.
It almost sounds as if Kirschner is suggesting that there is a "director" of this cellular play, but, of course, we know that that can't be. That wouldn't be "scientific." Everyone knows that the incredibly choreographed machinery of the cell is the product of an incredible series of tens of millions of fortuitous accidents occuring blindly over eons of time.
Any student who might be skeptical about this gets sent to a re-education camp in Siberia.
Thanks for the tip to Uncommon Descent.
