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Monday, August 23, 2021

Did Unguided Forces Produce Mitosis?

The Veratasium video below illustrates just a fraction of the complexity of the process of cell division, a process that's going on in our bodies billions of times each day. The video depicts conventional cell division (mitosis), but meiosis, the cell division that produces ova and sperm, is even more complex.

Now this marvelous process came about either as the result of wholly unguided, random events, like monkeys pecking at a typewriter and somehow by chance producing a copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or, like Shakespeare's Hamlet it came about as a result of the intentional design of an intelligent mind.

There's really no third option. Mitosis is the end result of either guided or unguided processes. If one opts for the first choice then the obvious question is who or what is the intelligent mind that guided its development.

If one opts for the second choice then the obvious question is where an unguided process, like biological evolution, for example, acquired the information necessary to input into the creation of such an amazing duplication mechanism.

Information, the kind that programs computers or programs cells to reproduce themselves, comes, as far as we have experience of it, only from minds. Physical forces can create complex arrangements, like the distribution of pebbles left by the tide on a beach, but information that specifies a function, that specifies instructions for an operation in a computer or a cell, an operation like mitosis, only comes from minds.

Anyway, here's the video: