Monday, September 13, 2021

How Do We Explain it?

The seven minute video below is a computer animation of processes that take place in every one of the hundred trillion cells in your body. One of the most interesting segments of the video comes at about the one minute mark when it depicts a strand of DNA being folded and compacted by proteins into a chromosome.

Even if you don't know what the processes are that the video depicts you might still have an appreciation for the incredible choreography that's taking place as protein molecules catalyze all sorts of reactions like DNA transcription and replication.

These proteins are tiny bio-machines that somehow know exactly where to go in the cell and what to do when they get there. Where does the information that that requires come from? How is the information communicated to the protein molecules?

Many of these processes must have been present in the very first living cell. How did such astonishing complexity of information, molecular machinery and the coordination of the machines' function all arise so quickly and in tandem if it was solely the product of unguided, random collisions of atoms in a primordial sea?

The DNA "packing" depicted at the one minute mark has the appearance of an ingeniously engineered system, but engineering requires a goal in the mind of an intelligent engineer. Nature, by itself, has no goals, no mind and no intelligence.

So how do we explain the origin of what we see in this video?