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Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Brilliant Engineering

Drew Berry creates computer generated animations of cellular processes and this particular video (below) is especially artful. The processes he depicts are occurring 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies. As you watch the video keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals, and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

Notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations in the cell where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did this behavior evolve in the first place?

There may indeed be naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions which we'll someday discover, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible and remote such explanations sound to all but the most inveterately committed and the more it looks like the living cell has in fact been engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark: