Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?Here's another question: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?
Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.
Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?
As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?
Furthermore, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?
For that matter where are the instructions stored that tell not only our bones to stop growing but also tell each organ in the body to stop growing? This information can't be stored solely on the DNA because the DNA has to be instructed when to stop and start producing RNA (and thus protein). How did that regulatory system come about and where is the information that governs it stored and how is it regulated?
And how is all of this produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution? No one knows. We just have to gin up enough blind faith to believe that it did, we are told, because believing that the body is designed by an intelligent agent has too many uncomfortable religious implications.
It all reminds one of a 1997 quote by the biologist Richard Lewontin who wrote that:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of heath and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door....To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Lewontin and his fellow naturalistic materialists refuse to believe that the marvels of biology are the product of intelligence, but they commit their lives to writing books about how blind chance, despite how absurd it seems, can accomplish miracles.
