Michael Denton, in his just-released book The Miracle of the Cell, writes that,
What one witnesses there seems to transcend all our intuitions: A tiny speck of matter, invisible to the naked eye, so small that one hundred of them could be lined up across the head of a pin, is seemingly endowed with intention and agency.Yet, the cell has no mind. It doesn't "know" what it's doing. Or does it?
It's like watching a house cat chasing a mouse ... or a man chasing down a kudu in the Kalahari.
Cells possess internal clocks and can measure the passage of time. They can sense electrical and magnetic fields, and communicate via chemical and electrical signals....[many of them have] courtship rituals...that include conjugal mating dances, reciprocal learning, repeated touching of prospective mates, and even deceit and cheating when communicating reproductive fitness to potential mates.Denton states that "it is hard to resist the feeling that these microscopic life forms are sentient, autonomous beings."
Indeed, as one biologist has said, if a single-celled protozoan were the size of an average mammal "its behavior would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute these things to the dog."
And, Denton adds, "It doesn't lessen the amazement to conclude that this ability must arise somehow from the atomic complexity that lies within this wondrous speck of matter."
Indeed, but where did this ability come from, and how did it arise?
In his new book A Series of Fortunate Events, cosmologist Sean Carroll blithely imputes such marvels to the wonder-working power of genetic mutation and natural selection. Carroll states that although fortuitous mutations are rare, given enough time and enough attempts, prodigies of complex design can be achieved. He compares it to "an amateur golfer who, given enough swings, will eventually hit the target."
This, though, is much too facile. The difficulty of blind, mindless processes just producing something like a single functional protein, let alone an entire white blood cell or protozoan are more akin to watching a man who has never hit a golf ball in his life, blindfolded and disoriented so that he doesn't know where the ball is or in which direction the green lies or how far away it is, and witnessing him nevertheless hit five consecutive holes-in-one.
For Denton - an agnostic, as far as I know - the emergence of such phenomena in biology are strong evidence of intentional, guided engineering, "whether imposed on nature at the origin of the first life, or built into the fabric of nature from the beginning." (i.e. the creation of the universe).
It's logically possible, of course, that mindless nature could have produced life without input from any intelligent agency, just as there's some non-zero but infinitesimal probability that our blindfolded man randomly swinging his golf club could sink five consecutive holes-in-one, but it takes so much faith in random chance to believe that it actually happened, not just once in our world, but at least hundreds of times (since there are hundreds of proteins in a minimally functioning cell), that I confess it's beyond my feeble powers to will myself to believe it.
