Darwin and his contemporaries assumed that cells were simple, made from a jelly-like substance they called protoplasm. It was natural for people in Darwin’s day to think that cells were simple building blocks.
We build complex entities from simpler components. Majestic cathedrals are built from stone and glass. Locomotives and pocket watches are both made from steel and brass, just arranged in the right shapes and positions.
But God hasn’t done it that way. The building blocks of life are just as complex and amazing as the final products.
When technology equipped scientists to look inside cells, our knowledge of the nature and the complexity of life exploded. The molecular details of the living world turned out to be nothing like what anyone had expected. Not simply different, but jaw-drop amazing, and way beyond the realms of chance!
Among their discoveries in the 1950s and 60s, two were unimaginable before molecular biology, and they changed everything we thought about life.
1. Living cells aren’t simple protoplasm building blocks.
2. Life isn’t a chemical phenomenon.
Living Cells aren’t Simple Building Blocks
Scientists found that living cells aren’t the simple protoplasm building blocks they expected. Very much the opposite, a single cell turned out to be one of the most intricate and complex entities in the universe.
Cells are complex, intricate, and carefully orchestrated. They resemble an automated factory, filled with hundreds of thousands of complex molecular machines, manufacturing exactly the chemicals and proteins needed and transporting each one to the right place.
And they’re industrious places; just one cell is home to more activities than take place in a typical large city.
Molecular biologist Michael Behe has said:
“Darwinism was a lot more plausible when we were thinking about globs of protoplasm than it is when we’re thinking about molecular machines.”
Life isn’t a Chemical Phenomenon
The second monumental discovery of the 20th century was that life isn’t the chemical phenomenon scientists expected. Instead, molecular biology showed us that life is built on information, codes, and molecular machines, not chemistry.
This represented a critical change in everyone’s view of life. For a long time, scientists thought of cells as tiny bags of chemicals – but suddenly chemistry didn’t relate to what takes place in cells. Think back to high school chemistry. We mixed carefully measured amounts of different chemicals, watched them bubble and fizz, as old bonds were broken and new bonds formed, and we discovered something solid at the bottom of the test tube. Nothing like that ever happens inside a cell. Instead, molecular machines work with individual molecules to break existing bonds, then form new bonds with other atoms.
A good mental picture of a cell would be something like this automated factory:
Starting from the information in DNA, cells manufacture proteins and other chemicals, assemble proteins into nano-machines, produce energy, deliver molecules to where they’re needed, and repair damage that’s constantly occurring.
What’s orchestrating and directing all the activities required to maintain a cell’s life? We’re just beginning to sort out those puzzles. It’s all based on information, but information, codes, and languages are intangible things, essentially agreements between two or more entities. What taught the cell how to read, interpret, and use the information in DNA? How do those molecular machines know what part to play in the code? Twenty-first century biology is going to be amazing and eye-opening!
Today, we can watch video animations of those molecular machines on YouTube, all developed from electron microscopy. For a really good introduction to what animates our cells, start at the Discovery Science YouTube channel with the Secrets of the Cell series,
https://www.youtube.com/@DiscoveryScienceChannel
or go to Intelligent Design | The Definitive Source on ID
or go to IllustraMedia’s website John1010Project.com, then find their Videos page.
https://thejohn1010project.com/videos/
Here are just a few of the great examples of molecular machines you can watch on YouTube. Don’t get lost in confusing terminology. Just watch what’s happening inside cells and be amazed!
Manufacturing proteins is a complex process that uses a cascade of more than a dozen molecular machines. This video shows just one of those machines, a Ribosome, in action:
Every cell produces the energy it needs through a process called cellular respiration. It uses more than 10 different molecular machines. Here’s the final step in that process, performed by ATP Synthase:
Cells have to be constantly on the lookout for damage, and prepared to repair it. One process that needs constant attention is DNA replication. When machines unwind the strands of DNA, twisting and tangling can occur, just like it did with old fashioned telephone cords. Cells have machines called Topoisomerase that can snip and rejoin strands of DNA to untangle them:
A cell isn’t a bag of chemicals drifting about. Molecules get transported by Kinesins through the cell to where they’re needed. Watch this:
These molecular machines are works of extreme genius, not accidents of nature. Natural forces and random accidents can’t and don’t produce anything approaching a work of genius. And natural selection can’t ride in to rescue evolution. Since machines need a minimum set of parts before they can function at all, they aren’t a candidate for gradual evolution. There’s no function for natural selection to select until all the parts are there.
If you could shrink yourself and walk through a cell to watch hundreds of thousands of machines humming along, manufacturing proteins, producing energy, delivering molecules to where they’re needed, the last thing you would think is “yeah, this probably just happened by accident”.
We know the answer to Michael Polanyi’s question, “Who made the machines we find in cells?” They certainly didn’t come about by accident.
At the time of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, a scientist would have had a difficult time mounting a counter-argument against evolution. Things began to turn around as the new discipline of molecular biology developed. Modern science has been steadily unraveling the evolution story for the past 60 years now.
Molecular biology is just one of the fields of science that indicates we wouldn’t be here without a Creator. We’re going to explore more in the topics that follow. God’s fingerprints are everywhere, yet most of us aren’t aware of it yet, so our worldviews are still being shaped to some degree by Darwin’s theory of accidental and purposeless evolution.
Recommended Books:
Recommended Videos:
Darwin’s Black Box, by Michael Behe
Unlocking the Secrets of Life, by Illustra Media