Cell Trends

[bob b]

I realize that evolutionists can not face the facts of the marvels of the cell. However, there may be some hope for those who have not completely embraced the absurdity of believing that a cell arose by natural means.

This thread is for those who still have an open mind.

I have so far on this thread posted 8 months of scientific evidence coming from mainline scientific investigations which are revealing more and more layers of complexity in cells.

I feel confident that when I finish posting the rest of the 6 years of material that I have available that those not completely deceived by the propaganda of the "godless" crowd will at least consider the possibility that cells did not arise naturally.

I also feel confident that even in the scientific community there are enough non-atheists that the growing body of knowledge about cells will eventually lead to the demise of the absurd idea that cells arose "naturally".

This trend is moving along so rapidly that God willing I may even live to see the day that it happens.

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Master On-Off Switch for Genes Found: A Second Genetic Code? 08/10/2001
Researchers at the University of Virginia have been studying a type of protein structure called chromatin that surrounds DNA, and believe it acts as a switch to turn genes off or on. If so, this is another source of information, like a second genome, that helps regulate DNA genes. Dr. C. David Allis, a biochemist, states: “We believe that what is telling the cell to make those choices is an overall code that may significantly extend the information potential of the genetic DNA code. For some time, we have known that there is more to our genetic blueprint than DNA itself. We are excited that we are beginning to decipher a new code, what is referred to as an epigenetic code.” The story was reported by SciNews.

This is a problem for evolution on two fronts: it increases the complexity of the cell enormously (again), and it creates a conundrum about how the DNA and the protein became interdependent – the old chicken and egg problem. If the DNA codes for the chromatin, how can it be expressed if the chromatin wasn’t there from the start to activate the gene?

 

[SUTG]

This trend is moving along so rapidly that God willing I may even live to see the day that it happens.

I'm afraid you are setting yourself up for a major disappointment.

 

[One Eyed Jack]

bob b needs a hobby.

I think this is his hobby.

 

[Stripe]

I'm not quite sure what "cross referential" means but the first part of your statement highlights one of your problems. Science is not necessarily "self explanatory". It takes some work to understand it. Learn some science. The emphasis on "learn".

i mean that if you claim life evolved you should be able to tell me what it evolved from .. not leave it up to some other area of science to explain for you ... and self explanatory means if you give me a theory i should be able to (in theory) go outside and see it working .. not just have to take your word for it ..

when will i have learnt some science? when i agree with everything you say?

 

[Johnny]

i mean that if you claim life evolved you should be able to tell me what it evolved from

Not at all true. When Ben Franklin determined that lightning was essentially electricity, did he also have to simultaenously propose a mechanism by which lightning originates? Did his failure to do so negate his findings about lightning or imply a supernatural origin of lightning?

 

[Jukia]

I realize that evolutionists can not face the facts of the marvels of the cell.

I'll bet that the real scientists who post on here, aharvey and stratnerd in particular, have a better understanding of the "marvels of the cell" and the general "marvels" of life than you do.
But keep going bob b, cut and paste all these abstracts. At least your keyboarding skills are improving even if your basic understanding of science is not.

 

[bob b]

I think this is his hobby.

You are quite correct.

:readthis:

Motor and Clutch Proteins Identified for Cellular Highways 08/17/2001
Did you know that cells have their own interstate highway system, with actin filaments serving as streets and microtubules serving as freeways? That motors send their cargo zipping down the lanes? EurekAlert reports that biologists at the University of Illinois, publishing in Science, believe they have identified the clutch that puts the motor in neutral or clicks it into gear. While studying pigment organelle movement in animals that can change color, like chameleons, they think they have uncovered a universal system for moving parts around the cell. The clutch is a complex molecule named calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII); it works to engage or disengage a motor protein they had earlier identified as myosin-V.

More and more, the cell is seen to be a fantastic array of functioning parts, as complex as a city. Such marvels do not arise from the random shuffling of liquids and solids. The old “watch requires a Watchmaker” argument for design has found its ultimate illustration in the tiniest unit of life: the cell. A watch is simple by comparison.
----
Bonus reference: http://www.idthefuture.com/2006/09/the_design_of_dna_compaction.html#more

 

[Stripe]

Not at all true. When Ben Franklin determined that lightning was essentially electricity, did he also have to simultaenously propose a mechanism by which lightning originates? Did his failure to do so negate his findings about lightning or imply a supernatural origin of lightning?

no .. but at least hes seen electricity and its effects..

 

[bob b]

Speaking of electricity:

Electricity Propels Cell Cargo 08/21/2001
Cells need to move stuff around through microtubules, little subway tunnels, and build proteins on assembly lines called ribosomes. How do they attract the trucks to the cargo bay and move them along the track? One factor appears to be static electricity. Scientists found ways to calculate the electrostatic potential of microtubules and ribosomes, and found that they have complex quilted patterns of positive and negative charges, with a net negative charge that helps attract the ingredients and propel them along, according to a paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper is technical, but has some nice illustrations of microtubules in cross section. It shows how the little tunnels are not simple structures like hoses, but elaborate, precise arrangements of molecules as intricately crocheted as a quilt. The main ribosome components have 88,000 to 95,000 atoms apiece, arranged to create the proper electrostatic potential. The precision of cellular structures defies any attempt at naturalistic explanation. Add electric power to the list of wonders.

 

[bob b]

Tiny RNAs: A Whole New World of Regulators Discovered 10/26/2001
Cell biologists have uncovered a whole new class of regulators that control development and gene expression: micro-RNAs, or miRNAs. These short sequences of genetic material (usually around 10-30 nucleotides, much smaller than genes) that had “almost escaped detection until now,” may number in the hundreds or thousands in the cells of all living things. They work not by coding for proteins, but by latching onto messenger RNAs, that are en route to the protein assembly plants, and inhibiting them until the right time, thus acting as switches or timing controls. But the range of possible functions is just now beginning to be explored. One geneticist comments, “Each miRNA is probably matched to one or more other genes whose expression it controls. Their potential importance to control development or physiology is really enormous. If there are hundreds of these in humans and each has two or three targets that it regulates, then there could be many hundreds of genes whose activity is being regulated this way.” Three reports on miRNAs are in the Oct 26 issue of Science. See also this summary in SciNews.

Switches, controllers, regulators– is this the language of purposelessness and chance? The microscopic world of the cell just keeps getting more amazing, and harder to explain by evolution. Now we have another category of tools to marvel at.

 

[Jukia]

Tiny RNAs: A Whole New World of Regulators Discovered 10/26/2001
Cell biologists have uncovered a whole new class of regulators that control development and gene expression: micro-RNAs, or miRNAs. These short sequences of genetic material (usually around 10-30 nucleotides, much smaller than genes) that had “almost escaped detection until now,” may number in the hundreds or thousands in the cells of all living things. They work not by coding for proteins, but by latching onto messenger RNAs, that are en route to the protein assembly plants, and inhibiting them until the right time, thus acting as switches or timing controls. But the range of possible functions is just now beginning to be explored. One geneticist comments, “Each miRNA is probably matched to one or more other genes whose expression it controls. Their potential importance to control development or physiology is really enormous. If there are hundreds of these in humans and each has two or three targets that it regulates, then there could be many hundreds of genes whose activity is being regulated this way.” Three reports on miRNAs are in the Oct 26 issue of Science. See also this summary in SciNews.

Switches, controllers, regulators– is this the language of purposelessness and chance? The microscopic world of the cell just keeps getting more amazing, and harder to explain by evolution. Now we have another category of tools to marvel at.

Wow, once again real scientists make a discovery.

 

[Stripe]

a single celled organism contains all these processes in order to survive ...

its an absolute fantasy .. evolution .. there is no possible way ever that this could have arisen from inanimate objects ... and science will never have anything to say about it...

 

[ThePhy]

Since this thread is basically a forum for Bob b to see how many ways he can say “complex cell”, let me ask a valid but peripheral question. Bob b can answer, but really I am hoping for AHarvey or Johnny or someone who has some real qualifications in the biological sciences to respond.

Question – Humans have one less chromosome than our ape cousins, ostensibly because two got fused into one longer one after our evolutionary paths diverged. It seems to me that a chromosomal fusion like that would be a dramatic enough change that the single individual in whom that mutation occurred would not be reproductively compatible with any of its companions. Can an egg with one less but one extra-long chromosome combine with a sperm having the “normal” number and lengths of chromosomes result in a successful offspring?

 

[Stripe]

cool .. i saw this issue produced by some thiestic evolutionist a while ago .. proof that apes turned into people ... is it as open and shut as they make it sound?

 

[aharvey]

Since this thread is basically a forum for Bob b to see how many ways he can say “complex cell”, let me ask a valid but peripheral question. Bob b can answer, but really I am hoping for AHarvey or Johnny or someone who has some real qualifications in the biological sciences to respond.

Question – Humans have one less chromosome than our ape cousins, ostensibly because two got fused into one longer one after our evolutionary paths diverged. It seems to me that a chromosomal fusion like that would be a dramatic enough change that the single individual in whom that mutation occurred would not be reproductively compatible with any of its companions. Can an egg with one less but one extra-long chromosome combine with a sperm having the “normal” number and lengths of chromosomes result in a successful offspring?

Oops, I unsubscribed from this thread, but caught a post from ThePhy. Anyways, to answer your question, yeah, you'd think that such a gamete would not be able to fuse with a wild-type gamete, and it doesn't seem to have happened often, but there is this phenomenon, known as Robertsonian chromosomal variation, that suggests that it is not impossible. Robertsonian chromosomal variation occurs in several groups of small mammals, in which there is a rather amazing range of chromosomal variation within a single species. The total genome content appears to be the same, it's just partitioned differently in different populations. I don't know if anyone's tried interbreeding the different populations, but it would be an interesting experiment to try. Incidentally, this is much less of a problem in plants, in which there is much potential for asexual reproduction and self-fertlization, which is at least partly why polyploidy is so much more common in plants than in animals.

 

[bob b]

Question – Humans have one less chromosome than our ape cousins, ostensibly because two got fused into one longer one after our evolutionary paths diverged. It seems to me that a chromosomal fusion like that would be a dramatic enough change that the single individual in whom that mutation occurred would not be reproductively compatible with any of its companions. Can an egg with one less but one extra-long chromosome combine with a sperm having the “normal” number and lengths of chromosomes result in a successful offspring?

There are all sorts of "wacky" things going on in the natural world out there. I seem to recall some goony? birds or whatever which have differing numbers of chromosomes yet are considered to be the same species and probably interbreed.

The problem is that there do not seem to be any "fixed" rules so that what goes for one set of creatures does not necessarily go for another. This is why there will continue to be surprises from time to time.

PS. You also might want to take a look at:

New Zealand's Leiopelma frogs
mole rat Spalax ehrenbergi
rattus rattus

 

[bob b]

How Plants Stand Up 10/26/2001
Plants are able to stand erect because of their rigid cell walls. Scientists have known that cell walls contained a complex carbohydrate called RG-II, but didn’t know its function. Now, scientists at the University of Georgia have figured out that RG-II forms a fishnet-like arrangement held together by boron atoms that, along with cellulose, gives the cell wall rigidity something like reinforced concrete. This carbohydrate, one of the most complex in nature and used by all plants, requires a host of enzymes to manufacture:

“RG-II has been known as an obscure, structurally weird polysaccharide that plants make,” said Malcolm O’Neill, senior research associate at UGA’s CCRC. “But we had no idea why plants went to all the effort to make it. There are 50 to 60 enzymes involved, 12 different sugars and 22 different linkages. There’s even one sugar that’s actually not been found anywhere else.”

They observed that mutants lacking a crucial side chain on the carbohydrate, or lacking boron, end up as dwarfs. The plants returned to normal by the addition of the missing ingredients.

Did you catch the personification fallacy there? Plants don’t go to the effort to make something; they just respond to the engineering designed into their coded instructions. Think about a process that requires 60 enzymes to complete, when each enzyme is a complex, folded strand of dozens or hundreds of precisely-placed amino acids, coded for by genes in the DNA library. The functions of enzymes and carbohydrates are highly dependent on having a precise shape, which in turn is highly dependent on the precise sequence of amino acids. The article agrees, “The sugar substitution [in the mutant form] changes the shape of the molecule . . . . As in all molecules - and in all biology - it’s the shapes of molecules that control their function.” The chance of getting one enzyme right, let alone 50 or 60, is infinitesimally small; yet if any one of them is wrong, the entire manufacturing process comes to a halt. how could this and thousands of other complex functional systems arise without design? Think about the degree of complexity at work the next time you look at a blade of grass standing upright against the force of gravity.

 

[Johnny]

Question – Humans have one less chromosome than our ape cousins, ostensibly because two got fused into one longer one after our evolutionary paths diverged. It seems to me that a chromosomal fusion like that would be a dramatic enough change that the single individual in whom that mutation occurred would not be reproductively compatible with any of its companions. Can an egg with one less but one extra-long chromosome combine with a sperm having the “normal” number and lengths of chromosomes result in a successful offspring?

As aharvey noted, a difference in chromosome numbers doesn't always lead to infertility. He calls it "robertsonian chromosomal variation", but you may have more success looking up "robertsonian translocation" (same phenomenon, slightly different label). A quick scan of pubmed turned up a lot of cow and sheep studies, many of which demonstrated no reduction in fertility with various robertsonian translocations.

 

[bob b]

Thermodynamics of Cellular “Steam Engines” Described 10/22/2001
Three Japanese scientists have analyzed the thermodynamics of molecular motors in living cells in a new paper in the Biological Proceedings of the Royal Society. They compare the thermodynamic properties of macroscopic steam engines vs. the microscopic motors like dynein and myosin-V involved in cellular transport and cell division. They describe how these “remarkable microscopic engines” are able to perform a biased random walk (like a ratchet), even though buffeted by Brownian (thermal) motion, and perform useful work. The same equations shown here for linear molecular motors should be applicable to rotary motors like ATP synthase.

The scientific literature on biochemistry is teeming with phrases like molecular motors and cellular machinery. How can any thinking person believe that machines evolved out of a primordial soup? One can conceive a day in the not too distant future when belief in chemical evolution will be abandoned by all knowledgeable biochemists, leaving the superstructure of Darwinian evolution built on it without a foundation, poised for a monumental collapse.

 

[bob b]

Virus Motor Packs DNA Under High Pressure 10/18/2001
University of California at Berkeley scientists have measured the force with which viruses stuff their DNA into protein bottles called capsids. A little molecular motor at the lid of the bottle is able to pack the coiled DNA with 60 piconewtons of pressure. On a human scale, that is ten times the pressure in a champagne bottle. The team is now studying whether the pressure is used to inject the DNA into the host bacterial cell, and whether the packing motor rotates as do some other molecular motors studied, such as the bacterial flagellum.

Think of this little motor packing a DNA molecule into a protein bottle, like stuffing a spring into a can. When the Jack in the Box pops open, surprise! This article uses the word motor two dozen times. It underscores the fact that cellular components are molecular machines. Evolutionists are up a creek to explain machines by chance, but creationists, too, should be intrigued by the high level of design being found in viruses. We think of viruses as nasty disease-causing agents, and some certainly are today, but the vast majority are harmless and may be beneficial. Jerry Bergman has speculated that viruses performed a vital role in the beginning; for instance, they may have prepared a host to enter a new environment, or provided functionality to pass from one organism to another by lateral gene transfer. Whatever is theorized about their role in creation, they are turning out to be more intricately designed than we could have imagined.