Biological complexity: how the cell proteasome works (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, May 04, 2017, 12:12 (2761 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID's comment: The proteasome protects itself from self-degradation and is specialized for different organ functions and for different immunologic activities. No cell can operate without this organelle. The original cells at the start of life had to have a portion of it that maintained this action. Only design can provide all the interactive parts of the original cells. The complexity shows this.
DAVID: It is important to recognize that the original cells of early life had to be complete units. How would a simple partial cell work? Could one even exist? We really have no experience with that. Viruses are close but they are set up to manage their affairs until they invade a fully living cell to take over the replication part of DNA and reproduce. This means my point above must be taken seriously. The first cells that maintained life after it started were complete units with completely integrated organelles that were protected against mistakes and had controls managed by feedback loops. They were run by a DNA code which rivals any code invented by humans. It is more than reasonable to conclude that only design by a planning mind is the source of the beginning of life.

Perfectly reasonable. And alongside a variety of psychic experiences, the complexity of the cell is the major reason why I cannot embrace atheism. The problem that leaves me on my agnostic fence is that we cannot solve a mystery by substituting another mystery. All we can say is that the first living cells were produced by an unknown force. We have no idea what that force is or was, how it originated, whether it is singular or plural, absent or present, working from top to bottom or bottom to top...You make great play of not humanizing this force, but you can’t help it – you call it “He”, you see it as an individual mind with individual intentions and interests, a “person like no other person” (why a “person” at all?), and you even pray to it in the belief that it cares about you. With my theist hat on, I can also humanize it (and I take this approach seriously, because your God may indeed exist), but with my agnostic hat on, I cannot go beyond the unknown force. THAT is avoidance of humanization. I shan’t bore you by repeating my panpsychist hypothesis, other than to say that I see it as no more and no less improbable than your sourceless eternal mind and the atheists’ “god” of chance. But in the light of some of your current posts (for which once more many thanks), I will point out the evidence for bottom-up evolution, the point being that rudimentary intelligence can create ever more sophisticated forms of intelligence by combining with other intelligences. This is summed up by the Wikipedia article I referred to earlier:

“Microbial intelligence (popularly known as bacterial intelligence) is the intelligence shown by microorganisms. The concept encompasses complex adaptive behaviour shown by single cells, and altruistic or cooperative behavior in populations of like or unlike cells mediated by chemical signalling that induces physiological or behavioral changes in cells and influences colony structures.”
(Please note that chemical signalling is their form of communication, and does not denote automaticity.)

From “Neurons’ DNA”: “Accepted dogma holds that—although every cell in the body contains its own DNA—the genetic instructions in each cell nucleus are identical. But new research has now proved this assumption wrong. There are actually several sources of spontaneous mutation in somatic (nonsex) cells, resulting in every individual containing a multitude of genomes—a situation researchers term somatic mosaicism....There are reasons to think somatic mosaicism may be particularly important in the brain, not least because neural genes are very active.”

From “Ant queens”: DAVID’S Comment: this is a logical explanation to show how social ant colonies get their cues for activity: chemical signals as well as instinctual behaviour. The ants need queen/worker ratios for proper survival. One can wonder how evolution worked this all out. Certainly not by chance; more likely by design.

The pattern in all these quotes is clear: individual units combine into communities that work out processes far beyond the scope of each individual in isolation. This applies from bacteria right through to ourselves: we are a collection of cell communities (including that of the brain), and all these cell communities have an intelligence of their own. This is not to minimize the problem of the very first cells, but I am simply trying to show that intelligent design does not necessarily mean a single mind that knows and plans everything (top down); intelligent design can be the product of intelligent communities that learn from experience and (bottom up) create ever more complex designs as they build on the work of their predecessors.