This week we ask the question, why is it that we can recognize the hand of intelligence when we look at an assembly line of complex machines that make potato chips, but we just take for granted that the microscopic machines, the cells, that make up us somehow came into being by random chance?  Once again the fingerprint of a Creator who loves us keeps coming into greater clarity as we look at the purpose and complexity of the cell.  “Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck, anthropically justified.  For example, my colleague, Mark Ridley in Mendel’s Demon has suggested that the origin of the eukaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step than the origin of life…Natural selection works because it is a cumulative one-way street to improvement.  It needs some luck to get it started, and the ‘billions of planets’ anthropic principle grants it that luck.  Maybe a few later gaps in the evolutionary story also need major infusions of luck, with anthropic justification.  Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2008  “Firstly, life – even a single, ‘simple’ cell – is a miracle of complexity.  Every cell in your body, for example, has molecular machines for moving itself, tagging and transporting molecules, processing food, defending against invaders, DNA duplication and repair, producing proteins and receiving and processing outside signals.  On top of all that, this entire machine can tear itself in half and produce a complete working copy in about 20 minutes.  Lewis and Barnes, A Fortunate Universe, 2016  “The cell can be thought of as a colossal factory, a city even, a Rube Goldberg contraption of interconnected assembly lines, machines, highways, transporters, blueprints, and more.  It would be extremely surprising if life on Earth went to all that bother if life is easy to make.” Lewis and Barnes, A Fortunate Universe, 2016  “The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”  Fred Hoyle, Hoyle on evolution, Nature, Vol. 294, No. 5837 (November 12, 1981), p. 105  “…Tompa and Rose have demonstrated mathematically that even having all the requisite parts for a cell will not ensure that those ingredients will self-organize into a living system.  Instead, the cell, like the individual genes or proteins, faces an extreme combinational problem.  Tompa and Rose calculate, building on the work of protein scientist Cyrus Levinthal, that there are a whopping 10^79,000,000,000 different ways of combining just the proteins in a relatively simple unicellular yeast.  That number only grows exponentially larger when biologists attempt to calculate the number of possible ways of combining all the proteins and all the other large molecular components necessary for that one-celled organism, including DNA and RNA molecules, ribosomes, lipids and glycolipid molecules, and others.  The number of possible combinations of these cellular components vastly exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe (10^80) and even the number of events since the big bang (10^139).”  Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021

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