Signature In The Cell Quotes

With odds standing at 1 chance in 10164 of finding a functional protein among the possible 150-amino-acid compounds, the probability is 84 orders of magnitude (or powers of ten) smaller than the probability of finding the marked particle in the whole universe. Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specified particle among all the particles in the universe.

God’s signature is not just in the cell, it’s in all of creation. God is as necessary to the universe as a band is to music. Once the band stops playing, the music is over.

Since natural selection “selects” or preserves functionally advantageous mutations or variations, it can explain the origin of systems that could have arisen through a series of incremental steps, each of which maintains or confers a functional advantage on a living organism. Nevertheless, by this same logic, selection and mutation face difficulty in explaining structures or systems that could not have been built through a close series of functional intermediates. Moreover, since selection operates only on what mutation first produces, mutation and selection do not readily explain appearances of design that require discrete jumps of complexity that exceed the reach of chance; that is to say, the available probabilistic resources.

The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where the cancer will one day form, studies the eyes where melanoma’s dark signature is already written along the optic nerve, touches the back where the liver will one day house the cirrhosis, feels the bloodstream that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the ax-handle of stroke, or listens to your heart, which, exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, will explode in your chest like a light going out in the world.

I love you more than words can say. I love you more than what you can imagine. I love you more than what your senses can perceive. I love you more than all the mortals’ feelings, emotions, love, and passion combined. You became part of my blood cells’ contents. You became my white blood cells that protect me from getting sick. You became my blood plasma that I will die without. You became my red blood cells that I can’t breathe without. You became my heart, that through it, I can survive. You became my lungs, that without them, I would die. You became my brain that is the only hope for life if my heart stops functioning. You became my eyes that see you and were created only to see you. You became my limbs that I can’t do anything without. You became my nose that smells your musk, even if you are amid millions of mortals. You became my lips that touch your flesh and paint their signature on every inch of your body. I am your love who cannot live without you.

constructed with the help of specific enzymes. For example, each of the systems involved in the processing of genetic information requires energy at many discrete steps.

God has a university. It’s a small school. Few enroll; even fewer graduate. Very, very few indeed. God has this school because he does not have broken men and women. Instead, he has several other types of people. He has people who claim to have God’s authority . . . and don’t—people who claim to be broken . . . and aren’t. And people who do have God’s authority, but who are mad and unbroken. And he has, regretfully, a great mixture of everything in between.

To complicate matters further, proteins must catalyze formation of the basic building blocks of cellular life such as sugars, lipids, glycolipids, nucleotides, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the main energy molecule of the cell).

At the close of the nineteenth century, most biologists thought life consisted solely of matter and energy. But after Watson and Crick, biologists came to recognize the importance of a third fundamental entity in living things: information.

How does this work? Rodents produce pheromonal odors with individual signatures, derived from genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This is a super variable gene cluster that produces unique proteins that form a signature for an individual. This was first studied by immunologists. What does the immune system do? It differentiates between you and invaders—“self” and “nonself”—and attacks the latter. All your cells carry your unique MHC-derived protein, and surveillance immune cells attack any cell lacking this protein password.

Biochemist David Goodsell describes the problem, “The key molecular process that makes modern life possible is protein synthesis, since proteins are used in nearly every aspect of living. The synthesis of proteins requires a tightly integrated sequence of reactions, most of which are themselves performed by proteins.”41 Or as Jacques Monod noted in 1971: “The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell’s translating machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of

early theories of the origin of life did not need to address, nor did they anticipate, this problem. Since scientists did not know about the information-bearing properties of DNA, or how the cell uses that functionally specified information to build proteins, they did not worry about explaining these features of life.

Although DNA does not convey information that is received, understood, or used by a conscious mind, it does have information that is received and used by the cell’s machinery to build the structures critical to the maintenance of life. DNA displays a property—functional specificity—that transcends the merely mathematical formalism of Shannon’s theory. Is

and the next day the parcel arrived. — This was all getting a bit eventful. In fact, when the parcel arrived, delivered by a kind of robot drone that dropped out of the sky making droning robot noises, it brought with it a sense, which gradually began to permeate through the whole village, that it was almost one event too many. It wasn’t the robot drone’s fault. All it required was Arthur Dent’s signature or thumbprint, or just a few scrapings of skin cells from the nape of his neck, and it would be on its way again. It hung around waiting, not quite sure what all this resentment was about.

I trudge toward the porch, entertaining the idea of running the other way. But technically, I shouldn't be in any trouble. It wasn't my car. I'm not the one who got a ticket. Samantha Forza did. And the picture on Samantha Forza's driver's license looks a lot like Rayna. She told Officer Downing that she swerved to keep from hitting a camel, which Officer Downing graciously interpreted as a deer after she described it as "a hairy animal with four legs and a horn." Since no one formed a search party to look for either a camel or a unicorn, I figured we were in the clear. But from Mom's expression, I'm miles from clear. "Hi," I say as I reach the steps. "We'll see about that," she says, grabbing my face and shining a pen light in my eyes. I slap it away. "Really? You're checking my pupils? Really?" "Hal said you looked hazy," she says, clipping the pen back on the neckline of her scrubs. "Hal? Who's Hal?" "Hal is the paramedic who took your signature when you declined medical treatment. He radioed in to the hospital after he left you." "Oh. Well, then Hal would have noticed I was just in an accident, so I might have been a little out of it. Doesn't mean I was high." So it wasn't small-town gossip, it was small-county gossip. Good ole Hal's probably transported hundreds of patients to my mom in the ER two towns over. She scowls. "Why didn't you call me? Who is Samantha?" I sigh and push past her. There's no reason to have this conversation on the porch. She follows me into the house. "She's Galen's sister. I didn't call because I didn't have a signal on my cell. We were on a dead road." "Where was Galen? Why were you driving his car?" "He was home. We were just taking it for a drive. He didn't want to come." Technically, all these statements are true, so they sound believable when I say them. Mom snorts and secures the dead bolt on the front door. "Probably because he knows his sister is life threatening behind the wheel." "Probably.

renowned British philosopher, Antony Flew, announced that he had repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing, among other factors, evidence of intelligent design in the DNA molecule.6

intelligent design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution.

To explain how life originated, scientists first have to understand what life is. That understanding, in turn, defines what their theories of the origin of life must explain. The Victorians weren’t especially concerned with the origin-of-life problem because they thought simple life was, well, simple. They really didn’t think there was much to explain. Biologists during this period assumed that the origin of life could eventually be explained as the by-product of a few simple chemical reactions.

From ancient times, humans have known a few basic facts about living things. The first is that all life comes from life. Omne vivum ex vivo. The second is that when living things reproduce themselves, the resulting offspring resemble their parents. Like produces like. But what inside a living thing ensures that its offspring will resemble itself? Where does the capacity to reproduce reside?

The phenomena we encountered in the previous chapters, from e-mail usage to travel patterns, hint that burstiness is deeply linked to human will and intelligence. Prioritizing only reinforces this impression, since it is our preferences that determine whether an action item is seen to immediately or indefinitely be postponed. This would suggest that bursts require the ability to set priorities. But from this perspective, the results discussed above are rather humbling. They indicate that burstiness is not something we invented but was in use well before intelligent life ever emerged on Earth. There's nothing smooth or random int he way life expresses itself, but bursts dominate at all time scales, from milliseconds to hours in our cells; from minutes to weeks in our activity patterns; from weeks to years when it comes to diseases; from millenia to millions of years in evolutionary processes. Bursts are an integral part of the miracle of life, signatures of the continuous struggle for adaptation and survival.

There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.”19

The functional design of organisms and their features would…seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment [however] to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”20

The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content. (See Fig. 4.8.)

Complex sequences exhibit an irregular, nonrepeating arrangement that defies expression by a general law or computer algorithm

the kind of information that DNA contains, namely, functionally specified information.

How does the sequence of bases on the DNA direct the construction of protein molecules?

How do specific sequences in a four-character alphabet generate specific sequences in a twenty-character alphabet? Francis

The chance hypothesis in effect says, “There is nothing going on in this event to indicate any regular or discernable causal factors.

Darwin read Lyell’s magnum opus, The Principles of Geology, on the voyage of the Beagle and employed its principles of reasoning in On the Origin of Species. The subtitle of Lyell’s Principles

Similarly, in 1968, Francis Crick suggested that the origin of the genetic code might be a “frozen accident.”3 Most

Earlier, in 1954, biochemist George Wald argued for the causal efficacy of chance in conjunction with vast expanses of time. As he explained, “Time is in fact the hero of the plot…. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain.”2

Many origin-of-life scientists have similarly recognized how difficult it is to generate specified biological information by chance alone in the time available on the early earth (or even in the time available since the beginning of the universe).

All this suggested to me that there are important distinctions to be made when talking about information in DNA. In the first place, it’s important to distinguish information defined as “a piece of knowledge known by a person” from information defined as “a sequence of characters or arrangements of something that produce a specific effect.” Whereas the first of these two definitions of information doesn’t apply to DNA, the

Proteins build cellular machines and structures, they carry and deliver cellular materials, and they catalyze chemical reactions that the cell needs to stay alive. Proteins also process genetic information.

second does. But it is also necessary to distinguish Shannon information from information that performs a function or conveys a meaning. We must distinguish sequences of characters that are (a) merely improbable from sequences that are (b) improbable and also specifically arranged so as to perform a function. That is, we must distinguish information-carrying capacity from functional information. So

In particular, the three-dimensional shape of a protein gives it a hand-in-glove fit with other equally specified and complex molecules or with simpler substrates, enabling it to catalyze specific chemical reactions or to build specific structures within the cell. Because of its three-dimensional specificity, one protein cannot usually substitute for another.

definition that defines information as “the attribute inherent in and communicated by alternative sequences or arrangements of something that produce specific effects.

Take an illustration from science. Evolutionists once claimed there were some one hundred eighty vestigial organs (with no known function) left over from our animal ancestry. Over the last century or so, this list has shrunk to six! And now there are known functions even for these. More recently some scientists were speaking of “junk genes,” but now there are good reasons for believing they have a special function – playing, for example, a key role in controlling gene expression (see Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell, 406–407). Further, even Nature magazine (2009) refers to them as “the junk that makes us human” as they account for the crucial differences among species. In fact, this is all evidence of intelligent design. Finally, to assume they are junk is to hinder scientific research.

Burr was in. He enthusiastically sent one of his contraptions back with Langman to his wards, where, in an initial group of 100 women, he strapped one electrode to the lower abdomen above the pubis, and the other either on or alongside the cervix.6 Women whose troubles turned out to be caused by ovarian cysts or other non-cancerous medical issues almost always had a positive reading. Women with malignant tumors, however, showed an electrical “marked negativity” of the cervical region every time.7 Langman confirmed their diagnosis with a pathological examination. Cancerous tissues, it appeared, emitted an unmistakable electrical signature. Langman repeated the technique in about a thousand women to see whether his results stood up. They did: 102 of his patients exhibited the characteristic voltage reversals. When Langman operated on them, he confirmed that 95 of the 102 had cancer.8 Even more remarkably, often the masses had not even progressed to the point where the symptoms would have driven them to visit the doctor, never mind obtain a correct diagnosis. After removing these cancers, the electrical polarity shown on the electrometer would normally flip back to a “healthy” positive indicator—but it did not always. When it stayed negative, Burr and Langman suspected that this indicated that they either hadn’t got it all, or the cells had metastasized. Somewhere in the body, a cancerous mass was still sending its nefarious signals. What struck them as especially strange was that the electrode inside the genital tract did not have to be placed directly on, or even particularly near to, the malignant tissue for the anomaly to be detectable. It was like a distress signal was being sent over distances through the body’s healthy tissue.

Yes, the origin of life was a missing link in that chain, but surely, it was thought, the gap would soon be bridged. Darwin’s theory, in particular, inspired many evolutionary biologists to begin formulating theories to solve the origin-of-life problem.

Who needs to invoke an unobservable designing intelligence to explain the origin of life, if observable material processes can produce life on their own?

One of the most basic principles in neuroscience states, “Nerve cells that fire together wire together.” 3 As your brain fires repeatedly in the same manner, you’re reproducing the same level of mind. According to neuroscience, mind is the brain in action or at work. Thus, we can say that if you’re reminding yourself of who you think you are on a daily basis by reproducing the same mind, you’re making your brain fire in the same ways and you’ll activate the same neural networks for years on end. By the time you reach your mid-30s, your brain has organized itself into a very finite signature of automatic programs—and that fixed pattern is called your identity.

Every multicellular organism begins as one cell, which contains all of the intricate instructions to synthesize, organize, and regulate not only this cell but the development and maintenance of all cells that will inevitably comprise the organism. All of these instructions are encoded in the first cell's DNA. This underscores the complexity of the genome and how each cell's expression must be controlled in specific ways depending on its function. The cells hailing from each tissue in the human body (e.g., muscle, lung, heart, liver) harbor a unique epigen­etic signature, which enables the maintenance of tissue-specific func­tions through the control of gene regulation, as just discussed. "Our knowledge of the total number of unique cells, or cell types, is still growing. Previous estimates put the number of unique cell types in the human body at ~300, but new estimates from the Human Cell Atlas have shown that we may have thousands of cell types and subtypes, each harboring a unique function for a specific physiological state or response to stimuli. But even cells of the same cell type will not be identical. A cell's 'presentation' of molecules on their surface can radi­cally change depending on internal variables such as genetic mutations or altered states of their epigenome, transcriptome, and proteome, as well as external stimuli including drugs and interactions with other cells. This novel presentation is most pronounced with a neoantigen, when a cancer cell creates an entirely new molecule on the surface of a cell. Given its unique presentation, which wouldn't be found in nor­mal cells, this offers a unique target for safer cancer therapies. "The human body has about 30 trillion human cells plus another 30-40 trillion bacterial cells, for a total of about 70 trillion cells. If your body were a democracy, the human cells would often be the minority or equal party. You (as a human) would never win an election. Your loss of control would likely result in you rolling around in the soil or lying in a bathtub full of yogurt, which I do sometimes on Sundays. Regard­less of how you spend your Sundays, there are a lot of microbes in, on, and around your body. There are in fact so many microbes that they compose the bulk of the cells on Earth. This is a humbling and exciting statistic, and one which is vividly apparent for anyone who has ever had explosive diarrhea.

Every cell in your prefrontal cortex carries the signature of the presence or absence of your mother

Our mirror neurons – specialised nerve cells that allow us to pick up on how other people are feeling – allow us to feel the fear in others. And when we see people feel the fear but take on the challenge anyway, we are inspired. It is a signature moment for performance under pressure.

Behind every double standard lies a single hidden agenda.

Il y a eu de nombres exemples, ces dernières années, de recours à l’action directe : les associations qui affrètent des bateaux pour secourir les migrants qui se noyaient dans la Méditerranée, Carola Rackete qui force en 2019 un blocus italien pour débarquer des hommes et femmes sauvés en mer vers le port de Lampedusa, Cédric Herrou et les militants qui apportent aux migrants aide et assistance, celles et ceux qui réquisitionnent des logements vides pour y loger là encore des migrants ou des mineurs isolés, des antifascistes qui se mobilisent pour empêcher un rassemblement d’extrême droite ou la signature d’un auteur réactionnaire… En un sens, les actes des lanceurs d’alerte qui publient des documents en ligne ressortissent à la même catégorie puisque l’on peut assimiler ces pratiques à du sabotage : perturber le fonctionnement d’une institution de l’intérieur de l’institution. C’est probablement en France l’association 269 Libération animale, peut-être l’un des groupes les plus innovants politiquement actuellement, qui en fait l’usage le plus beau et le plus conséquent : au lieu de se contenter de faire des vidéos d’abattoirs, dont l’effet se limite souvent au fait de distribuer des peines aux ouvriers qui y travaillent, ses membres libèrent des animaux sur le point d’être exécutés dans des abattoirs puis les installent et les laissent vivre dans des sanctuaires, sorte d’utopie pratique réalisée, dont sont absentes les logiques de l’exploitation animale […]. Lorsque le Black Panther Party organisa en 1967 des patrouilles armées pour policer la police et veiller à ce qu’elle respecte la Loi et la constitution, et la menaçait d’intervenir dans le cas contraire, puis lorsqu’il mit en place des programmes de santé, d’éducation, et de distribution alimentaire dans les quartiers noirs pour remplacer le gouvernement défaillant, c’est aussi de l’action directe qu’il développa. (p. 43-44)

THERMOGRAPHY Misinformation abounds as to the true nature of breast cancer and what causes it. With so much public focus on breast cancer awareness, very little attention is given to breast health, which we know is governed by things like clean eating, routine detoxification, energy balance, and stress reduction, among other things. These other things include not blasting radiation at the breasts in the form of mammograms, which only exacerbate breast cancer risk. Dr. Martin Bales, L.Ac., D.A.O.M., a licensed acupuncturist and certified thermologist at the Center for New Medicine in Irvine, California, has for years been administering one of the best-known alternatives to mammograms: thermograms. As its name suggests, thermography utilizes the power of infrared heat—hence the root word “therm”—to detect physiological abnormalities indicative of a possible breast cancer diagnosis. Dr. Bales’s father first pioneered the technology in the late 1970s with the development of the world’s first all-digital infrared camera, which was used for missile detection purposes during wartime. Its capacity to track the heat signature of missiles was applied to the field of medicine in the 1980s, which eventually gave way to thermographic medical devices. Dr. Bales opined during a recent interview: “In the early eighties, a group of doctors approached my father and said, ‘You know, we’ve heard the body—obviously with its (blood) circulation—we can diagnose a lot of diseases by seeing where there’s hot spots and where there’s cold.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll make a medical version for you.’” And the rest is history: thermography machines that identify hot spots in the breasts later hit the market, and select doctors and clinics offer it as a safe, side effect–free alternative to mammograms. “The most promising aspect of thermography is its ability to spot anomalies years before mammography,” says women’s health expert Christiane Northrup, M.D., about the merits of thermography. “With thermography as your regular screening tool, it’s likely that you would have the opportunity to make adjustments to your diet, beliefs, and lifestyle to transform your cells before they became cancerous. Talk about true prevention.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.25

If a substantive chance hypothesis necessarily negates or nullifies explanations involving physical-chemical necessity and design, then the presence of a pattern necessarily negates chance.

Many historians of science have noted that Greek ideas about nature tended to induce a sterile armchair philosophizing unconstrained by actual observations.

Although the Greek philosophers thought that nature reflected an underlying order, they nevertheless believed that this order issued not from a designing mind, but from an underlying and self-evident logical principle. For this reason, many assumed that they could deduce how nature ought to behave from first principles without actually observing nature. In astronomy, for example, the Greeks (Aristotle and Ptolemy) assumed that planets must move in circular orbits. Why? Because according to the Greek cosmology, the planets moved in the “quintessential” realm of the crystalline spheres, a heavenly realm in which only perfection was possible. Since, they deduced, the most perfect form of motion was circular, the planets must move in circular orbits. What could be more logical?

If intelligent design turned out to be the only known or adequate cause of the origin of specified information, then the past action of a designing intelligence could be established on the basis of the strongest and most logically compelling form of historical inference—an inference from the effect in question (specified information) to a single necessary cause of that effect (intelligent activity).