Page 56 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism

Once Upon a Time
There Was Darwinism

cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell
or causing it to grow. Solar-powered machines capture the
energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines
allow current to flow through nerves. Manufacturing machines
build other molecular machines, as well as themselves. Cells swim
using machines, copy themselves with machinery, ingest food with
machinery. In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines con-
trol every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely cali-
brated, and the machinery of life enormously complex. 14

Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist and molecular biologist,
emphasizes this extraordinary complexity:
. . . On average, each cell in your body, at this second and every sec-
ond, is forming two thousand proteins. Every second! In every cell.
Continuously. And they do it so modestly. For all that activity, we
can't feel a bit of it. A protein is a string of several hundred amino
acids, and an amino acid is a molecule having twenty or so atoms.
Each cell, every cell in your body, is selecting right now approxi-
mately five hundred thousand amino acids, consisting of some ten
million atoms, organizing them into pre-selected strings, joining
them together, checking to be certain each string is folded into spe-
cific shapes, and then shipping each protein off to a site, some in-
side the cell, some outside, sites that somehow have signaled a need
for these specific proteins. Every second. Every cell. Your body, and
mine too, is a living wonder. 15
As Paul Davies wrote, to claim that this extraordinarily com-
plex system is a product of chance or natural laws is like asserting
that a house could be built by blowing up bricks with dyna-
mite. It is for these reasons that the complexity of life dis-

arms Darwinists. Behe says that none of their
scientific publications gives any evolutionist ex-

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