Page 30 - The Miracle in the Cell Membrane
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The Mir a cle in the Cell Mem brane
since the 18th cen tu ry, to be mis tak en. He also main tains
that the claim that the cell mem brane func tions sole ly as a
result of nat u ral laws—which is an abso lute dogma of
mate ri al ist sci ence—is incor rect.
Schroed er's expla na tion is that the mol e cu les that con -
sti tute life behave in a flawless man ner:
Every par ti cle, every being, from atom to human, appears to
have with in it a level of infor ma tion, of con scious wis dom. . . .
The puz zle I con front in this book is this: where does this arise?
There is no hint of it in the laws of nature that gov ern the inter -
ac tion among the basic par ti cles that com pose all mat ter. 4
One impor tant dis tinc tion is that although intel li gence
is observed in mat ter, it is impos si ble for that intel li gence
to stem from mat ter itself. You can see this most clear ly by
com par ing ani mate and inan i mate sub stan ces. While intel -
li gence is open ly dis played in liv ing mat ter—in a cell, for
instance—there is no such intel li gence in inan i mate mat -
ter. Yet both pro teins that con sti tute the cell and the same
mol e cu les that con sti tute the stones along the road con sist
of the same kinds of atoms, assem bled togeth er. Their
mate ri als are fun da men tal ly the same. Yet while we
observe no intel li gent action in the mol e cu les in the stone,
aston ish ing intel li gence can be seen in those of the cell. (In
addi tion, inan i mate sub stan ces in nature have never been
observed to devel op into liv ing organ isms, although this is
the basic claim of the the o ry of evo lu tion.)
Ger ald Schroed er draws atten tion to this and empha siz -
es how intel li gence appears in the mol e cu les in organ isms:
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