Still working my way backward through Matt Chait’s excellent blog Beyond Evolution, I got to his post on “Intelligence.” Here he gives voice to a question that has bothered me for years. He says it better than I can, so here is an except:
Let’s look at the manufacture of enzymes, which takes place millions of times in the one hundred trillion cells of your body every day. Over three billion genes are folded over and over again inside the nucleus of each cell. The nucleus is surrounded by a membrane which protects it from anything harmful that might come floating through the cell’s cytoplasm. When a cell needs a certain enzyme produced, another enzyme moves to that exact location in the nuclear membrane that separates the needed piece of genetic code from the cytoplasm and this enzyme opens a hole in the membrane. Then, more enzymes separate the strand of DNA that contains the code from its partnered strand so that the needed code is pressed up against the opening in the membrane. Then another molecule, RNA, attaches to the exposed code and ‘copies’ it. More enzymes close the hole in the membrane and more enzymes help the DNA strand reattach to it’s partner strand. Then the RNA with the copied code travels through the cytoplasm to a ribosome molecule which ‘reads’ the code and manufactures the needed protein. This process goes on millions of times every day within your body. Oh, yes, and not to worry about mistakes made with all this reading and transcribing. There are other enzymes that ‘proofread’ and correct mistakes in all these processes. Currently some of these processes are considered ‘understood’ and some are considered ‘not yet understood’. By that is meant that many of the enzymes involved in the process have been identified and named and other enzymes have not yet been identified and named.
Let’s suppose that everything were ‘completely understood’ in those terms. Let’s suppose that we could specify every enzyme and every molecule that was used in all of these processes. Would we, then, completely understand how enzymes and proteins were manufactured? How does the cell know what enzyme it needs? I know when I need something to eat. I know when I need some sleep, but I am recognized as a modestly intelligent being. How does the cell know precisely what enzyme it needs out of thousands of possibilities if it has no intelligence? I could probably go to the Library of Congress and find a particular article I needed with the help of a librarian and a computer, because, once again, I am a human being with some intelligence and sophistication. Yet, how does that microscopic droplet of enzyme know exactly where to locate the needed genetic information in the nucleosome, which, by the way, contains more information than the Library of Congress?
This is the big question for me, yet I have not seen it addressed or even acknowledged in biology books and articles that I’ve read. It’s one thing to say that X enzyme does such-and-such, and Y enzyme does this-or-that, but how can these enzymes “know” what to do and when to do it? What signal is sent to activate the right enzyme at the right time, and who or what is sending the signal? How is this whole elaborate process coordinated? Who’s in charge?
Other than Matt Chait and, from a somewhat different perspective, Rupert Sheldrake, I have not found anyone who writes about this issue, yet it seems (to me) that it is the biggest issue of all.
At the end of the post Chait poses this devastating rebuttal to materialist reductionists:
How did Albert Einstein come up with the theory of relativity? He made one vertical line with three horizontal lines attached to it and that gave him the E. Then, he made two horizontal lines, one underneath the other, and that gave him the =. He followed this with two vertical lines attached two two slanted lines which yielded the M, one curved line which gave him the C and, for his coup de grace, he took a curved line and attached a horizontal line to the bottom of it, and he was done; E=MC2. See, now we completely understand the theory of relativity!