Staggering Complexity
The adult human being, according to some estimates, has 100 trillion cells. A 100 trillion written out looks like this: 100,000,000,000,000.
Even that has little meaning! And, notice how small these cells are.
"The cells of living things are usually too small to be seen with the naked eye. The average cell is so tiny that a line of 250 of them, arranged end to end, would be only one inch long" (How Life Began, Irving Adler, p. 46).
End to end, these 100 trillion cells — small as they are — would stretch for over 6,300,000 miles. That's enough cells to stretch TWO HUNDRED TIMES around the earth — and have sufficient left over for several round trips between Los Angeles and London.
Some cells are as tiny as 0.004 millimeter! That means to get one inch you would need 6,250 cells — set end on end. Or you need 250 to make one millimeter.
The third dimension or thickness of the usual cell wall is about 0.0000075 millimeter. For those on the metric system, it would require over 133,000 cell walls stacked up to make ONE millimeter.
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Or it would take a stack of 3,333,000 cell walls to make ONE INCH. Yet, the cell wall itself is an amazing entity. It is so constructed that it can control what goes in and out on the molecular level.
A truly amazing accomplishment. But even more staggering is the relationship of cells and your heredity.
The Cell and You
"At the present moment there are about 2,750,000,000 (book written in 1959) human beings alive on the face of this earth. Allowing one sperm and one egg to each of them as being responsible both for their existence and their genetic heredity, we have a total of 5,500,000,000 germ cells involved, a number which could be contained in about two and a half quart milk bottles" (Human Heredity, Ashley Montagu, p. 28).
The author went on in his amazing analogy:
"The sperm cells would occupy the space of less than an aspirin tablet. In fact, the chromosomes, the actual bearers of the hereditary particles, the genes, within the cells of this huge number would occupy the space of LESS THAN HALF an aspirin tablet!"
Can your mind comprehend it?
Every characteristic of every human — at least from the father's side — fitting into a volume that could rest comfortably on the end of your finger.
From the two cells — the egg and the sperm — which combine into one, two cells will develop, then four, then eight, then sixteen. They will continue to multiply until the trillions upon trillions of cells that make up the adult are formed.
At birth, the average baby will weigh Two BILLION times his weight at fertilization. Adults will weigh FIFTY billion times their weight at conception!
And this all evolved? NONSENSE!
From a sperm and egg — which must be seen with a microscope — emerges a living organism that is perfect, complete and complex. Each organ is the right size, in the right place, carries out the right functions.
How do the right cells seem to organize themselves into tissues? Why are appropriate cells always available when interactions involving their development are scheduled to occur?
'Why do cells have different "life" spans? White blood cells live 13 days; red blood cells live 120 days; some epithelial cells live one and one-half days; nerve cells live 100 years. The latter life span is strangely fortunate, because nerve cells DO NOT REPLACE themselves!
What It Takes to Make a Cell
Everything on earth is composed of one or more of the 103 chemical elements.
Just a small part of these elements are fitted together to form the "elements of life."
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus are the principal atomic building blocks of both proteins — the basic structural material in man and animals — and nucleic acid, of which genetic material is composed.
Living things are composed of hundreds of thousands of varieties of protein.
"Protein comes in forms as various as silk, fingernails, skin, hormones, enzymes, peanuts and viruses. Gelatin, egg albumin, pepsin, casein and insulin are pure protein . . . some 50,000 DIFFERENT kinds of protein account for nearly half of the dry weight of the human body." (Viruses and the Nature of Life, Stanley and Valens, p. 156)
But amazingly, these proteins are all built up from sequences of only TWENTY amino acids. Here we have a few molecular units, which can be ingeniously combined to provide MULTIPLE THOUSANDS of different kinds of proteins.
A Formula for Milk
To get an inkling — and not much more — of how utterly complex proteins are, here is a comparison. Water is H20 or two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen.
But below is the formula for a "simple" protein founds in milk, casein:
C708 H1130 0224 N180 S4 P4. That means a molecule of "simple" casein has 708 atoms of carbon, 1130 atoms of hydrogen, 224 atoms of oxygen, 180 atoms of nitrogen, 4 atoms of sulfur and 4 atoms of phosphorus.
Deciphering the proper sequence and arrangement of the atoms is another story altogether.
These atoms are bound together into units called amino acids. It is the 20 amino acids that are grouped in sequences to form all the multitudes of proteins.
However, these components are completely standard forms for all life. Glycine, leucine, tyrosine, and all the rest can be obtained out of human protein, whale protein, bat protein, trout protein, snail protein, dandelion protein, or bacterial protein.
Tyrosine from one is identical to the tyrosine from all the others, and so on for the remaining amino acids.
But does this prove evolution? No! It proves life forms have standard forms of protein. If anything, this proves that a Master Molecular Biologist — the Creator God — used some basic protein molds in creating life.
Behind the Protein
These giant protein molecules are infinitesimally small but irritatingly complex. Ultracentrifuges, scanning electron microscopes, X-ray spectrometers, tracer materials, chromatography methods and all other attempts by chemists have only recently pried open a few of the yet secret atomic structures of proteins.
It wasn't until 1958 that F. Sanger received a Nobel Prize for working out the sequence of amino acids in the insulin protein. Its molecule contains only 51 amino acid units. An average sized molecule contains SIX HUNDRED amino acid units.
Hemoglobin is such an "average" protein.
"A single red blood cell contains about 280 MILLION molecules of hemoglobin. Each molecule has 64,500 times the weight of a hydrogen atom and is made up of about 10,000 atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphr, plus four atoms of iron, which are more important than the rest" ("The Hemoglobin Molecule," H.F. Perutz, Scientific American, pp. 64, 65, November, 1964).
The entire process is a marvel of engineering achievement on a sub-microscopic level.
But that's only half of the story.
Genes, Genesis and Evolution
How are proteins manufactured and brought into existence? After all, we begin from one cell, and must GROW.
The answer lies in the other half of the structure of life — the genes — made of nucleic acid.
In the human body, the first cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes — one set from the mother, the other from the father. Each chromosome is made up of a whole string of genes. These determine the sum total of characteristics and growth processes of a given human being or any organism.
A gene is a small part of a giant molecule, which is believed to consist mainly of a chemical substance called deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA for short. Chromosomes are made of DNA plus protein coats. This DNA is the blueprint that directs the manufacture of proteins.
"What is the size of a gene? It is ultra-microscopically small . . . Estimates of size range between 4 or 50 millimicrons in diameter — a millimicron is one millionth of a millimeter" (Human Heredity, Ashley Montagu, p. 32).
Based on the smaller size, it would take 500,000 of them to cover the period at the end of a sentence!
If one assigns to man 1250 genes in each chromosome of just his sex cells, "In a single mating the possible combinations between the twenty-three chromosomes of the male and those of the female are 8,388,608 or two raised to the twenty-third power, and the chance of any one such combination occurring more than once is one in approximately 70,000,000,000,000 or seventy trillion" (Human Heredity, Ashley Montagu, p. 33).
Yet, once again, it can miraculously — like some ultra computer — transmit and select the exact information so that the body grows and functions according to precise law.
Even though these proteins and nucleic acids possess awesome complexity — they do not constitute life of THEMSELVES! Rather, they are all part of a process of living. ALL the components of a cell or organism had to be put together and "started" simultaneously in order for life to be. When death ensues (which is the absence of life) — all these components fall apart with surprising speed, and disintegrate into dust.
But in spite of the obvious, scientists continue to seek for some "link" between the living and not living. One popular idea was that viruses constituted this much-sought-after KEY.