What Darwin did not know

“Reflect on whether nanomachines produced for specific purposes could arise by chance when they depend upon detailed information both for their making and their function.”

That’s the request from Kjell J. Tveter, a Norwegian professor emeritus of surgery and urology, after watching the Discovery Institute’s short animation on kinesins, which move cargo within cells from one place to another. You should take a few minutes to watch it also:

We need kinesins because small molecules within cells can diffuse to wherever needed, but large molecules, vesicles, and mitochondria are too large to diffuse, so motor proteins carry them. As Tveter writes, a kinesin “must receive detailed information telling it where to go to pick up cargo, and where to deliver it—and in some miraculous way it is able to do exactly that. If the cargo is heavy, two such intracellular workers may join efforts and help each other, an activity demanding intelligent communication.”

Wow. Darwin observed well what he could see on the Galapagos and elsewhere, but he had no idea of the nanomachines operating within us. But we know how “fearfully and wonderfully made” we are, as Psalm 139 declares. Tveter says that “the mere existence of kinesin is convincing evidence of intelligent causation of life’s processes.”