SCIENTISTS SPEAK
ABOUT THE CELL
Every plant and every animal is made up of billions of cells. Yet every one is a city full of complexity. Here are facts you need to know. Evolutionary theory is a myth. God created everything; the evidence clearly points to it. Nothing else can explain the mountain of evidence. This is science vs. evolution—a Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, brought to you by Creation Science Facts.
CONTENTS: Scientists Speak about the Cell
Overconfidence in Evolution the Problem: Get rid of that fairy tale, and we will begin to deal correctly from effect to cause
Too Much Complexity in Just One Cell: It is bigger than New York City!
Cells Only Reproduce after Their Kind: They obey the law of Genesis 1
Evolutionary Theories Are Ridiculous: They do not explain the facts
Each Cell Is Full of Complicated Parts: We still do not understand its full complexity
All its Parts Had to Begin Operating at the Same Time: Gradual changeover could not succeed
Evolutionary Theory Offers No Solutions: We must look elsewhere for answers
This material is excerpted from the book, DNA
AND CELLS.
An asterisk ( * ) by a name indicates
that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations
in the books this Encyclopedia
is based on, only 164 statements are by creationists.
You will have a better understanding of the following
statements by scientists if you will also read the web page,
DNA and Cells.
OVERCONFIDENCE IN EVOLUTION THE PROBLEM
The underlying problem is confidence in evolutionary theory. It greatly retards scientific advance.
"Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses and extrapolations that the theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs."—*Pierre-Paul de Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms (1977), p. 8.
"To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all."—*H. Lipson, "A Physicist Looks at Evolution," Physics Bulletin 31 (1980), p. 138.
"The evolution theory can by no means be regarded as an innocuous natural philosophy. It is a serious obstruction to biological research. It obstructs—as has been repeatedly shown—the attainment of consistent results, even from uniform experimental material. For everything must ultimately be forced to fit this theory. An exact biology cannot, therefore, be built up."—*H. Neilsson, Sythetische Artbildng, 1954, p. 11.
TOO MUCH COMPLEXITY IN JUST ONE CELL
Just one cell is bigger than New York City!
"The cell is as complicated as New York City."—*Look, January 16, 1962, p. 46.
"A bacterium is far more complex than any inanimate system known to man. There is not a laboratory in the world which can compete with the biochemical activity of the smallest living organism."—Sir James Gray, chapter in Science Today (1961), p. 21 [professor of Zoology, Cambridge University].
"Now we know that the cell itself is far more complex than we had imagined. It includes thousands of functioning enzymes, each one of them a complex machine itself. Furthermore, each enzyme comes into being in response to a gene, a strand of DNA. The information content of the gene—its complexity—must be as great as that of the enzyme it controls." —*Frank B. Salisbury, "Doubts about the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," in American Biology Teacher, September 1971, pp. 336-338.
"A living cell is a marvel of detailed and complex architecture. Seen through a microscope there is an appearance of almost frantic activity. On a deeper level it is known that molecules are being synthesized at an enormous rate. Almost any enzyme catalyzes the synthesis of more than 100 other molecules per second. In ten minutes, a sizeable fraction of total mass of a metabolizing bacterial cell has been synthesized. The information content of a simple cell had been estimated as around 1012 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica."—*Carl Sagan, "Life" in Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia (1974 ed.), pp. 893-894.
"Each of those 100 trillion cells functions like a walled city. Power plants generate the cell's energy. Factories produce proteins, vital units of chemical commerce. Complex transportation systems guide specific chemicals from point to point within the cell and beyond. Sentries at the barricades control the export and import markets, and monitor the outside world for signs of danger. Disciplined biological armies stand ready to grapple with invaders. A centralized genetic government maintains order."—Peter Gwynne, *Sharon Begley, and *Mary Hager, "The Secrets of the Human Cell," in Newsweek, August 20, 1979, p. 48.
CELLS ONLY REPRODUCE AFTER THEIR KIND
Cells consistently reproduce "after their kind"—the law of Genesis 1 [Genesis 1:12, 21, 24, etc.].
"The cells which form a carrot or form the liver of a mouse consistently retain their respective tissue and organism identities after countless cycles of reproduction."—*Phillip C. Hanawalt, "Simple Inorganic Molecules to Complex Free-living Cells" in Molecules to Living Cells (1980), p. 3.
"All life . . reproduces with incredible fidelity."—*Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (1981), p. 87.
"So perfect is the original one-cell form of life, and so potent both for body building, for activating nerves and muscles, and for procreation, that the cell has never altered its basic size or nature from the beginning of life even to this day."—*Rutherford Platt, The River of Life (1956), p. 100.
EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES ARE RIDICULOUS
They do not explain the facts.
The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."—*Fred Hoyle, "The Big Bang in Astronomy," in New Scientist (1981) Vol. 9, pp. 521, 527.
"I think it is fair to say that all the facile speculations and discussions published during the last 10-15 years explaining the mode of origin of life have been shown to be far too simple-minded and to bear very little weight. The problem in fact seems as far from solution as it ever was.
"The origin of even the simplest cell poses a problem hardly less difficult. The most elementary type of cell constitutes a `mechanism' unimaginably more complex than any machine yet thought up, let alone constructed, by man. There is no real clue as to the way in which any of these riddles were solved, so it is open to anyone to espouse any theory which he finds helpful."—*W. Thorpe, "Reductionism in Biology," in Studies in the Philosophy of Biology (1974), pp. 116-117.
"To grasp in detail the physio-chemical organization of the simplest cell is far beyond our capacity."—*Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957), p. 206 [Quoting German biologist *Von Bertalanffy].
"One does occasionally observe, however, a tendency for the beginning zoological textbook to take the unwary reader by a hop, skip, and jump from the little steaming pond or the beneficent chemical crucible of the sea, into the lower world of life with such sureness and rapidity that it is easy to assume that there is no mystery about this matter at all, or, if there is, that it is a very little one.
"This attitude has indeed been sharply criticized by the distinguished British biologist, Woodger, who remarked some years ago: `Unstable organic compounds and chlorophyll corpuscles do not persist or come into existence in nature on their own account at the present day, and consequently it is necessary to postulate that conditions were once such that this did happen although, and in spite of the fact that, our knowledge of nature does not give us any warrant for making such a supposition . . It is simple dogmatism—asserting that what you want to believe did in fact happen.' "—*Loren Eisley, the Immense Journey (1957), pp. 199-200.
EACH CELL IS FULL OF COMPLICATED PARTS
We still do not understand the nature and complexity of these interrelated parts.
"Life itself is incredible, starting with every cell of every organ of every organism that Sir Arthur has investigated. `Every organism,' wrote nineteenth-century German philosopher, Schoepenhauer, using words with which modern biologists will concur, `is organic through and through in all its parts, and nowhere are these, not even in their smallest particles, mere aggregates of inorganic matter.' A cell may contain 100,000 million atoms and they are atoms in specific order."—*Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), pp. 26-27.
"Formerly, it was thought that a cell was composed of nucleus and a few other parts in a `sea' of cytoplasms, with large spaces in the cell unoccupied. Now it is known that a cell literally `swarms,' that is, it's packed full of important functioning units necessary to the life of the cell and the body containing it. The theory of evolution assumes life developed from a `simple' cell—but science today demonstrates that there is no such thing as a simple cell."—Howard Peth, Blind Faith (1990), p. 77.
"To grasp in detail the physico-chemical organization of the simplest cell is far beyond our capacity."—*Von Bertalanffy, quoted in *Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957), p. 206.
"A bacterium is far more complex than any inanimate system known to man. There is not a laboratory in the world which can compete with the biochemical activity of the smallest living organism."—*Sir James Gray, "The Science of Life," chapter in Science Today (1961), p. 21.
"The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle."—*Michael Denton, Evolution: Theory In Crisis (1985), p. 264.
ALL ITS PARTS HAD TO BEGIN OPERATING AT THE SAME TIME
Gradual changeover could not succeed.
"It is as though everything must happen at once: The entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless."—*F. Salisbury, "Doubts about the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," in American Biology Teacher (1971), Vol. 33, pp. 335-336.
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OFFERS NO SOLUTIONS
We must look elsewhere for answers.
"The events that gave rise to that first primordial cell are totally unknown, matters for guesswork and a standing challenge to scientific imagination."—*Lewis Thomas, Forward, in *Robert M. Pool (Ed.), Incredible Machine (1986), p. 7.
"I am not satisfied that Darwin proved his point or that his influence in scientific and public thinking has been beneficial . . the success of Darwinism was accomplished by a decline in scientific integrity."—*W.R. Thompson, Introduction to *Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species.
"This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories Nature presents to us, is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of the Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion."—*W.R. Thompson, "Introduction," to Everyman's Library issue of *Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
To the next topic in this series: GENETICS CLASS DISCUSSION. A student explains some facts to his university professor.