“We have always underestimated the cell”

Three quotations on the living cell, selected from some of my notes:

The first is from Michael Denton:

It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that has ever existed on Earth, from a giant redwood to a human brain, can construct all its own components in a matter of minutes and . . . is of the order of several thousand million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man.[1]

Even a lowly single-celled organism is almost unfathomably complex, a kind of high-tech factory.  Its features include:

artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction . . .  [and] a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.[2]

And here’s one from Bruce Alberts, at that time the president of the National Academy of Sciences:

We have always underestimated the cell. . . .  The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. . . .  Why do we call [them] machines?  Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.[3]

[1] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 338.

[2] Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 329.

[3] Bruce Alberts, “The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines,” Cell 92 (8 February 1998).

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I’ve long suspected this:

“Bad News for the Highly Intelligent: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests”

However, I’m not absolutely certain that Mensa is a representative group.  I know lots and lots of highly intelligent people, and there may be some members of Mensa among them.  If so, though, I’m unaware of it.

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And here’s a potentially useful bit of science news:

“The brains of children with a better physical fitness possess a greater volume of gray matter”

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Everything you’ll ever need to know is within you; the secrets of the universe are imprinted on the cells of your body.  (Dan Millman)

Posted from Park City, Utah