Your Designed Body: Engineering Hurdles

Excerpt from Your Designed Body, by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD.

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence.  This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work?  Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times.  The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated.  To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells.  This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems.  Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules.  And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.  Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems.  Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things.  Presently it even lies beyond he reach of our brightest human designers to create them.  Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

Your Designed Body, pages 49-50.

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