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Here is How the Cytoskeleton Evolved

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Though illustrations of the cell often depict it as a bag full of various organelles and folded membranes, this fundamental unit of life is actually organized upon a highly-structured three-dimensional truss structure known as the cytoskeleton. Until the early 1990s the cytoskeleton had been observed only in the more complex eukaryotic cells. But a series of detailed then emerged indicating that the other two domains of life (bacteria and archaea) also have cytoskeletons. The wikipedia entry gives a good introduction to this subject:  Read more

Comments
But be careful. It's sorta like drugs. They make you feel oh so good for a while, but pretty soon you depend on them and you can't stop using them. Same as what happens here. ;-) -QQuerius
September 4, 2014
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#16 Querius I kind of like that defense approach you described so well. ;-)Dionisio
September 4, 2014
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Querius #12: Yes you are absolutely right! I am not overly optimistic but at least they are postulating something new rather than the tired mantra of neuroscientists and strong AI proponents that the mind is just a form of computation, an idea that has been thoroughly refuted IMO by the works of Gödel and Turing and the latter day application by Penrose et al.aqeels
September 4, 2014
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Querius: Are you giving private lessons to them? :) I hope they pay well (you know, all the funds for research...)gpuccio
September 3, 2014
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Dionisio@14, Heh, that's actually a great all around defense. Any time someone gets cornered by logic or experimental data, they just insist that you just don't understand some irrelevant nuance that would supposedly change everything. For example You obviously don't understand the issue here. If you knew anything about the effect of space quantization on the bond angles in ATP cycle, you would understand why sea jellies must have been evolving internally while their morpology was unchanged. Easy. :P Then, if anyone challenges you as in That's one of the stupidest things I've every heard. Where would the nonuniform magnetic field come from? You would reply I have absolutely no idea what on earth you're talking about. What are you using as your definition of nonuniform? And then when they explain it---regardless of what they write, you criticize their definition with lots of ad hominems. Obfuscatory obscurationism, my little chickadee. ;-) -QQuerius
September 3, 2014
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OT: Two Flagella Are Better than One - September 3, 2014 Excerpt: The assembly instructions,, are even more irreducibly complex than the motor itself. Parts are arriving on time and moving into place in a programmed sequence, with feedback to the nucleus affecting how many parts are to be manufactured. Dr. Jonathan Wells added, "What we see is irreducible complexity all the way down." Twelve years of closer looks at these astonishing machines have only amplified those conclusions. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/09/two_flagella_ar089611.htmlbornagain77
September 3, 2014
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#3 Querius
Seems like a problem for evolution
Nope, that's not a problem for 'n-D e' The problem is ours, because we don't understand it. ;-)Dionisio
September 3, 2014
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Mung: "ok gpuccio, get busy calculating the dFSCI! " Easy! Alpha tubulin is 451 AAs long in humans. Aligned to the form in fungi, it shows 80-90% identities, If we go "down" to amoebae, the identities a little less (60.80%). Let's say at least 300 conserved aminoacids in eukaryotes, that means at least 1300 bits of dFSCI, probably more about 1500 - 2000 if we consider all AA positions with the Durston method. For a protein of "only 451 AAs, it's practically a record. Actin shows similar values. These are proteins for which design can be inferred with absolute safety!gpuccio
September 3, 2014
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Great links and comments as usual, bornagain77. Thank you. aqeels, I watched about half the Dr. Hameroff interview. I found parts of it were interesting and a lot was speculative. He starts out by wondering how the brain generates consciousness. This excludes any possibility that the brain merely expresses consciousness, which cannot be excluded a priori as Hameroff has done. After criticizing the position that a really big and fast computer has the potential of becoming conscious, he goes down the rabbit hole to postulate some even more complex interaction between microtubules and QM as the source of consciousness. Then he gets philosophical. Yes, I do think Hameroff is on the right track with studying how anesthesia interacts with the microtubules in brain cells to shut off consciousness. But I'd be cautious about attributing consciousness to the microtubules themselves, just as unplugging a computer from a wall socket might make a desktop computer go dark, but understanding the plug won't do much for understanding how a computer works. -QQuerius
September 2, 2014
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"Abiogenesis has nothing to do with the theory of evolution so we don't need to discuss it. However, given the success of NDT at explaining everything else sans designer, there is every reason to believe that a naturalistic explanation of the OOL is as good as a done deal. Don't give us another "god of the gaps" argument. It's only a minor speed bump on the path to complete personal autonomy." -- (anonymous regurgitating plurality)
But I say, which came first? The chicken or the cytoskeleton?leodp
September 2, 2014
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“It is yet another case of complexity pushed farther and farther back in history, to the era of early evolution where the supposed evolution of such complexity is hidden in evolutionary gaps.”
Soon the ratio of time of evolution divided by the time of stasis will be so small it will approach the 6 day to 6,000 year ratio, where of course creationists have been sitting all this time from the beginning. But even that ratio won't keep the evolutionists from hijacking the creation narrative and twist it into something more suitable to their liking.awstar
September 2, 2014
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Thank you, Vel. Mind you I prefer the phonetic spelling of critters ursine.Axel
September 2, 2014
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axel, to quote Ben Hogan on the Golden Barr’s golf.. Bobby Jones on the Golden Bear's style of golf.velikovskys
September 2, 2014
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Turns out that microtubules have very interesting quantum properties that could prove key to our understanding of consciousness itself. See video link: - Stuart Hameroff on Singularity 1 on 1: Consciousness is More than Computation! aqeels
September 2, 2014
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“Time is in fact the hero of the plot. Given so much time the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: Time itself performs the miracles.” - George Wald When I read this, I thought it was a hilariously vicious, satirical barb on abiogenesis. It might have been written by Mung. Instead, Wald seems to be satirising his own perspective on it. I wonder if there is anything to match it in the whole of the annals of atheist scientism. The whole thread reads very comically from start to finish - omitting the body of the text of Cornelius' original article, written, as ever, in a language with which I am not familiar - to quote Ben Hogan on the Golden Barr's golf.. (I tend to scan technical articles, usually too quickly, suspecting it will be futile, and I'm usually right, of course. Though more so in relation to biology than the physics, where the extrapolation from the maths is already performed.)Axel
September 2, 2014
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Supplemental notes: That consciousness did not ‘emerge’ from the entropic forces of the universe is perhaps most easily demonstrated by the ‘Quantum Zeno effect:
Quantum Zeno effect Excerpt: The quantum Zeno effect is,,, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect “It has been experimentally confirmed,, that unstable particles will not decay, or will decay less rapidly, if they are observed. Somehow, observation changes the quantum system. We’re talking pure observation, not interacting with the system in any way.” Douglas Ell - Counting to God - pg. 189 - 2014 - Douglas Ell graduated early from MIT, where he double majored in math and physics. He then obtained a masters in theoretical mathematics from the University of Maryland. After graduating from law school, magna cum laude, he became a prominent attorney.
i.e. Why in blue blazes should conscious observation put a freeze on entropic decay, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than entropy is? And seeing that entropy is VERY foundational to explaining events within space-time (and even space-time itself), I think the implications are fairly obvious that consciousness precedes the 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe! In closing, i is also interesting to note that Black Holes are the greatest source of entropic decay in the universe:
Two very different ‘eternities’ revealed by physics: Special Relativity, General Relativity, Heaven and Hell Excerpt: "Einstein's equation predicts that, as the astronaut reaches the singularity (of the black-hole), the tidal forces grow infinitely strong, and their chaotic oscillations become infinitely rapid. The astronaut dies and the atoms which his body is made become infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed-and then, at the moment when everything becomes infinite (the tidal strengths, the oscillation frequencies, the distortions, and the mixing), spacetime ceases to exist." Kip S. Thorne - "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" pg. 476 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_4cQ7MXq8bLkoFLYW0kq3Xq-Hkc3c7r-gTk0DYJQFSg/edit
It is also interesting to point out a subtle nuance on the Shroud of Turin. Namely that Gravity was overcome in the resurrection event of Christ:
A Quantum Hologram of Christ’s Resurrection? by Chuck Missler Excerpt: “You can read the science of the Shroud, such as total lack of gravity, lack of entropy (without gravitational collapse), no time, no space—it conforms to no known law of physics.” The phenomenon of the image brings us to a true event horizon, a moment when all of the laws of physics change drastically. Dame Piczek created a one-fourth size sculpture of the man in the Shroud. When viewed from the side, it appears as if the man is suspended in mid air (see graphic, below), indicating that the image defies previously accepted science. The phenomenon of the image brings us to a true event horizon, a moment when all of the laws of physics change drastically. http://www.khouse.org/articles/2008/847
Moreover, as would be expected if General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics/Special Relativity (QED) were truly unified in the resurrection of Christ from death, the image on the shroud is found to be formed by a quantum process. The image was not formed by a ‘classical’ process::
The absorbed energy in the Shroud body image formation appears as contributed by discrete values – Giovanni Fazio, Giuseppe Mandaglio – 2008 Excerpt: This result means that the optical density distribution,, can not be attributed at the absorbed energy described in the framework of the classical physics model. It is, in fact, necessary to hypothesize a absorption by discrete values of the energy where the ‘quantum’ is equal to the one necessary to yellow one fibril. http://cab.unime.it/journals/index.php/AAPP/article/view/C1A0802004/271
I consider the preceding ‘quantum’ nuance on the Shroud of Turin to be a subtle, but powerful, evidence substantiating Christ’s primary claim as to being our Savior from sin, death, and hell:
John 8:23-24 But he continued, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.
bornagain77
September 2, 2014
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As to the appeal to deep time:
"It is yet another case of complexity pushed farther and farther back in history, to the era of early evolution where the supposed evolution of such complexity is hidden in evolutionary gaps."
Evolutionists are notorious for appealling to deep time to work miracles. Nobel Laureate George Wald, when confronted with the impossibility of the naturalistic Origin Of Life, put it like this:
"Time is in fact the hero of the plot. Given so much time the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: Time itself performs the miracles."
But long periods of time, contrary to what materialists such as Wald imagine to be true, is not the hero, but the villian, of the plot. This is because the longer the period of time that has elapsed, the more likely entropic processes will drive a system towards equilibrium. Harold F. Blum, who is also a materialist, in criticism to Wald, put the problem with entropy like this:
"I think if I were rewriting this chapter [on the origin of life] completely, I should want to change the emphasis somewhat. I should want to play down still more the importance of the great amount of time available for highly improbable events to occur. One may take the view that the greater the time elapsed the greater should be the approach to equilibrium, the most probable state, and it seems that this ought to take precedence in our thinking over the idea that time provides the possibility for the occurrence of the highly improbable."
Entropy, simply cannot be easily separated from temporal time. In fact, many people claim that 'entropy explains time'
Shining Light on Dark Energy – October 21, 2012 Excerpt: It (Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,, Even gravity, Vedral argued, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy. ,,, The principles of thermodynamics are at their roots all to do with information theory. Information theory is simply an embodiment of how we interact with the universe —,,, http://crev.info/2012/10/shining-light-on-dark-energy/
Roger Penrose stated this in regards to the deep relationship between spacetime and entropy:
The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them? Roger Penrose Excerpt: “The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the “source” of the Second Law (Entropy).” http://www.pul.it/irafs/CD%20IRAFS%2702/texts/Penrose.pdf Roger Penrose – How Special Was The Big Bang? “But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space.” How special was the big bang? – Roger Penrose Excerpt: This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. (from the Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose, pp 339-345 – 1989)
But what is devastating for the atheist (or even for the Theistic Evolutionist) who wants ‘randomness’, (i.e. the entropic processes of the universe), to be the ultimate source for all creativity in the universe, is that the 'random' entropiuc events of the universe are now shown, scientifically, to be vastly more likely to destroy functional information within the cell rather than ever creating it or building it up’. Here are a few notes along that line:
“Is there a real connection between entropy in physics and the entropy of information? …. The equations of information theory and the second law are the same, suggesting that the idea of entropy is something fundamental…” Tom Siegfried, Dallas Morning News, 5/14/90 – Quotes attributed to Robert W. Lucky, Ex. Director of Research, AT&T, Bell Laboratories & John A. Wheeler, of Princeton & Univ. of TX, Austin in the article
And, after years of intense effort, a direct connection was finally made between entropy and the information inherent in a cell:
Demonic device converts information to energy – 2010 Excerpt: “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,” says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. “This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale,” says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform
,,having a empirically demonstrated direct connection between entropy of the universe and the information inherent within a cell is extremely problematic for Darwinists because of the following principle,,,
“Bertalanffy (1968) called the relation between irreversible thermodynamics and information theory one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in biology.” Charles J. Smith – Biosystems, Vol.1, p259. “Gain in entropy always means loss of information, and nothing more.” Gilbert Newton Lewis – preeminent Chemist of the first half of last century
and this 'principle of degradation' is confirmed empirically:
“The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain – Michael Behe – December 2010 Excerpt: In its most recent issue The Quarterly Review of Biology has published a review by myself of laboratory evolution experiments of microbes going back four decades.,,, The gist of the paper is that so far the overwhelming number of adaptive (that is, helpful) mutations seen in laboratory evolution experiments are either loss or modification of function. Of course we had already known that the great majority of mutations that have a visible effect on an organism are deleterious. Now, surprisingly, it seems that even the great majority of helpful mutations degrade the genome to a greater or lesser extent.,,, I dub it “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain. http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2010/12/the-first-rule-of-adaptive-evolution/
In fact entropy is deeply associated with death itself:
Entropy Explains Aging, Genetic Determinism Explains Longevity, and Undefined Terminology Explains Misunderstanding Both - 2007 Excerpt: There is a huge body of knowledge supporting the belief that age changes are characterized by increasing entropy, which results in the random loss of molecular fidelity, and accumulates to slowly overwhelm maintenance systems [1–4].,,, http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030220
Thus, Darwinists are found to be postulating that the ‘random’ entropic events of the universe, which are found to be consistently destroying information in the cell (and are deeply associated with aging and death), are instead what are creating the information in the cell (and are what created life). It is the equivalent in science of someone (in this case a ‘consensus of scientists’) claiming that Gravity makes things fall up instead of down. And that is not overstating the bizarre situation we find ourselves in in the least, since Gravity 'arises as an ‘entropic force’ from space-time. It is also very interesting to note that Ludwig Boltzmann, an atheist, when he linked entropy and probability, did not, as Max Planck, a Christian Theist, points out in the following link, think to look for a constant for entropy:
The Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann first linked entropy and probability in 1877. However, the equation as shown, involving a specific constant, was first written down by Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics in 1900. In his 1918 Nobel Prize lecture, Planck said: “This constant is often referred to as Boltzmann’s constant, although, to my knowledge, Boltzmann himself never introduced it – a peculiar state of affairs, which can be explained by the fact that Boltzmann, as appears from his occasional utterances, never gave thought to the possibility of carrying out an exact measurement of the constant.” http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/Boltzmann_equation.html
I hold that the primary reason why Boltzmann, an atheist, never thought to carry out, or even propose, a precise measurement for the constant on entropy is that he, as an atheist, had thought he had arrived at the ultimate ‘random’ explanation for how everything in the universe operates when he had link probability with entropy. i.e. In linking entropy with probability, Boltzmann, again an atheist, thought he had explained everything that happens in the universe to a ‘random’ chance basis. To him, as an atheist, I hold that it would simply be unfathomable for him to conceive that the ‘random chance’ (probabilistic) events of entropy in the universe should ever be constrained by a constant that would limit the effects of ‘random’ entropic events of the universe. Whereas on the contrary, to a Christian Theist such as Planck, it is expected that even these seemingly random entropic events of the universe should be bounded by a constant. In fact modern science was born out of such thinking:
‘Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true.’ Lewis, C.S., Miracles: a preliminary study, Collins, London, p. 110, 1947.
Verse and Music:
Romans 8:20-21 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. Shatter Me Featuring Lzzy Hale - Lindsey Stirling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49tpIMDy9BE
bornagain77
September 2, 2014
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Fascinating article. The cytoskeleton turns out to be as complex as any other organelle. Seems like a problem for evolution. I guess one would have to assume that life could exist without cell walls. -QQuerius
September 1, 2014
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ok gpuccio, get busy calculating the dFSCI! ;) This could be an interesting place to start looking for reasonable intermediate sequences.
Although the name implies the cytoskeleton to be stable, it is a dynamic structure, parts of which are constantly destroyed, renewed or newly constructed.
Looks like bad design to me.
Evolutionary explanations, such as this one, are the height of creative story-telling...
Nah. I've read much better stories. This is more like "fill in the blanks" story telling.Mung
September 1, 2014
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Does this mean that all three domains of life are all the same kind?Mung
September 1, 2014
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