A few years ago I followed parts of a YouTube course on virology by Professor Vincent Racaniello and was awestruck by one statistic on the first module.
| http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/cells/virus.html a bacteriophage is typically 100 nm long (300 atoms) one of thousands of highly efficient designs of virus |
If you could take all
the bacteriophages (a bacteriophage is a particular type of virus which destroys bacteria), and
lay them end to end, how far do you think the line would reach? The Moon, the
edge of the solar system, the nearest star? These distances are orders of magnitude too small. In
fact the line would be 200 million light years. This compares with about 2.5 million
to the nearest galaxy, Andromeda.
There are 10power30 (10 with 30 zeros) bacteriophage viruses
in the world’s water supplies. (I am not sure how he defines ‘water supply’ but
it doesn’t really matter in this context.)
Elsewhere it has been pointed out that the bacteriophages in soil, water, air and living organisms play a crucial role in maintaining the natural, life-friendly balance of bacteria in the ecosphere.
He also points out that there are believed to be 10power16 HIV viruses , of which only a tiny proportion have been discovered and it is almost certain that there will be an HIV virus resistant not only to every anti-viral drug we know about, but to any anti-viral drug that could conceivably be developed in the future. (If such an omniresistant virus mutated into a form that can be transmitted by droplet infection, like the Black Death there would be no stopping it. If you are an expert in this area and think I am wrong please tell me: I am only a layman and would gladly modify this post and be pleased to be wrong.)
He also points out that there are believed to be 10power16 HIV viruses , of which only a tiny proportion have been discovered and it is almost certain that there will be an HIV virus resistant not only to every anti-viral drug we know about, but to any anti-viral drug that could conceivably be developed in the future. (If such an omniresistant virus mutated into a form that can be transmitted by droplet infection, like the Black Death there would be no stopping it. If you are an expert in this area and think I am wrong please tell me: I am only a layman and would gladly modify this post and be pleased to be wrong.)
More extraordinary than the number of viruses is their
biodiversity, reckoned by him to be greater than that of the bacterial, plant
and animal kingdoms put together. There were, for example, some 10,000 species
of virus found by drilling into a frigid Antarctic lake trapped below a thick
layer of ice (Lake Limnopolar, 2009). Many of these were previously unknown to
science. No one knows the total number of species in the viral kingdom but they
appear to fall into seven classes, each class being divided into orders,
families, genus’s and species, as is the case with the other kingdoms.
A virion (a single
particle of a virus) is only a fraction of the size of a bacterium and has no
on board machinery for producing copies of itself. Neither is it able to propel
itself – unlike the bacterium, which is much larger in size. It is, however, a
complex and ultra efficiently designed molecular machine able to penetrate the
membrane of a bacterial cell and use the machinery inside to its own end, to
either the detriment or the benefit of the host cell. The internal structure of
the cell, with its ribosome, nucleus and proteins, is utilised to make mRNA
(messenger ribonucleic acid) which it needs to produce a replica of itself.
Having used the host cell’s machinery to produce a replica
of itself the virion then has to have itself ejected from the bacterium. This in
itself is a remarkable feat.
Virions
also have the capacity to reassemble themselves if broken down into their constituent
proteins, which means the proteins have been designed with a unique molecular arrangement
out of an astronomically high range of possibilities. Only this one geometry
allows the virus to spontaneously assemble itself under the right conditions.
It reminds me of the fine tuning of the physical constants of the universe to enable
biological life to form.
Discoveries made over the last decade or so affirm giant viruses many times the size of previously known ones. This is largely because the method of discovering new viruses relied on the assumption that they were too small to be trapped by a filter. It now transpires that there are giant viruses comparable in size and genetic complexity to bacteria. They also appear to manufacture DNA, not just RNA and there is every reason to suppose they are equally numerous. Some biologists are now proposing that totally new domains of life must have predated the oldest forms of microscopic life discovered to date. The complexity and richness of life 4 billion years ago, only shortly (in geological nuance) after the formation of the earth, is even greater than had been assumed and adds to the depth of the mystery of what lies behind such intelligent systems.
Discoveries made over the last decade or so affirm giant viruses many times the size of previously known ones. This is largely because the method of discovering new viruses relied on the assumption that they were too small to be trapped by a filter. It now transpires that there are giant viruses comparable in size and genetic complexity to bacteria. They also appear to manufacture DNA, not just RNA and there is every reason to suppose they are equally numerous. Some biologists are now proposing that totally new domains of life must have predated the oldest forms of microscopic life discovered to date. The complexity and richness of life 4 billion years ago, only shortly (in geological nuance) after the formation of the earth, is even greater than had been assumed and adds to the depth of the mystery of what lies behind such intelligent systems.
In describing biomolecular phenomena biologists are forced to use words like
think, decide, employ, ensure, exhibit, store, encode,
divide, assemble, manufacture, coordinate, orchestrate....
These all imply that intelligent willful decisions are
somehow involved and strike fear into the heart of the neo-Darwinist. Many biologists warns their students to steer clear of such words wherever possible
and when forced to use them to hold in mind the (metaphysical) belief that
there can be no intelligence because these molecules don’t have brains, as
though molecules having brains would be the only way they could purposefully
move and that intelligence could be involved in the processes in some way which is beyond present science, at least - in fact, I would suggest, epistemologically out of the realms of investigation, which is OK for scientists but not for followers of scientism, a religion commonly adhered to by neo Darwinists.
He no doubt fears that believers in God will invoke a direct
hands-on intervention by the Lord every time an unexplained phenomena or event is
encountered. The professor need have no such fear from those who, like me,
suspect that intelligence was built into God’s creation at the instant the
universe was conceived in the original quantum event, along with space, time,
energy, matter and the laws of physics. Mind could have been created as a fifth attribute of the universe.
This might help explain why there is so much order in the natural world, even where
brains are absent, although the laws of physics, mathematics and probability could well be enough. Moreover, since God is greater than the reality we live in I
can imagine mind serving as a timeless, spaceless agent by which God pervades the universe and interacts with humanity. Looking at the universe, noting its power, complexity and subtle order, it is not surprising that the eternal Creator can interact with every soul on the planet before and after being born into a body.
(The observed intelligently guided progressive evolution, with experimentation built in, right up to homo sapiens could, in my view, be envisaged as a something analogous to Michelangelo painting a masterpiece, but done by the Creator from outside of space-time. From our perspective, trapped in space-time, this looks like a progress of events in time and space.)
(The observed intelligently guided progressive evolution, with experimentation built in, right up to homo sapiens could, in my view, be envisaged as a something analogous to Michelangelo painting a masterpiece, but done by the Creator from outside of space-time. From our perspective, trapped in space-time, this looks like a progress of events in time and space.)
Once one accepts that the universe may have teleological
characteristics deliberately designed into it one can look for order in apparently random or unconnected
phenomena by constructing experimentally verifiable hypothesis. To reject faith in the underlying order and
interconnectedness of all things is to risk the very future of science as much as
would a belief in a god or gods of the gaps. Some scientists put their faith in Chance, the new god of the gaps, and this could plunge us into a new dark age. Lord have mercy.
see alsoIntelligence without brains
Natural technology: the bacterium
