Darwin knew nothing of chromosomes, genes and DNA, or even the genetic principles being investigated by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel at the very same time he was writing his opus – with the result that the comparative ignorance of his evolutionary speculations put him on the level of a little child who squeezes a lump of modelling clay, pinches it a few times, then cries: “Look, mummy, I’ve made a doggy!”

The study of cells had begun with Robert Hooke (1635-1703) who used the newly available microscope to examine very thin slices of cork, and saw that it was composed of small segments that reminded him, for some reason, of the “cells” which monks occupied in monasteries. Hence the term we still use to today. His discoveries were published in 1665 in a book entitled “Micrographia”.

Later, in 1805, the German naturalist Lorenz Oken stated what came to be known as the cell theory: “All life comes from cells and is made of cells”, probably the most important generalization in biology.

However, the importance of the cell as the basic unit of living organisms, let alone detail of its structure, was not firmly established until1860, one year after Darwin’s book came out -- when Rudolph Virchow devised a Latin credo asserting that “All cells arise from cells”. In fact, it was not until 1882, some 23 years after “Origins”, that Flemming was able to give a detailed description of the nine stages of change involved in cell division and reproduction, the process of mitosis.

Chromosomes
The term “chromosome” was suggested by W. von Waldeyer, in 1888, to describe the threadlike structures that became visible in dividing cells when dyed with “chromatin”. By 1904, Theodor Boveri was able to count the numbers of chromosomes in the cell nuclei of several organisms, such as cats, wheat and tomatoes.

The removal of a chromosome, he found, caused offspring to be deformed in some way, leading him to conclude that Mendel’s units of heredity, now called genes, must reside on the chromosomes.

One year later, in 1905, ambitious Cambridge lecturer William Bateson proposed the term “genetics” to describe the rapidly expanding science of inheritance, basing it on the Greek word for “origins” [Ed: Wasn’t it Bateson, G-Man, who was so excited about Darwin’s theory that he once said in a letter to his sister “My brain boils with evolution!”? ]

The term “gene” itself was not coined until 1909 when the wise Wilhelm Johannsen suggested it as a tool to facilitate fruitful discussion of the mysterious and as-yet-unidentified units of inheritance that had been investigated by Mendel and other workers.

Cell Structure
The detail observable through an ordinary microscope, its “resolution”, is limited by the wavelength of the visible light used. This is because objects smaller than the wavelength of light will not disturb the waves passing over them enough to be detected -- in just the way a pencil held in the path of a wave on the sea would also have minimal effect on its path or shape as it moves on to hit the shore. As a result, the maximum resolution of an ordinary optical microscope is about x3000, which although very useful, has severe limitations in investigating the structure of plant and animals cells which have a diameter of about a thousandth of a millimetre.

The scanning electron microscope, however, invented in 1940, uses the extremely short waves associated with high-speed electrons as its “light”, and has a resolution of the order of x1,000,000+. Suddenly a whole new cellular world of unsuspected complexity was made visible, and could be conveniently projected onto the fluorescent screen of a TV monitor.

Another powerful, high-resolution research tool has been x-ray crystallography, which was originally developed for measuring the separation of layers of atoms in crystals by reflecting x-rays off them. [Ed: Aren’t x-rays the shortest waves you can get, except for gamma rays, G-Man?]

Micro-Manufacturing
It is well known that Darwin literally shuddered with fear when he contemplated the complexity of the human eye, knowing full well the futile inadequacy of his theory to account for its miraculous creation and design, as well as other miracles of nature that he was well aware of. [Ed: That probably explains why he suffered with severe psycho-somatic afflictions for many years. How astonishing it is, as he well knew, that the lens of the human eye is made thicker and thinner to focus on objects at different distances by a set of minute muscles that work without conscious effort.]

That said, the detail revealed by the electron microscope, and x-ray crystallography, would have surely given him apoplexy – revealing for the first time structural elements such as the nucleus, chromosomes, genes, DNA, RNA, chromatin, goigt bodies, Golgi complexes, microfilaments, mitochondria, plastids, chromatin, micro-tubes, ribosomes, cytoplasm, enzymes, glycogen granules, selectively permeable membranes (with their inner structure), lysosomes, micro-tubes, recticula, twisted strands, filaments, storage vesicles, secretory vesicles, etc., etc., etc., all vital parts of the incredible “micro manufacturing factories” we call cells, and all of which have their own internal molecular architecture. And all of which, Richard Dawkins still stoutly maintains, accidentally created themselves by the fortuitous combination of endless random DNA copying errors! [Ed: And Dawkins things that we are the loony ones, G-Man? ]

Mysteries of the Cell
In his book “The Chemistry of Life”, Steven Rose attempts to explain some of what is presently known about the workings of a cell -- the fact, for example, that the typical cell synthesises several thousand new protein molecules per hour, using incredibly complex chemical reactions involving catalytic molecules called enzymes.

Incredibly, even after commenting, a la Cuvier, that: “We have emphasised the integrity of the cell as a system, that each part needs all the others in order to survive”, Rose remains a confirmed evolutionist, and happy to join in speculations as to how “life” accidentally arose out of the mythical prehistoric pools of slime cocktail.

As is now taught in schools, the cell nucleus contains tiny strands called chromosomes which are in turn composed of strings of genes, made of varieties of DNA, which in turn supposedly control all the attributes of an organism. Because chromosomes consist of chains of molecular units, they are sometimes compared to strings of beads. However, in “diploid” organisms, such as humans, there are pairs of chromosomes, with the partner genes for the same trait positioned side by side, so that before reproduction takes place, each attribute of the offspring, such as eye colour or blood type, is potentially dictated by any of four genes, two in each parent. Such were the genetic principles investigated by Mendel.

Is Man a Monkey?
Despite the genetic complexity already discovered, there is much left to learn. Rose points out, for example, that although human DNA is virtually identical to that of chimpanzees, as far as we can tell, within two or three percent, humans not only look very different to chimps, but have vastly greater capabilities. Why this should be, he happily admits, saying: “We have no idea!”

To explain such mysteries, we need once again to fall back to the inside information provided by the Bible, which tells us that there is a “spirit” in man, and almost certainly in animals – a spirit which imparts “understanding” and which evidently differentiates man from monkey, cat from dog, and so on. Clearly, there is more to man than mere atoms and molecules, as some evolutionists are actually beginning to admit.

The Epigenome
The fact that the human genome is said to be 99 per cent identical with that of a chimp suggests there is something very important here that we do not understand. Evolution’s latest answer is to postulate the existence of even more miraculous complexity in the form of an “Epi-genome”, a meta genome that tells the peasant genes, the workers, what to do and when to do it – especially at those critical moments when stem cells need to turn into specialist cells and start creating muscle, or bone or skin, etc., and start fabricating organs such as the heart, stomach and lungs.

The protein materials produced by the worker genes, it seems, are like the paints on a palette, and the epi-genome is the artist who decides what to do with them -- how and where to apply the colours and textures on the canvas of creation. Taken one step further, however, might the epi-genome in turn be no more than a paint brush in the hands of Sheldrake’s morphic manager that we shall meet in a moment, the invisible, non-physical force this avowed evolutionist postulates as a necessary explanation of evolutions impossible antics?

Making the Impossible Possible?
Marvelling at the structure of the cell, in both plants and animals, Rose is moved to comment: “Even the simplest of present day organisms are highly complex, highly improbable molecular structures, whose chance of assembly from their elements would involve odds of such astronomical unlikelihood that we may regard it, for practical purposes, as impossible.” [Ed: I wonder if the said “IMPOSSIBLE!!!”, G-Man, or “Impos-s-s-sible!” ]

Not to be confused by the facts, however, Rose then asserts: “We must assume that these attributes evolved slowly over 4.5 billion years”. [Ed: It’s a matter of “faith” G-Man. ]

How Dey do Dat?
Avowed evolutionist Rupert Sheldrake has the refreshing scientific honesty to ask hard questions – wondering with the childlike curiosity of genius how, for example, the molecules that come together to form a finger or an eye, a cell or a leaf or a root, “know” what shape and internal structure they are supposed to create, and how to coordinate their activities to achieve it?

Such situations seem to bear some similarity to phenomena such as the way shoals of fish, flocks of birds and armies of ants or hives of bees coordinate their activities. At an even more basic level, Sheldrake asks how a moving object, such as bullet speeding through the air, “knows” it has to obey the laws of mechanics. A short sequence of several such simple “yes, but why?” questions soon take us to the frontiers of knowledge in any area and push any “expert” to the limits of his or her patience – and the realization that science really does not actually understand very much about the ultimate nature of time, matter, energy, electric charge, or space, let alone “life”.

Sheldrake’s solution to the mystery of morphology is to postulate the existence of an invisible “morphic field” which he compares to the one around a magnet that causes sprinkled iron filings to form interesting patterns. The suggestion that invisible “fields” shape the growth and development of plant and animal cells is in fact quite old, as he explains on his fascinating website.

Panspermia
Confronted by impossibility of “life” having created itself on earth, the great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle effectively passed the problem over to the little green men from Mars by speculating in his theory of “Panspermia” (everywhere-life) that the earth was somehow “seeded” with pre-formed, ready-made, off-the-shelf, so to speak, nucleic acid units delivered from outer space on comets. . [Ed: Domino’s deliver a lot of pre-formed DNA units, G-Man, but only in a five mile radius, so I don’t suppose they did it. ]

Supporters of Hoyle’s theory now claim to have found organic-looking forms of microbial proportions on meteorites. If confirmed, this finding could be easily accommodated by G-Theory which would suggest that massive amounts of organic material could have been blasted into space by the incredible cataclysms that not only destroyed the pre-Adamic earth, but may also have devastated the moon and other parts of the solar system. [Ed: On the other hand, G-Man, we don’t know what the other planets of the solar system were like before the catastrophic destructions that ended the world of the dinosaurs and wrecked the surface of the moon. ]

Panspermia speculates that living organisms exist throughout the universe. The more limited theory that life arrived on earth from somewhere else where it had accidentally evolved, possibly one location, is called “Exogenesis”.

The Vitalists
As microscope techniques improved, the question arose as to whether cells consisted merely of atoms and molecules, or whether there was a non-physical controlling mechanism at work, the principle of “vitalism”. Interestingly, as the scientific merry-go-round continues, the vitalism concept that was very firmly kicked into touch a century ago is now making a come-back as evolutionists such as Rupert Sheldrake admit that nature is just too complex to be explained in simply mechanical terms – and that some kind of invisible, non-physical “morphic” (shaping) field must be at work controlling and directing the operation of the genes and chromosomes in cells as they work to create the internal and external architecture of organisms.

As the techniques of chemistry became more sophisticated, chemists were able to move on from discovering that water, H2O, for example, is composed of simple molecules containing just three atoms, one of oxygen and two of hydrogen, and start to investigating the structure of molecules obtained from the organs of living things – whence the term “organic” chemistry. At first, they thought that the strange molecules obtained by distilling human urine, for example, or boiling masses of ants in water, were somehow magically different to those of non-organic compounds such as sodium chloride (common salt) or copper sulphate. [Ed: Did you know, G-Man, that the Greek word ‘atom’ means ‘cannot be cut up’? But as we now know, atoms can be split – so atoms are not really atoms? Am I right or am I right? In the same way, hard plastics are no longer “plastic”.]

Size Matters
The key difference between organic and inorganic molecules, it was found, lay simply in their size and the predominance of carbon atoms in the latter. Whereas a water molecule contains just 3 atoms, organic macro-molecules, such as starches or fats or DNA, can contain thousands of atoms, all strung together along spines of carbon atoms. [Ed: That’s why I like the term “chain molecule”, G-Man.]

A critical evolutionary event occurred in 1828 when chemist Friedrich Wohler, starting out with simple chemicals of non-organic origin, was able to synthesise molecules of urea, a compound which had previously only been derived from organic sources.

As a direct result, a major assumption was then made, a leap of erroneous understanding, reminiscent of that made by Darwin – namely that because an “organic” molecule could be synthesised from evidently non-living atoms of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, all derived from non-organic sources, then “life” itself, as possessed by cats and dogs and a lower level by cabbages, must be no more than a bunch of atoms cleverly combined together. As a result, evolutionists also assumed the vitalists had been put to flight once and for all.

Is it Really Only Atoms?
So it was that when James Watson and Francis Crick finally worked out the chemical structure of DNA, they claimed to have discovered the “secret of life”. It was Watson who later commented, in total ignorance of a spiritual dimension that: “In the last analysis, there are only atoms!” [Ed: Why are these guys so dogmatic, G-Man? Will they never learn? ]

Coming from the same place as Watson, many molecular biologists now define life simply as “the capacity of accurate self-replication”, as demonstrated by the mechanical self-replication of a DNA molecule . Despite his formidable knowledge of chemistry, and his stance as an evolutionist, Rose does actually admit that he cannot agree with that radical and simplistic claim – understanding intuitively, as a human being, that “there is more to life than replication”.

Some Things are Alive!
What, in fact, is the real difference between living and non-living things, Rose asks – and answers: “Clearly some things – dogs, flowers, yeast cell – are alive. Others – such as molecules of salt, urea, or amino acids – are not”. [Ed: Good lad, he’s making progress.]

Despite the rapid progress of science, which is claimed to have reduced chemistry to a mere technology with nothing left to discover, evolution still cannot create “life”, or any kind of organism, be it a fly or a worm, let alone a dog or a dinosaur, a man or a mouse, or even a blade of grass. There is clearly more to life and existence and mind and emotions than atoms and molecules.