I’ve gotten a little behind in my blogging, and one reason is the birth of my first grandchild, a girl, on January 28. I was able to see her at the hospital the day she was born, and hold her when she was six days old. It is another level of experience to hold a grandchild in your arms.
But, being me, I can’t help but also analyze it as a miracle of molecular biology. Like all of us, my granddaughter started off as a single cell. I don’t know how many cells are in her body now, but likely many trillions. Estimates vary, but the consensus seems to be that an adult human has about 30 trillion cells. That’s 30,000,000,000,000 cells; or about 100,000 cells for every person in the United States. Her trillions of cells are not identical, they are quite varied, and they are quite interconnected.
One of the many pleasures I’ve had in my journey has been interacting with people at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. I would encourage you to support them; they do a superb job uncovering design in biology and fighting Darwinist nonsense. Once I was able to meet with Ann Gauger, who helped me with my book. Ann is a research scientist who “uses molecular genetics and genomic engineering to study the origin, organization and operation of metabolic pathways.” So she’s very smart, and has done a lot of research into how biological systems are created. Ann told me that they’re finding amazing design in the architecture of how a single cell develops into a member of a particular species. It’s not just DNA coding; rather each species somehow has, built into the design of that first embryo, mechanisms for creating a member of that species. Ann told me that they’ve found that if you tinker just a little with what’s going on, the organism dies. So you have quite different cellular architectures producing different species, and they couldn’t have grown apart in the manner predicted by Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution, because any minor change would doom the organism.
A reader pointed me to a related item in the Encyclopedia Britannica:
During its development the nervous system undergoes remarkable changes to attain its complex organization. In order to produce the estimated 1 trillion neurons present in the mature brain, an average of 2.5 million neurons must be generated per minute during the entire prenatal life. This includes the formation of neuronal circuits comprising 100 trillion synapses, as each potential neuron is ultimately connected with either a selected set of other neurons or specific targets such as sensory endings. Moreover, synaptic connections with other neurons are made at precise locations on the cell membranes of target neurons. The totality of these events is not thought to be the exclusive product of the genetic code, for there are simply not enough genes to account for such complexity.
So each minute, for all of her nine month gestation, an average of 2.5 million neurons were generated in my granddaughter’s brain. This incredible feat is accomplished in part by architecture and design outside of our genes.
Birth is a miracle on many levels.
Thanks for reading.