"The cover story of the March 9 Science News Vol 161:10, pp 152-154 is about ion channels, the complex gates that attract and channel electrically-charged atoms into the cell.....the complex proteins that make up the channels and describes how they function: the KcsA potassium channel, for instance, “can shuttle up to 100 million potassium ions across a cell membrane in a single second while keeping out similarly charged sodium ions, whose smaller size would seem to make the passage easier.”
The importance of ion channels is emphasized: “Literally every single thought or action involves these channels. After all, among their duties is regulation of the electrical excitability that nerve cells use to communicate and that muscles exploit to contract.”
Roderick MacKinnon and other researchers who first revealed their intricate structure were surprised that lowly bacteria had fully-formed ion channels:
The descriptions of these channels and their fast-acting voltage-regulated gates borders on awe at times. MacKinnon, though pleased at the possibility of medical advancements now that ion channels are becoming better understood, “admits that he’s motivated more by the thrill of understanding these remarkable proteins. ‘I just wonder how nature does things,’ he says. ‘How did nature make an electrical signal go from my brain to my toes so fast? The more you learn about what the ion channels have to do to make that signal, the more incredible it seems.’”
---Yes! Keep asking questions like that. Let the evidence speak for itself.
"There was something even more surprising. No one had previouslyreported voltage-gated ion channels in a microbe. Jellyfish were the simplest creatures known to possess such channels. It was generally thought that microbes, which lack muscles and nervous systems, don’t need the high-speed reactions that voltage-gated ion channels permit.
This changes the whole evolutionary picture of [ion] channels,” says Clapham. “It means that bacteria, the most primitive life forms, have what was thought to be a very specialized channel."
The descriptions of these channels and their fast-acting voltage-regulated gates borders on awe at times. MacKinnon, though pleased at the possibility of medical advancements now that ion channels are becoming better understood, “admits that he’s motivated more by the thrill of understanding these remarkable proteins. ‘I just wonder how nature does things,’ he says. ‘How did nature make an electrical signal go from my brain to my toes so fast? The more you learn about what the ion channels have to do to make that signal, the more incredible it seems.’”
---Yes! Keep asking questions like that. Let the evidence speak for itself.
The closer you look at the cell, the more amazing it becomes, and the more old-fashioned Darwinism looks totally inadequate to account for it.
What is strange are the forced references to Darwinian evolution and materialism, the near obsession with explaining how complex specified structures arose spontaneously.
If we just omitted those references, we would have Intelligent Design science right now.
This article is a good example. It shows what the potassium channel is, what it does, what it looks like, how it operates, what genes code for its formation, etc.–in other words, a description of its design.
It is even fair to call it beautiful, intricate, and exquisite.
---But the brief reference to the evolutionary history of these channels adds nothing to the story, other than to show what an awful predicament the evolutionists are in.
Design presupposes information, which could be assumed to be a fundamental entity of the universe alongside matter and energy."
CEH