The Extracellular Space: Where the Rest of Life Takes Place
When it comes to the discussion of how life came into being, whether by intelligent design or by the unguided processes proposed by evolutionary biology, I have a pet peeve.
It’s that almost all of the discussion from both camps revolves around just molecular and cellular biology — DNA, RNA, genes and their regulatory networks (GRNs), proteins and their various shapes, sizes, and functions, the cell membrane and cytoskeleton, and all the other fascinating intricacies of the cell.
Don’t Get Me Wrong
When it comes to the dialogue about the causal hurdles that life must overcome, every component mentioned above is important. And to my mind, they all favor ID.
After all, as chemist James Tour wrote in his chapter in The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy, when considering what is known about the laws of chemistry, “we’re still clueless about the origin of life.” Biologist Douglas Axe, in his book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, tells us that “of the possible genes encoding protein chains 153 amino acids in length, only about one in a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion is expected to encode a chain that folds well enough to perform a biological function.”
Zooming Out
But what about multicellular organisms, like us? Isn’t there more to think about and explain than just molecular and cellular biology? Here’s how Steve Laufmann and I posed the problem in our book Your Designed Body.
Zooming out from a single cell, the human body as a whole is made up of around thirty trillion cells. It needs to solve all the same kinds of problems that a cell does, plus quite a few more. And it needs new ways to solve old problems, ways completely different from how the same problems were solved at the cellular level.
For example, a single-celled organism is like a microscopic island of life. The cell gets what it needs and gets rid of what it doesn’t need from its surrounding environment. In contrast, a large multi-cellular organism (like you) is more like a continent with a deep and dark interior. Most of the cells reside deep in the interior with no direct access to the body’s surrounding environment. For a multi-cellular organism, then, harvesting the raw materials its cells need and getting rid of toxic byproducts becomes a major logistical problem.
Several hundred such problems must be solved for a complex body to be alive. And many of the solutions to these basic problems generate new problems that must also be solved, or that constrain other solutions in critical ways. The result is that for a complex body to be alive, thousands of deeply interconnected problems must be solved, and many of them solved at all times, or life will fail.
The bottom line is that, as hard as it is for a cell to maintain life, it’s much harder for an organism with a complex body plan like yours.
Besides knowing what’s going on inside our cells (within the intracellular space), don’t we also need to consider what’s going on outside our cells (but within our body) — in the extracellular space? Where one-third of our body’s total water resides? Where the various biomolecules that provide the framework for structure and support to all the different tissues in our body are located? Where the precise chemistry allowing for tissue survival and proper nerve and muscle function must be present? And much, much more.
My Experience as a Physician
As a hospice physician, I can tell you that all this is a matter of “life and death.” It’s something that evolutionary biologists rarely mention. This may be, at best, because they’ve never considered or understood it, or at worst, because they can’t explain it and it undermines their theory.
Let me give you a practical example from what I see and do every day. That way, you can understand why adding what goes on inside the extracellular space as a causal hurdle for multicelluar life is important. Meet my patient Joe.
Joe had had several heart attacks and now his heart wasn’t pumping as well as it should. In fact, it was doing so at one-quarter its normal strength — meaning he had heart failure. Since his heart wasn’t pumping efficiently, it caused a reduction in the force of arterial blood flow which turned on certain hormone systems in his body. These systems were designed (yes — designed) to try to correct such a situation. Unfortunately, this caused Joe’s body to start holding on to excessive amounts of water.
Joe’s body’s inability to control how much water was in his extracellular space put him at risk of death. Fluid was taking up more and more space in his lungs, making it harder and harder to breathe. Since he kept going in and out of the hospital and his physicians could not solve his recurrent fluid overload problem, he was put on hospice. By the time I first saw him, Joe could barely move or even talk without becoming short of breath. Fortunately for Joe, I knew exactly what medication adjustments were needed to safely remove his excessive fluid. Within a few months, we were able to discharge him alive from our service.
The above case (and I’ve had dozens of them) clearly shows that what’s going on in the extracellular space matters. It matters so much that to not even talk about it, in the context of biological origins, is frankly unscientific.
It also shows that my pet peeve about the absence of this discussion in the origins debate is my own fault. So, please watch this space for articles in the future on the extracellular space and ID.
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