Cell response to electric field (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 26, 2013, 15:30 (4028 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Friday, April 26, 2013, 16:02


> dhw: My question, as ever, concerns how these organs were first formed ... i.e. INNOVATION. Cells combined in a new, meaningful, functional and INVENTIVE way, but we don't know how. Your own argument has been that they were preprogrammed to react automatically to environmental change, but unless your God kept intervening or they were preprogrammed right from the start to produce functioning organs that had never existed before, I'm arguing that there has to be an inventive intelligence at work within them. -Here is an 'inventive intelligence' hard at work and producing an innovation by altering the expession of a gene molecule. Who did the thinking here?-"To test their theory, the researchers investigated what would happen to fetal mouse brains if they interfered with Trnp1 expression using synthetic sequences of genetic material that silenced the gene, a technique called RNA interference. The tiny fetal mouse brains developed cortical folds, the authors report today in Cell. The "most exciting" part of the discovery was that "just by varying how much of this gene is expressed, we are able to have folds in the cortex," Borrell says."- http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/04/master-gene-makes-mouse-brain-lo.html?ref... can happen epigenetically by gene expression modification, no thinking by a cell required. All done at a molecular level.-Please demonstrate a thinking molecule. Shades of Kipling!-Here is an example of embryonic cell control at a molecular level. The molecule acts to control, no evidence of thinking. This scientist believes as I do that it is all under automatic molecular control:-"Movies of early development show that neural cells decide what fate to adopt while rapidly traveling from place to place, making it hard to see how the textbook model can be true. Megason and colleagues propose that instead of the location telling a cell what identity to adopt, the cell's identity is fixed first and then determines the location.
 
The work provides insight into how embryos manage to develop the same complex structures despite a wide range of possible environmental and genetic conditions.The molecular mechanism that governs the sorting of cells is not yet clear. One possibility is that as the cells assume their fates, they turn on different adhesion molecules that make them stick to one another in different ways.
 
"Once they have these differential affinities, they could self-assemble," said Megason.
 
Megason is delving deeper into the molecular biology to determine whether adhesion is directing self-assembly."-
 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-view-embryos-imaging-technique-cells.html#jCp