Quirky Kinesin

Imagine walking out on your front porch to get the newspaper one morning and getting the shock of your life! After looking over at your neighbor Sam who is sitting and reading his own copy over a cup of coffee, you notice a robot carrying a package down the street.1

Astounded, you observe that after it drops the parcel off on someone’s doorstep and walks away, several more robots appear, marching along, performing the same task. After rubbing your eyes in disbelief, you “whisper-shout” to your friend, “Sam, where did these robots come from? Who do you think made them?”2

To which he glances at you over the top of his glasses with a slightly bored look and says, “I don’t think anyone made them. I think they made themselves.”3

A Realistic Parable?

Now, does this scenario have any correlation to a situation we could relate to in real life? Well, yes, it does. Our neighbor Sam is analogous to the materialistic worldview being taught today through the state-run education and media platforms throughout the West: the story of evolution presented as “science and fact.”

This materialistic ideology explains everything through a naturalistic lens—no matter how intricate, complex, or marvelously engineered something appears to be. The foregone conclusion always trotted out is that whatever is being discussed was somehow produced by nature—with no appeal to design allowed (i.e., everything “makes itself”).

The robots referred to in our story are represented by the incredible motor protein kinesin that is found inside the cells of all living things. And as amazing as it sounds, they are very much like tiny biological robots walking around inside all your cells at this very moment, and most of you likely never even knew this was happening before now.

Fantastic Voyage

To understand the world in which kinesin operates, imagine the scenario depicted in Isaac Asimov’s classic 1966 sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage. In it, a group of scientists were shrunk in a submarine and injected inside someone’s body to perform microsurgery on him before reverting to normal size.

Now of course, we haven’t been able to shrink ourselves yet, but advances in biochemistry have allowed us to take many fantastic voyages inside cells through the use of electron microscopes. And what we’ve discovered through using them is truly fantastic.

Electron microscopy is a technique for obtaining high resolution images of biological specimens by using a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. And what is discovered inside the simplest of living things is astounding indeed. As PhD geneticist Michael Denton described,

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is 20 kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. . . . What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design.

On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast spaceship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.4

Part of that bewildering complexity is our topic of conversation: kinesin.

Biological Robots?

Kinesin proteins aren’t living things; rather, they are a family of miniature motor proteins inside living things that transport cargo around inside cells and are remarkably humanoid in appearance.

Having two legs that allow them to walk along the roadways inside cells and two arms that allow them to carry packages full of important cargo, they are like the postal delivery persons—but on a mind-bogglingly microscopic scale.

At only seven-billionths of a meter long, they consist of, utilize, and synchronize with an incredibly complex array of micro-biotechnology that rivals the most sophisticated feats of engineering humans have ever achieved.

High-Tech Micromachines

There are many different types of kinesin and kinesin-related proteins, each with different specifications and functions that have been discovered in various organisms from yeast to humans. The following example is a very basic scientific description of what a typical kinesin does and why it does it.

Inside life forms, proteins and other needed parts must be delivered to specific places within the cell at precise times. “If the needed part is a protein, a manufacturing plant (called the ribosome) receives blueprints for the part from the nucleus (the information is stored in the nucleus on a strand of DNA, but the blueprint is sent in the form of an RNA copy of that section of DNA).”5

“This is a complex coordinated effort, as something must first access the creature’s DNA library, unzip it at the exact location needed for the specific information required (for whatever part is to be manufactured), create a duplicate of the information for the part and deliver it to the factory.”6

Afterward, “another organelle in the cell (called the Golgi apparatus) packages the needed part by wrapping it in a bag (called a vesicle) and imprints the ‘address’ where the part is to be delivered in the cell onto the outside of the vesicle ‘parcel.’ Then a kinesin is summoned.”7

“A typical kinesin has two ‘arms’ on one end (that hold onto the cargo [the vesicle]) and two ‘legs’ on the other end that walk along the microtubule). . . . It picks up the parcel and ‘walks’ along microtubule roadways in the cell and delivers the parcel where it is needed.”8

Now, if that sounded like a lot of technobabble to you, let’s use a more relatable scenario that although sophisticated, actually pales in comparison to what kinesin regularly does, so that we can better understand the level of complexity at which these micromachines interact and operate among the other systems inside cells.

All in a Day’s Work

Imagine a fellow named “Joe is working at his job one day when his machine breaks down. He identifies the broken part and makes a call from his cell phone to a local manufacturer requesting a new one, giving them the part number.”9

“The manufacturer agrees [takes the order] and records Joe’s address. The manufacturer has a list of all the part numbers on hand but not the schematic for them so they send an email to another company (that has a copy of all of the blueprints for every part needed in the industry) requesting the blueprint.”10

So “a person there makes a photocopy of the needed section and delivers it to the manufacturer. From the instructions in the blueprints, the factory then manufactures the part and puts it in a package marked with the postal address from its database. A courier is contacted.”11

After arriving at the factory and acquiring the package, the courier punches in the GPS coordinates and travels along the route plotted to deliver the package to the proper address so that Joe can get on with his day. Voilà! Mission accomplished!

Connecting the Dots

Now, “most would agree that the level of complexity just described is pretty impressive.”12 Both in the engineering and manufacturing prowess combined with the multitiered levels of coordinated communication and interaction that I just described in my analogy: not simply the technology, communications systems, manufacturing capability, and databases combining these integrated components but the specialized knowledge required at each step along the way—beginning with Joe performing the troubleshooting analysis of his broken machine all the way to the admin person’s insight about which area of the “meta-database” to access.13

Truly, such intricately synchronized problem solving would be considered close to peak level human sophistication. And of course in our example, “all of these steps were coordinated by intelligent people at every stage.”14

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Well, as impressive as that may have been, let’s understand that “the actual processes involving kinesin are far more impressive than what ‘Joe’ experienced above.”15 And all the programming involved was, according to advocates of the story of evolution, supposed to have been generated via random mechanistic processes over millions of years—all without any intelligence behind it.

However, just think about the implications we’ve gone over here. The fact that cells are somehow able to “know” when and where a specific part is needed inside of themselves requires an incredibly sophisticated diagnostic system. It also requires a database of all the parts that may be stored and the ability to access them at the appropriate times when the correct, specific communication is activated through the system.

And as discussed, that communication then must trigger the access of a blueprint for the needed part and the assembly and packaging of it, along with the recording of some type of “address” for the kinesin to access and utilize in order to travel to the correct destination (just as an address is useless to us without some sort of map or GPS system of the location).

However, the more we discover, the more mind-blowing it gets! Just the kinesin proteins themselves function with incredible efficiency.

Stronger, Faster, Smarter

A kinesin’s motor produces nearly 15 times more power than most man-made engines16 and is nearly twice as efficient as a gasoline engine. In addition, kinesin is extremely fast, moving at a rate of 100 steps per second.17 If we were to somehow scale up a kinesin to my height, it would move approximately 600 meters per second—over 2,000 km per hour! As Steven M. Block from the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University said,

Scaled up to our own dimensions, a motor with corresponding properties would travel at similar speeds and produce as much horsepower per unit weight as the jet engines of the Thrust supersonic car, which recently broke the sound barrier.18

Incredibly, “kinesins also have a ‘bypass mode’ ability that allows them to navigate around obstructions they may encounter”19 while delivering packages. “Similar to a GPS system ‘re-computing,’ kinesins have demonstrated the remarkable ability to re-route automatically when needed.”20

Of course, this not only demonstrates programming of the kind that computer science describes as conditional statements, illustrated by an “if-then-else” construct common to most programming languages (i.e., if [an obstruction]-then [re-route]).21 It also means that they can somehow determine alternate routes through some type of program operating in the background that can provide the most efficient path available. (No one yet knows what exactly that program is or how it works.)

Kinesin proteins also coordinate their efforts should the task at hand be too much for just one of them to complete. Like runners in a relay race, kinesins sometimes “hand off” their cargo to a fresh worker after bringing it a certain distance. And if the cargo to be transported isn’t a “one-man job,” so to speak, multiple kinesins will join and pull the load together.22

And however mundane a simple delivery service may seem, research has shown that kinesins do far more than so-called “grunt work.” Among their most important functions are support of cell division (mitosis and meiosis; “in which a nucleus divides into four daughter nuclei to make reproductive cells”23) and “transport[ing] neurotransmitters needed for neurons to communicate with one another.”24

Some “kinesins can dismantle microtubules” and since “controlling the length of microtubules is particularly important during cell division—lack of control can cause chromosomal instability, which is in turn linked to human cancer25),”26 their work is very important indeed!

As one researcher said,

If kinesin were to fail altogether, you wouldn’t even make it to the embryo stage, because your cells wouldn’t survive. It’s that important.27

“Kinesins are powered by the universal energy compound known as ATP (which is produced by another incredible the molecular motor: ATP synthase).”28 Every molecule of ATP absorbed by kinesin allows it to take a step. Without the ATP synthase motors, there would be no way for the kinesin “robot” to function (which adds yet another extraordinary level of complexity to the processes involved).

Cells are also extremely efficient. This is remarkably illustrated by how kinesin has a hibernation feature and enters an “autoinhibited” state when not in use. “Similar to how modern computers shut down after a period of un-use to conserve energy, kinesins have a hibernation feature”29 when cargo isn’t attached, to prevent ATP from being wasted.30 When needed, they reactivate (somehow) and carry on with whatever new task they’ve been assigned.

“There is good evidence they are either transported back to the cell center in groups by large transport units ( like mass transits in cities) or alternatively dismantled and their parts recycled when done [with] their tasks.”31 32

Now let’s be honest, if any scientist were somehow able to design such incredible microtechnology, they would likely receive the highest possible accolades and be the recipient of the most prestigious awards available from the scientific community.

But of course, no scientist has even come close. And yet scientists have minds; nature doesn’t. Unless nature can display the capability to construct such marvels, would it not be logical to invoke our Creator as the source of these?

But in a culture with an education system committed to naturalism, God is never given the glory for such marvelous creations. It is the story of evolution that supposedly explains such nanotechnology.

It is impressive how nature manages to combine all of these functions in one molecule. In this respect it is still far superior to all the efforts of modern nanotechnology and serves as a great example to us all.33 (Emphasis added.)

Time Has Run Out for Evolutionists

Of course, naturalists typically appeal to the concept of “deep time” to explain away such marvelous constructs. The materialist’s mantra is “simple to complex over millions of years”—repeated ad nauseam. This is their typical modus operandi for explaining away the incredible complexity continuously being revealed by modern scientific techniques.

By simply declaring that all things, no matter how miraculous they might seem, are possible with enough time, naturalists brandish the wand of deep time with impunity, waving away all criticisms of the story of evolution that appeal to examples of design.

This is a terrible argument of course. In our experience, even with intelligent input and upkeep, things get worse over time, not better. However, the problem for them in this case is that the more they research, the more they run out of time. Why?

Well, originally, kinesin was thought to only be in the cells of organisms with a nucleus (eukaryote cells). But evolutionists’ “best guesses” of when first life (consisting of so-called simple prokaryote cells) appeared on earth is around 3.834–4.3535 billion years ago.

As evolutionists believed eukaryote cells evolved well over two billion years ago, that meant such incredibly sophisticated constructs as kinesin appeared in life very early on indeed—in less than or just over half of the supposed time life was on earth! How could such marvels appear so quickly after evolution began?

And if trying to explain that type of sophistication in such a short time wasn’t enough of a headache, researchers now propose that types of kinesin must have appeared prior to eukaryotes, in what researchers call the “last common eukaryotic ancestor” (LCEA), which means they must have come into existence even earlier on in the deep-time framework.

As one researcher put it,

[A] large proportion of the extant diversity of the kinesin superfamily was already established before the radiation of eukaryotes from the last known eukaryote ancestor (LCEA).36

And now new research has revealed a kinesin type within bacteria, which, according to the story of evolution, evolved 3.5 billion years ago!

A eubacterial homolog of a kinesin light chain gene has been isolated and characterized from the cyanobacterium Plectonema boryanum.37

But that would mean complex features like kinesin were here from at least very near the beginning of life according to their imagined evolutionary timescale!

Again, “this is technology far superior to anything the most intelligent scientific minds on the planet have ever produced!”38 Which is likely why evolutionists have suggested (without any observable evidence) that perhaps bacteria were simply given this genetic “software package” at a much later date via lateral gene transfer—after it had evolved elsewhere.

However, Bible believers can be confident in the fact that kinesins were truly here from the beginning as the Word of God says,

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. (Exodus 20:11)

Which would of course include kinesin.

No Such Thing as “Simple” Life

The commonly taught evolutionary story that simple life evolved into more complex forms is simply false. True science is based on observation, and what we’ve observed is that there is no such thing as a “simple” life form—even the simplest creatures we’ve seen aren’t simple at all.

What we have observed is life forms that range from mind-blowingly complex to a level of sophistication that is virtually inconceivable in terms of brilliant design and functional ability.

Should evolutionists believe that in the past there were “simpler” life forms that existed other than what we observe today (which are not simple in any true sense of the word), they believe that on faith, not facts.

Common Sense Is No Longer Common

Common sense tells us that when we see robots in factories, communication devices such as smartphones that can connect to the internet and share information through vast and diverse networks, GPS systems that required countless hours of data collecting and utilization through sophisticated, state-of-the-art satellite systems, etc., in our everyday life, they are always the result of intelligent design.

And yet as a culture in the West, we have been feeding our children into indoctrination centers for decades now. These institutions have been teaching young minds—in contradiction to all human experience—that a “no-mind process” (evolution) can produce far more sophisticated technology than what the most brilliant scientists on the planet have ever achieved and that, somehow, matter arranged itself into minds that have determined matter is in fact better at creating constructs than we will likely ever be. As Jack Szostak, an evolutionist from Harvard Medical school, admitted,

We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened.39

Are we supposed to believe this is logical, reasonable, or rational to any degree whatsoever?

No! When we see comparable (yet even more sophisticated) things inside the so-called “simplest” living things on the planet, it is a logical conclusion to believe that the incredible Creator God of the Bible, Jesus Christ, is the wonderful Mastermind behind all that we experience!

God’s Word Is True

Christians, don’t ever let anyone tell you that your faith is irrational, illogical, or “not scientifically supported.”

Christians, don’t ever let anyone tell you that your faith is irrational, illogical, or “not scientifically supported.”

Non-Christians, take an honest look at the evidence from science and Scripture. The story of evolution is simply not scientifically tenable whatsoever according to what we observe in nature—even in something like the quirky kinesin crawling around inside of you right now.

The fact is, what we see in God’s world is what we see in his Word.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)