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Michael Denton on How Kinesins, the Cell’s "Wondrous Mini-Machine," Give Evidence of Design

Dr. Michael Denton is a biochemist, Senior Fellow with the Center for Science & Culture, and author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. He commented on kinesins, subject of the new animation in Discovery Institute’s series on molecular machines, elaborating on exactly how they give evidence of design:

This wondrous mini-machine is one of dozens of different types of kinesin-like molecular motors in the cell, each adapted to carry different types of cargo around the interior of the cell. All these mini-motors consist of an exquisitely engineered arrangement of unique parts — the motor heads, linker chains joining the two motor heads together and a relatively long tail linking the motor heads with the docking domains. Given the number of molecular components that must be exquisitely co-adapted to function together before any cargo could be carried along a microtubule in any conceivable cell, it is hard to escape the powerful impression that these wondrous mini-motors are the result of design rather than Darwinian evolution. Another set of molecular motors related to the kinesins are the myosins, which are responsible for muscle contraction. It is worth noting that putative primitive ancestral types of motors have never been identified in any extant cell — and remarkably, from phylogenetic reconstructions, the earliest eukaryotic cells apparently had as diverse a set of complex motors as extant cells and no motors are known linking the kinesin family to the myosin family or between the different classes of kinesins and myosins.

See "The Workhorse of the Cell: Kinesin" now!

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