In my first article in this series on the extracellular space, I noted that when it comes to the question of how life came into being, I have a pet peeve. It is that whether it’s a discussion that supports intelligent design, or the unguided processes proposed by evolutionary biology, it almost always involves just molecular and/or cellular biology. 

But what about multicellular organisms like us? Besides knowing what’s going on inside our cells (within the intracellular space), we also need to consider what’s going on outside our cells (but within our body) — in the extracellular space.

Basics of a Multicellular Organism

A multicellular organism (MCO) consists of more than one cell. Since your body has more than thirty trillion cells, you are an MCO. 

The intracellular space consists of everything inside the cell membranes of your cells. The extracellular space consists of everything outside the cell membranes of your cells. To clarify:

1. The various tissues and organs of your body are made up of many different types of cells, but the spaces between them is part of the extracellular space.  
2. The different types of blood vessels in your body are made up of various types of cells, but the channels, and the blood within them, are part of the extracellular space. 
3. The four chambers of your heart consist of muscle cells, but the cavity within them, in which blood is pumped throughout your body, is part of the extracellular space.
4. The gastrointestinal system is a muscular hollow tube lined with cells that help with the digestion and absorption of water and nutrients, but its lumen and the fluid within it are part of the extracellular space.  

A Multicellular Organism, in More Detail

1. The intracellular and extracellular spaces consist mainly of water with various chemicals in solution (chemical content) along with various biomolecular structures. 
2. For an MCO’s cells to stay alive and work properly they have to maintain control of the intracellular space — its water, chemical content, and various biomolecular structures.   
3. For an MCO to stay alive and work properly it must maintain control of its extracellular space — its water, chemical content, and various biomolecular structures.
4. In an MCO, the total water, chemical content and various biomolecular structures within its intracellular space are very different from what is in its extracellular space. This difference must be maintained for proper tissue and organ function, that is, for survival itself. 
5. In contrast to a unicellular organism, the cells of an MCO do more than just live for themselves. An MCO consists of different types of cells that perform different important functions, most of which affect the extracellular space. For example, the human body has about two hundred different types of cells, each of which has a specific function which allows for survival and reproduction.   
6. The laws of nature affect the water, chemical content, and various biomolecular structures of the intracellular and extracellular spaces. For this reason, unicellular and multicellular life require innovations to combat or leverage the laws of nature.  

From Unicellular to Multicellular Organisms

Note all the different types of cells needed for an MCO to survive. Now, add to this that an MCO has distinct intracellular and extracellular spaces, each consisting of different amounts of water, chemicals, and various biomolecular structures, all of which must be maintained for survival. 

Given these astronomical differences, consider what it would take for a unicellular organism to develop into a multicellular organism. As I noted in my last article, chemist James Tour and biologist Douglas Axe have concluded that scientists can’t explain the origin of the cell, its DNA, RNA, genes and gene regulatory networks (GRNs), proteins with their various shapes, sizes, and function, the cell membrane and cytoskeleton, and all the cell’s other fascinating intricacies. 

Now, above and beyond what we know about the intracellular space, evolution is tasked with explaining the origin of multicellular life which involves different cells performing different functions that largely affect the extracellular space to allow for survival. That is quite a causal hurdle.

This is how Steve Laufmann and I explained the situation in our book, Your Designed Body.

Together, the many thousands of problems the body must solve for survival and reproduction require many thousands of ingenious solutions. Most of these solutions need special-purpose equipment across all levels of the body plan, from specifically adapted molecular machinery, to specialized cells, to tissues, to whole body systems. This may involve hundreds of thousands of parts, replicated in millions of places. Solutions to this class of problems always exhibit four interesting characteristics.

1. Specialization — it takes the right parts to make a working whole.
2. Organization — the parts must be in the right places, arranged and interconnected to enable the function of the whole.
3. Integration — the parts must have exactly those interfaces that enable the parts to work together.
4. Coordination — the parts must be coordinated such that each performs its respective function or functions at the right time. 

When a system has all the right parts, in all the right places, made of the right materials, with the right specifications, doing their respective functions, at all the right times, to achieve an overall, system-level function that none of the parts can do on its own, you have what is known as a coherent system. Moreover, in life, the systems are never standalone — there are always interdependencies between and among the various component systems and parts. 

The human body is composed of coherent interdependent systems. Life’s margin of error is small. Jump-starting, sustaining, and reproducing life are enormously hard problems to solve. 

How is it possible to get so much right, to land within the margin of error, again and again and again? 

Hard problems require ingenious solutions. Fortunately for us, ingenious solutions are everywhere in biology — and nowhere more so than in the human body.

My Experience as a Physician

As a hospice physician I can tell you that for your body to stay alive requires numerous coherent interdependent systems. That’s because, if any one part of any one system fails — then your body fails.

It could be a rise in your carbon dioxide or a drop in your oxygen level, a rise or fall in your level of water, or glucose, or sodium, or potassium or calcium, or heart rate or blood pressure. If any one of these chemical or physiological parameters falls outside the “Goldilocks” range, the result is catastrophic. 

Even if all of the other parameters are perfectly normal, if just one of them is significantly out of its bounds — you cannot survive.

It is as if evolutionary biologists don’t take death into account. All their theories seem to work like magic — their evolving intermediate organisms appear to be at no risk of dying before being able to reproduce. Miraculously, these fortunate organisms always seem to land within the margin of error, again and again and again. 

Foresight: The Ability to Predict 

What would it have taken for the origin of life to occur, with its need for coherent interdependent systems to maintain (and reproduce) itself? A commonsense approach to the question is to consider the products of engineered technology. They didn’t come into being by the laws of nature alone. They required intelligent and hard-working engineers who had to have a lot of foresight — the ability to predict how the laws of nature would affect what they were trying to produce.  

One could say the same thing about life. In fact, that was the conclusion of chemist Marcos Eberlin, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the former president of the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation. Here’s how he put it in his book Foresight.

The need to anticipate — to look into the future, predict potentially fatal problems with the plan, and solve them ahead of time — is observable all around us.  Many biological functions and systems required planning to work. These features speak strongly against modern evolutionary theory in all its forms, which remains wedded to blind processes. No foresight, no life.

Evolutionary Explanations for Multicellular Life

With all the foregoing in mind, it’s interesting to read some explanations from evolutionary biologists for the development of multicellular life. See what you think:

Life is very good at reinventing itself over time, and one of its most important innovations has been multicellularity, the capacity to make multiple cells and cell types that carry out specialized functions. Without the evolution of multicellularity, our planet would be a very different place — a world without plants or animals of any kind, and of course without humans. Yet even though multicellular species have evolved independently in most major lineages of eukaryotic organisms — we know surprisingly little about how this evolution came about.

Here is another attempt:

Scientists are discovering ways in which single cells might have evolved traits that entrenched them into group behavior, paving the way for multicellular life. These discoveries could shed light on how complex extraterrestrial life might evolve on alien worlds.

The first known single-celled organisms appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, roughly a billion years after Earth formed. More complex forms of life took longer to evolve, with the first multicellular animals not appearing until about 600 million years ago.

The evolution of multicellular life from simpler, unicellular microbes was a pivotal moment in the history of biology on Earth and has drastically reshaped the planet’s ecology. However, one mystery about multicellular organisms is why cells did not return back to single-celled life.

“Unicellularity is clearly successful — unicellular organisms are much more abundant than multicellular organisms, and have been around for at least an additional 2 billion years,” said lead study author Eric Libby, a mathematical biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “So what is the advantage to being multicellular and staying that way?”

The answer to this question is usually cooperation, as cells benefitted more from working together than they would from living alone. However, in scenarios of cooperation, there are constantly tempting opportunities “for cells to shirk their duties — that is, cheat,” Libby said.

And another:

Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 25 times. However, complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: animals, (certain) fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants. The first evidence of multicellular organization, which is when unicellular organisms coordinate behaviors and may be an evolutionary precursor to true multicellularity, is from cyanobacteria-like organisms that lived 3.0–3.5 billion years ago. 

To reproduce, true multicellular organisms must solve the problem of regenerating a whole organism from germ cells (i.e., sperm and egg cells), an issue that is studied in evolutionary developmental biology. Animals have evolved a considerable diversity of cell types in a multicellular body (100–150 different cell types), compared with 10–20 in plants and fungi.

Given what we’ve reviewed about multicellular life, especially the differences between the intracellular and extracellular spaces, ask yourself:

• Are you intellectually satisfied by these evolutionary explanations? 
• Do you see what they leave out? 
• Do you see what they assume? 
• Do you see how they often conflate explaining how something works with how it came into being?

As we move forward in this series, things will only get harder for evolutionists. And you will have better and better questions that they can’t answer. At least, that is my hope.