Posted on 12/08/2006 7:17:52 AM PST by WhatsItAllAbout
The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students, wont draw the kind of box office crowds that more ferociousand furrierdigital creations did last Christmas. But it will share a place along side them in SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theatre show, which will run for three days during the 33rd annual exhibition and conference in Boston next month. Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.
Nuclei, proteins and lipids move with bug-like authority, slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space. All of those things that you see in the animation are going on in every one of your cells in your body all the time, says XVIVO lead animator John Liebler, who worked with company partners David Bolinsky, XVIVOs medical director, and Mike Astrachan, the projects production director, to blend the academic data and narrative from Harvards faculty into a fluid visual interpretation. First, we couldnt have known where to begin with all of this material without significant work done by Alain Viel, Ph.D. [associate director of undergraduate research at Harvard University], who wrote and guided the focus to include the essential processes that needed to be described to complement the curriculum and sustain an interesting narrative. Ive been in the medical animation field for seven years now, so Im a little jaded, but I still get surprised by things. For instance, in the animation theres a motor protein thats sort of walking along a line, carrying this round sphere of lipids. When I started working on that section I admit I was kind of surprised to see that it really does look like its out for a stroll, like a character in a science fiction film or animation. But based on all the data, its a completely accurate rendering.
Pinging myself for later
Where did the simple structures come from? How did they achieve their specifc atomic weights in order to form the carbon molecules that are the basis of human life?
You might find Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" interesting. It seems quite possible that ID and species evolution are not diametrically opposed ideas, although the proponents tend to be.
My problem with Darwinian evolution: it's a theory with a lot of holes in it. IMO, it's fairly valid, but not something we should worship as sacrosanct (pun intended).
That is a common fallacy. Chance does not enter into biological evolution.
For the record, I am trained in Microbiology/Bacteriology. I am also trained to broaden my view and not to focus narrowly on what are perceived to be "knowns." If you are trained in science, then you should know that a great many discoveries started out as "gut feelings" or a hypothesis based upon an analysis of factual data.
And if cells were "intelligently designed" then the designer needs some remedial training for they are models of inefficiency, duplicity of function, are wholly insecure, and are enormously information intensive.
Talk about a narrow focus - whew!
Humans will be designing our own cells in a few years, and they will borrow from nature, but will also VASTLY improve upon so called "intelligent" design
It is certainly conceivable, and just possibly as in the case of breast milk, humans may find out at a later date that there was more than they originally thought. This is precisely why one should maintain a broad view and not focus narrowly on what are perceived to be "knowns."
"What 'force' drove the simple structure to evolve to more complex structures? Why?"
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Google "Ganesh particle"
http://www.think-aboutit.com/conspiracy/DanBurischTheGaneshParticle.htm
Supposedly this dude hit the mother lode. Ther are many other less flakey web sites that document his findings.
The Principle of Evolution is not a theory. It is, however, organic rather than stochastic.
The simplest explanation is that if it weren't we wouldn't be here to ask the question. There are many potential universes with many different values of those things, but because they're the wrong values, there aren't people asking questions in them.
Pretty good explanation. The anthropic principle is most often explained completely wrongly, even by experts.
Could someone please explain to me why it is that ID and Evolution are mutually exclusive? Does no one think that maybe this universe was set into motion by a "creator", with the laws we've discovered, and processes like evolution, as tools for its development?
They are hung up on the nature of life itself. And that without considering the nature of life.
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