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To: Alamo-Girl
I raised this example because there is much more intelligence at work even now in this creation than a materialist worldview can explain without appealing to eyebrow-raising scenarios.

Here is a good example.

DNA End Capping More Complex Than Thought 07/25/2003
An idea has been floating around for years to explain why cells grow old and die. Biochemists have known that DNA strands have end caps, called telomeres. These caps keep them from unwinding or sticking to other DNA strands, which, when it occurs, creates a crisis in the cell, and usually triggers cell death or apoptosis. Each time a cell divides, the story goes, it loses a telomere, because the duplication machinery could not get a grip on the last cap. This seemed to act like a countdown timer. When the telomeres hit zero, pop goes the apoptosis. An enzyme has been known, however, that repairs telomeres. Named telomerase, it was thought to work only in certain kinds of cells, and has been implicated in cancer. The idea was that out-of-control telomerase made cancer cells immortal when they should have died.

Well, once again, the picture is more complicated than that. An international team has just reported in the journal Cell 07/25/2003 that “Telomerase Maintains Telomere Structure in Normal Human Cells.” They found that all cells express this repair enzyme, and that there is a complicated interplay between regulatory factors to keep a normal cell functioning through multiple cell divisions, with just the right number of telomeres for its needs and environment. Their observations “support the view that telomerase and telomere structure are dynamically regulated in normal human cells,” and that telomere length alone is not a sign of old age and impending death.

Only when things go wrong with these regulatory mechanisms do cells either lose their last telomeres and die, or go wild into immortal replication cycles as in cancer. Telomerase is a key ingredient both in the regulation of cell proliferation and replicative lifespan, they found. Targeting telomerase in cancer treatment as a bad molecule may not be wise, therefore. It’s apparently a vital part of a normal cell’s operation. One thing is clear: “the relationships among telomere length, telomere expression, and replicative lifespan are more complex than previously believed.”

The complexity of life and the credibility of Darwinian evolution are inversely proportional. The complexity of life is increasing.


143 posted on 09/08/2003 9:39:09 PM PDT by bondserv
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To: bondserv
Consider sourcing your posts lest someone take one of them for a real science article. It's just good scholarship!
165 posted on 09/09/2003 6:46:22 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: bondserv
Very interesting! Thank you so much for the information!
184 posted on 09/09/2003 8:33:20 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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