Intelligent-Design Theory: An Argument for Biotic Laws
Uko Zylstra, Dean for Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Contextual Disciplines at Calvin College
Zygon
vol. 39:1, pp. 175-191*

Excerpt

We typically recognize laws through regularities and patterns in
the world of our experience. To begin with, some law statements that are a description of biotic laws would be (1) the law that, in reproduction, like begets like; (2) the law of cell division that all cells come from cells; (3) the law of natural selection; (4) the laws of mating and courtship that define many forms of animal behavior; and (5) the laws of development that define the various regularities and patterns that we observe.

It might be helpful to provide an expanded discussion of a biotic law such as the law of cell division. Cell division is a phenomenon that in its regularity and precision appears very much to be governed by biotic ordering principles. There is a complex pattern of integration of cellular and molecular activity that characterizes the cell-division process. Numerous cell-division cycle genes and proteins have already been identified that play an important role in the regulation of the cell-division process. Nevertheless, the process of cell division is a feature of the cell as a whole, not of the collection of genes and proteins that are involved in the cell-division process. Regulatory molecules of cell division do not themselves govern the cell-division process. The genes and proteins are bound to the cell as a living entity. As molecules, proteins and nucleic acids continue to function as chemical and physical structures within the cell and are subject to chemical and physical laws. But their specific roles and activities are orchestrated by the cell as a whole. The cell is subject to ordering principles that govern this orchestration in the spatial and temporal configuration of the cell. For example, the division and migration of the centrioles, the spatial organization of the mitotic spindle, the supercoiling of the chromosomes
into compact structures, and the sequential timing of all these dynamic events are indicative of ordering principles that go beyond the properties of the molecular constituents. There is a cell program that supersedes the genetic program that provides the information for the synthesis of the numerous proteins and other molecules that play a critical role in all of these activities. This is essentially the point that Steven Rose makes in his critique of reductionism in his book Lifelines: “the functioning cell, as a unit, constrains the properties of its individual components. The whole has primacy over its parts."

* The full text of this article can be retrieved at the Calvin College Hekman Library, and can be furnished for free as a PDF upon e-mail request to the author at zylu@calvin.edu.

The author will speak on "Evolution Wars: A Failure to Communicate," on November 18 as part of the Christian Perspectives in Science Seminars series at Calvin College.