Very cool video. If you get a chance, take a look at the others too! Science popularization at it’s finest!

If it (a cell) doesn’t know anything then why is it "following a specific set of steps"?

And this is the misunderstanding, the personification of a cell. The sperm cell itself is the result of a multitude of previous steps undertaken by ancestral precursor cells. It’s not like building a car, one cell isn’t progressively built piece by piece and made into something else. It’s not like a cell decides to go into the "sperm line" to become a sperm cell over a liver cell or blood cell. Sperm cells are produced by means of spermatogenesis where one spermatogonium becomes four sperm cells. Spermatogonia are the self-replicating source cells for all sperm made. During this process, a series of biochemical reactions occur that guide the cells through their development. But it’s not active decision making. As I said before, it could be as simple as which daughter cell gets the majority of a signaling molecule inside the dividing cell. It’s no more a decision than a toy drinking bird always dipping back into the glass for more water. One thing to keep in mind, if a cell doesn’t follow the proper course of development, it will be exterminated.

Considering that result is viable with one species and not another, I’d say there’s recognition involved. – By the other species that is. So how does the egg of the other species know what’s right and wrong? Kinda weird how something so small knows what works and what doesn’t.

Wow It’s a stretch to say that because it doesn’t work in the end, recognition is occurring. If a fishing rod is unable to reel in line, is that a recognition by the fishing tool that something is wrong with the reeling mechanism? If a loaf of bread fails to rise, is that recognition by the bread that there wasn’t enough sugar in it to feed the yeast to make it rise? Trying something repeatedly and getting the same result each time is not recognition. The reason cross species fertilization won’t work is because the DNA templates do not match up, therefore, proper directions as to how the cell should begin dividing and developing do not occur. Basically, the recipe is wrong and has too many of some ingredients and not enough of others that are put into the mixing bowl at bad times. It’s not a matter of the embryo finding itself in the wrong place and deciding that it’s an abomination, it’s a matter of having the wrong developmental mechanisms turned on at the wrong time resulting in an unstable organism that eventually dies because of the bad directions. If the directions are good enough, the organism will survive to birth. Look at breeding tigers and lions. Two similar species, but able to make viable reproducing (sometimes) offspring. Other times, the organisms are sterile.

So you mean to tell me that there are little instructions on little sperm cells that have to find ways to work in tandem with other little itsy bitsy things. – How unreal is that? How totally unbelievably amazing?

In a word … yes! You stumbled onto this without much of any prior knowledge whatsoever! How cool eh?  Remember, a fully differentiated cell is one that is the result of many rounds of development stretching all the way to the point of fertilization. One cell, by using chemical and surface receptor signaling is able to become any cell in the body if given in the proper order and concentration. As a result, the surface of the cells are covered with proteins, sugars and lipids in the form of receptors and binding sites that read almost like a book as to where the cell has been and what biochemical processes it has undergone. So it’s not so much a set of instructions, although i think that stems from the fact that you insist on personifying cells, but more like a documentation of the life of that particular cell, a biography if you will. Unreal? Unbelievable? Believe it!

If this happens on such a microscopic scale everyday, then why is it so hard to understand that something so much smarter than us must have created it?

Not even microscopic, but nano and picoscopic. And it’s not that it’s so hard to understand a prime mover, it’s just that everything I’ve laid out is an explanation as to how certain things work, and is not evidence for or against God. It makes no hypothesis about that idea, so therefore is outside the explanation. Pointing at something and saying, "God did it" is nothing more than an explanation in itself anyways.

How can anybody dismiss this as random?

No one’s dismissing anything. It’s not a poor admission to be randomly guided, and it’s not any less of an explanation as to how something works.

A sperm cell, so small that it can’t be seen by the human eye knows how to merge with an egg of equal size.

It doesn’t know anything. It’s development from a precursor cell has made it into something that is capable of one thing only. There’s no decision making, no "if i do this, then the door will unlock" type of thing. Cells that are capable of fertilization follow a specific set of steps that result from the cells developmental path in order to get the ability to gain entry into the oocyte, any deviation results in that sperm cell not being fit enough to fertilize. The funny thing is, it can even try to fertilize an egg of a different species, the result won’t (usually) be viable, but the sperm will still try. There’s no real recognition involved, no decision making.

Also, size-wise, the comparison between the egg and sperm is actually closer to that of the earth and moon. Fun fact!

Then from there, it knows how to form eyes, a heart, a brain, etc.

Development follows the directions of the DNA contained inside the new cell. However DNA by itself is useless. It’s more like a recipe than a computer code because even by reading the intact genetic sequence of an animal, it wouldn’t give us the first idea as to what type of organism would result from the DNA. You can’t just read genetic code and tell what it will do. However, computer code can be read and translated into a working product. DNA is the index card, the template by which the recipe of the development of an organism occurs. So many other factors are necessary to complete development of even one cell. If specific steps don’t occur before other steps then the end product will be off, different in a potentially life threatening. For instance, in cortical development of the brain, neuroblasts actively divide to form two cells: radial cells, the scaffolding of the early cortex and more neuroblasts. Depending on the presence of the signalling molecule Nestin in the dorsal area of the cell during a certain part of cell division, determines whether the daughter cells will start differentiation into other cells like radial glia or stay the same. My point is that cells are only capable of reacting in a certain way towards a specific stimulus that is determined by way of the pathway it took to get there. It’s no more decision making than a roomba going about cleaning up the floors; when you encounter a wall, turn left 15 degrees and start forward again, etc. DNA provides information storage, but unless it’s in a certain developmental context it’s useless.

We have the power to create life from nothing.

Mashing two cells together hardly equates to nothing

What do you think makes us tick? We’re not connected to electrical outlets.

No, we have little symbionts that live in our cells that are inefficient (but vastly more efficient than our own cells) at creating energy. So we’re hooked up to those. These archae-bacteria have their own DNA and divide separately from our own cells. They even have a double plasma membrane! It’s called Endosymbiont Theory.

What makes my heart pump?

The SA node of each side of the heart keeps a steady pulse without higher brain input. The autonomic (unconscious) nervous system by way of the vagus nerve helps regulate the tempo. Pulse originate from the SA node on each side of the heart and propagate through the cardiac cell walls in a wave-like fashion due to ion concentration gradients shifting. Once they reach the ventricles, a delay is initiated so that the ventricles begin contraction shortly after the completion of the atrial contraction.

Why do we all have different fingerprints?

One of the many developmental questions left out there. Could it be genetic? Maybe. Not in the sense that there are certain genes for certain types of fingerprints like you would see in blood typing, but maybe due to concentration gradients of certain developmental trophic factors at a certain stage of epithelial developmental. That’s a hypothesis, nothing more. We’ll know someday though.

Why do we all have different personalities?

Now this is something I can sink my teeth into. It’s all in your head! The brain, and how certain circuits within it communicate with other circuits, are responsible for our personalities. There’s many documented cases where workers have received traumatic brain injuries (pole through the eye socket) and lived. However, after they healed, they had a different personality. We can infer that personality is a direct result of both natural (genetic) and nurtural (environmental) developmental processes from these people who got their brains rearranged. Our genetics and development through early stages of life help lay the foundation of what we are. Then experiences later in life shape us. It’s a mixture of both. Identical twins very rarely share the same personality, yet have (roughly, within a 200 base pair homology) the same genetic makeup. It could have something to do with early development taking a role, but we also have to take a look at the way they experience the world too. There’s too many factors to ever tell how someone is going to turn out, but we can get a handle on certain personality disorders like depression.

On a side note, the actual research is not in question and seems to hold water.

Found it on the Bad Astonomy Blog.

http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/

Basically, it’s a six-part series that is dedicated to the national parks past and present. Ken Burn’s has done some of the best documentaries in the past decade ranging from World War II to the History of Jazz. All of them are shot amazingly well and tell a great story.

Too often these days people don’t stop and look past the cities, suburbs, and wal-marts to see some of the best things left our world has to offer.

There’s a picture circulating around the web that really took me by surprise. I’ll post it here just to share.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/07/19/article-0-05C30DC4000005DC-422_634x542.jpg

I made it as big as possible to share the effect. This is a re-rendered shot from a video taken from inside the Lunar Lander on the Apollo 11 moon mission. The picture, is Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. The cool part is that there aren’t many pictures of Armstrong taking his first steps, there’s plenty of video taken by him of Buzz Aldrin taking his own first steps from the lander to the moon’s regolith (soil, terrain, “earth” although all are poor synonyms), but very little of himself, and none of one of the moon men’s faces. The picture of a human face inside those big, bulky suits just gives an air of humanity about this mission and undertaking where before, all we really had to relate to was a pictures of white suits in a foreign landscape. As the title says, it really hits home what was accomplished 40 years ago this day.

To all the nay-sayers, here’s more proof. Could it be photoshopped? Probably. And if there were a cover-up, the government would surely keep it up. However, there’s so much evidence to the contrary that’s it’s not even funny. Here’s a listing of the top 5 reasons we did do what we said we did. Sorry, it’s from Askmen.com, but it does lay out the premises of each of the five reasons fairly well.

**Sorry, don’t know why it won’t let me post the pic, I’ll try and get on it. I posted a link to it though.

And what is evolution’s answer to the meaning of life?

This is the part you’re hung up on. Your approach is very normal for someone who has gotten their evolution education in the church. However, as I’ve been trying to explain, what they’ve taught you there regarding it is completely wrong not just in the mechanisms, but also in what it’s role is in science.You can’t seem to shake this "Evolution is to non-believers as Religion is believers" thing. Evolution is based off of decades of religiously-benign research and observation. Science makes no predictions about the status of God because if it’s observed in nature, there must be a reasonable explanation. One that doesn’t need the hand of God or some magical intervention to work. Evolution is not a belief system because it is rooted in fact that had been observed and corroborated time and again by many avenues of study ranging from earth sciences to genetics and everything in between. It’s not belief driven because belief implies something that is potentially unbelieveable, miraculous, like religion. ToE makes no mention of an afterlife, big bang, or meaning of life because it isn’t meant to explain any of that, and was never meant to even broach the topic in any way. It’s only goal was to explain what happened AFTER life arose on this planet. You see what I mean? You’re approaching evolution like you would Islam, Judaism, or Hindu.Your comparison of ANY religion or belief system to evolution is a comparison of apples to oranges. Religion deals in the soul and the afterlife, whereas evolution attempts to explain how organisms change and adapt over time. How is that even comparable?

And here you thought I was going to bash religion. Like the title says, religion and evolution don’t mix because their two different things, not that their repellant of one another.