Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10⁻¹²gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.

“Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.”⁠¹⁴

Not surprising, then, that Harold Morowitz, a Yale University physicist, has calculated that the chances of getting the simplest living bacterium by random changes is 1 in 1 followed by 100,000,000,000 zeros. “This number is so large,” Shapiro said, “that to write it in conventional form we would require several hundred thousand blank books.” He charges that scientists committed to the chemical evolution of life ignore the increasing evidence and “have chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology.”⁠¹⁵

One scientist specializing in cell biology says that millions of years ago “just a single cell could make weapons, catch food, digest it, get rid of wastes, move around, build houses, engage in sexual activity straightforward or bizarre. These creatures are still around. The protists​—organisms complete and entire, yet made up of just a single cell with many talents, but with no tissues, no organs, no hearts and no minds—​really have everything we’ve got.” She speaks of a single cell percolating with “those hundreds of thousands of simultaneous chemical reactions that are life.”⁠¹⁶

What an unbelievable maze of chemical traffic within the confines of a microscopic cell, yet without a traffic jam! Obviously, this demands a Master Designer of supreme intelligence. The information content coded into a speck of DNA weighing “less than a few thousand millionths of a gram” is enough “to specify an organism as complex as man.”⁠¹⁷ Even the information content of a single cell, “if written out, would fill a thousand 600-page books.”⁠¹⁸

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Hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions are happening simultaneously in each living cell​—without a traffic jam!

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The information in a single cell would fill a thousand 600-page books