Why Billions of Cells Acting as One Body Point to Design, Not Evolution

 

The organizational leap evolution cannot explain

 

In my previous article, “Why I Don’t Believe All Life Came from One Cell”, I challenged the standard story of evolution on time, probability, and coordination. Now I want to go one level deeper – to the question of organization.

Even the so‑called “simplest” organisms we can see with the naked eye are already made of billions, sometimes trillions of cells, all working together as one body.

So the real question is not just:

“Can species change over time?” but:
“How did independent cells ever become a single, fully coordinated organism in the first place?”

That is where the “one cell became everything” story quietly falls apart.

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1. Picking Up Where We Left Off

In my previous blog, I showed three major problems with the standard evolutionary narrative:

• The continuous waves problem:
  • If life began with simple cells and kept branching, we should see clear, ongoing layers of “younger” and “older” evolutionary lines.
  • Reality shows stable kinds with limited adaptation, not a never‑ending staircase from simple to complex.
• The coordination problem:
  • Systems like cows and grass, bees and flowers, or plants as medicine for animals look like designed partnerships, not blind accidents.
• The mathematical problem:
  • The number of coordinated steps needed to go from a simple cell to a fully integrated tree (never mind humans) makes “random mutation + time” sound like a fairy tale mechanism.

Now I want to add a fourth knife: the organization problem inside a single organism.

 

2. The Myth of “Simple” Life

We are told a charming story:

“Life started very simple – one little cell in some warm pool. Over millions of years it slowly became more complex.”

It sounds reasonable until you ask:

• What do we actually mean by a living organism?
• What does even the “simplest” body really look like?

The truth:

• Almost any organism we can see as a separate body – even the very small ones – is already made of:
  • billions or trillions of cells,
  • each cell a highly complex system on its own.

So by the time we have anything that looks like:

• a tiny worm,
• a small plant,
• or any visible creature,

we are already dealing with massive cellular coordination – not “one simple cell.”

The deeper question becomes:

Not “Can a fish change a little over time?” but:
“How did many independent cells ever become a single coordinated organism in the first place?”

 

3. Many Cells Are Not Yet One Body

Imagine this:

• One single cell, living alone.
• Or even: a trillion identical cells floating together in the same space.

Do you have:

• a worm?
• a fish?
• a plant?
• a human?

Of course not. You simply have:

• many separate units,
• not one integrated being.

To become a real organism, those cells must do something extraordinary. They must:

• Differentiate:
  • some become “outside” (skin, boundary),
  • some become “inside” (organs, support, storage),
  • others become special tissues (transport, communication, defense).
• Take on roles:
  • structure and support,
  • moving water and nutrients,
  • receiving and sending signals,
  • reproduction and repair.
• Know where to be:
  • top vs bottom,
  • left vs right,
  • inside vs outside.
• Coordinate in real time:
  • share resources,
  • respond to injury,
  • grow in specific shapes and proportions,
  • stop growing when the right size is reached.

In other words:

It’s not enough to have many cells. You must have an organizing principle that turns many cells into one body.

A trillion bacteria in a dish is still a soup, not a fish.

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4. The Forgotten Question: Who Gave Them the Plan?

Evolutionary theory loves to talk about:

• mutation (random changes),
• selection (survival of the “fittest”).

But it usually slides past a more basic question:

Who or what gave these cells the organizing principle and blueprint that tells them how to behave as one organism?

For independent cells to become a true organism, you need at least:

• A blueprint:
  • instructions for the overall body shape,
  • where each kind of cell belongs,
  • how many of each type,
  • when to grow and when to stop.
• A communication language:
  • chemical signals and gradients,
  • on/off switches telling cells what to become,
  • signals for stress, damage, and repair.
• A control system:
  • feedback loops,
  • error correction,
  • the ability to maintain internal balance (homeostasis).

Without these, a pile of cells:

• cannot form a stable shape,
• cannot maintain internal conditions,
• cannot coordinate growth,
• cannot repair itself,
• cannot function as a single living unit.

Evolutionary storytelling usually says that multicellularity simply “emerged” when some cells started sticking together.

But from a philosophical and anthropological perspective, that word hides the real difficulty. It is like saying:

“Some people randomly met in a field and, without any plan, language, or leadership, slowly turned into a functioning city with roads, power, water, roles, and rules – just by bumping into each other and copying what didn’t fail.”

At city scale, we’d call that nonsense. At cellular scale, we call it “science” – without noticing the same problem.

 

💡 FACT: Even in relatively simple multicellular organisms, development is controlled by complex gene regulatory networks and signaling pathways. Cells follow highly specific spatial and temporal instructions to form tissues and organs. This is an information and coordination problem, not just a chemistry problem.

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5. Why “Just Add Time” Is Not an Answer Here

When pressed, defenders of evolution fall back on one sentence:

“Given enough time, small changes can add up.”

That might sound plausible when we talk about:

• beak sizes in birds,
• color changes in insects,
• minor climate adaptations.

But it fails when we talk about the first leap to multicellularity.

Why?

• Because here we are not tweaking an existing body plan.
• We are asking where the body plan came from in the first place.

You can “select”:

• longer or shorter legs,
• different feather colors,

only after you already have:

• legs,
• feathers,
• and a bird with a working developmental program.

Selection cannot operate on a plan that does not exist.

So when we ask:

“How did a group of independent cells become a single, planned organism at all?”

“Time” is not an explanation. You could have infinite time and still get nowhere without:

• a blueprint,
• a code,
• a coordination principle.

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6. Even the “Simplest” Body Is Already Over the Line

Let’s be blunt:

• A single bacterium is already astonishingly complex.
• A single-celled eukaryote (with a nucleus) is even more complex.
• A multicellular organism – even a small worm – adds entire new layers of:
  • structure,
  • communication,
  • developmental programming.

We are told:

“Life started as a simple cell, then at some point multicellularity evolved.”

But that “some point” hides an explosion of:

• new information,
• new control systems,
• new communication rules,
• a shared identity: “we are one body.”

As an anthropologist, I hear in this the pattern of a myth:

• “Once upon a time there was a simple cell.”
• “Then, slowly, it became everything.”

It is a beautiful story. But when we look seriously at the biology, the story does not survive its own details.

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7. Design with a Blueprint vs. Evolution Without One

My position, after following all these lines, is this:

There was a Designer who created not only individual kinds (trees, animals, humans), but also the organizing principles that allow:

• billions of cells to act as one body,
• different kinds to interact (food chains, medicine, ecosystems),
• life to adapt within pre‑designed boundaries.

In this model:

• What we call “evolution” is mostly:
  • micro‑adaptation,
  • variation within a kind,
  • flexibility inside a designed system.
• It is not the author of:
  • life from non‑life,
  • organisms from random cell soup,
  • body plans from chaos.

So when I look at even one multicellular organism, I see:

• billions of cells,
• one identity,
• one coherent plan,
• one coordinated life.

That does not look like an accident. It looks like something – or someone – gave those cells:

• a shared design,
• a shared purpose,
• a shared language for building and maintaining that body together.

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8. The Real Question We Should Be Asking

The public debate keeps asking:

• “Do species evolve over time?”
• “Can DNA change?”
• “Do we see adaptation in nature?”

These are not the deepest questions.

The prior, more fundamental question is:

How did we ever get from many independent cells to one integrated organism with a working plan?

If you cannot answer that convincingly, then arguing about:

• whether a fish can become another kind of fish,
• whether apes and humans share a common ancestor,

is like arguing about how a city remodels its buildings when you have no explanation for how the city appeared at all.

From where I stand:

The existence of even one multicellular organism – billions of cells acting as one self‑repairing, self‑replicating body – is already strong evidence of Design with a blueprint, not a blind shuffle from a lonely cell.

On that note, I am content to let this evolution debate rest for now – and let those who still believe the old story go and regurgitate it among themselves.