All cells come from previous cells. In order to produce a new cell, the Lord Jesus designed a process called the cell cycle. This is a highly ordered sequence of four events or phases within the cell nucleus, with one phase blending imperceptibly into the next. All of these stages or phases can be seen by looking under the microscope at a section of, for example, Allium (onion) cells.

The cell cycle includes a process most of us learned in high school. It’s called mitosis and is one half of cell division. The two-step process includes the division of the nucleus—mitosis (the M phase of the cell cycle)—followed by division of the cellular cytoplasm called cytokinesis. Mitosis plus cytokinesis in a single cell produces two daughter cells with the same number of chromosomes (DNA) in each cell. A common example of constant cell division is your skin cells. The old cells are sloughed off by the hundreds of thousands every day and are continually replaced.

A recent SciTechDaily article reported how scientists attempted to address “the evolutionary origins of the nucleus and cell division,” calling it “A Billion-Year Evolutionary Tale.”¹ An evolutionary tale indeed! How could evolutionists possibly trace origins of the nucleus and cell division considering their strange idea of vast ages and mindless evolution? Their answer in part is supposedly “reconstructing how things evolved.”¹ But no one has ever been able to reconstruct how anything evolved!² This is doubly true regarding the origins of the nucleus and cell division. Evolutionists can only appeal to hypothesis, speculation, and conjecture.

The article stated,

Despite last sharing a common ancestor over a billion years ago, animals and fungi are similar in many ways. Both belong to a broader group called ‘eukaryotes’—organisms whose cells store their genetic material inside a closed compartment called the ‘nucleus’. The two differ, however, in how they carry out many physiological processes, including the most common type of cell division—mitosis.¹

Appealing to an unknown, unobserved, common ancestor over a billion years ago is plainly a stretch. Creationists predict this hypothetical common ancestor of fungi and animals will never be found. Not surprisingly, it is admitted they differ regarding “many physiological processes,” including mitosis.

Gautam Dey, group leader at EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) Heidelberg, stated, “Our findings led to the key inference that the way animal cells do mitosis evolved hundreds of millions of years before animals did.”¹ This is just speculation. Suggesting that mitosis somehow evolved millions of years before animals doesn’t address the origin of mitosis.

As you might imagine, there is nothing simple about this nuclear division (mitosis). It is ubiquitous in the plant, human, fungal, and animal world. The complexity of the mitotic process is well-known. In 2001 two evolutionists stated in Nature that they “have a detailed, but still incomplete, description of spindle dynamics and mechanics, a sense of potential mechanochemical and regulatory mechanisms at a molecular level, and a long list of mitotic proteins.”³ This hardly speaks of evolution’s time, chance and natural processes. In addition, Shah et al. stated in Nature that “eukaryotic mitosis relies on a tight coordination between chromosome segregation and the remodelling of the nuclear compartment to ensure the fidelity of nuclear division and genome inheritance.”⁴ Chromosome segregation depends on the mitotic spindle apparatus that sorts and organizes the chromosomes and is formed from the microtubules-organizing centers (MTOCs).

Evolutionists feel that a small group of oceanic protists (a unique collection of eukaryotes) called Ichthyosporea “are closely related to both fungi and animals, with different species lying closer to one or the other group on the evolutionary family tree.”¹ But evolutionary trees are subjective and unreliable.^5,6 Two groups of scientists used Ichthyosporea to investigate two types of mitosis: closed and open.

The Dey and Dudin groups, in collaboration with Yannick Schwab’s group at EMBL Heidelberg, decided to probe the origins of open and closed mitosis using Ichthyosporea as a model. Interestingly, the researchers found that certain species of Ichthyosporea undergo closed mitosis while others undergo open mitosis. Therefore, by comparing and contrasting their biology, they could obtain insights into how organisms adapt to and use these two cell division modes.¹

The evolutionary researchers discovered yet another example of what ICR scientists call continuous environmental tracking (CET).⁷ Although they would never acknowledge this designed tracking mechanism, the scientists refer to an organism’s biological adaptability and the use of these two cell division modes as they self-adjust to changing environments.

God—not mindless evolution— designed the highly complex process of mitosis and cytokinesis to ensure cellular formation from previous cells. Evolutionists have attempted a naturalistic explanation of this process, stating, “New findings by EMBL researchers reveal how animals and fungi have developed distinct cell division processes to accommodate their varied life cycles.”¹ But creationists maintain animals and fungi were created with distinct cell division processes in place to accommodate their varied life cycles.

The creative hand of the Lord Jesus is “clearly seen”⁸ in cellular production.

References

1. “A Billion-Year Evolutionary Tale – Biologists Trace Cell Division Back to Its Roots,” SciTechDaily, June 25, 2024, https://scitechdaily.com/a-billion-year-
   evolutionary-tale-biologists-trace-cell-
   division-back-to-its-roots/.
2. Michael Denton, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (Dallas, TX: Discovery Institute, 2016).
3. Timothy J. Mitchison and Edward D. Salmon, “Mitosis: A History of Division,” Nature 3, no. 1 (2001): E17–21.
4. Hiral Shah et al., “Life-Cycle-Coupled Evolution of Mitosis in Close Relatives of Animals,” Nature 630 (2024):116-122.
5. Jeffrey Tomkins and Jerry Bergman. “Incomplete Lineage Sorting and Other ‘Rogue’ Data Fell the Tree of Life,” Journal of Creation 27, no. 3 (2013): 84–92.
6. Brian Thomas, “Whale Study Confirms Evolutionary Trees Don’t Work,” Creation Science Update, September 30, 2011, https://www.icr.org/article/whale-study-
   confirms-evolutionary-trees.
7. Randy Guliuzza and Phil Gaskill, “Continuous Environmental Tracking: An Engineering Framework to Understand Adaptation and Diversification,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism 8, no. 11 (2018): 158–184.
8. Romans 1:20.

Stage image: Mitosis in onion root
Stage image credit: Copyright © Natalierussell77. Used in accordance with federal copyright (fair use doctrine) law. Usage by ICR does not imply endorsement of copyright holder.

* Dr. Sherwin is a science news writer at the Institute for Creation Research. He earned an M.A. in invertebrate zoology from the University of Northern Colorado and received an honorary doctorate of science from Pensacola Christian College.