A formula one racer without a steering wheel.

How to Solve the Cambrian Explosion: Turn Up the Evolutionary Speed Dial

Evolution News & Views September 20, 2013 5:05 AM

 Among the scientific papers out there that try to refute Stephen Meyer without naming him, here's one that makes it all so simple: evolution just ran faster in the Cambrian, that's all.

It's amazing how the news media flocked to a new paper in Current Biology by Lee, Soubrier and Edgecombe, "Rates of Phenotypic and Genomic Evolution during the Cambrian Explosion." It's as if they were breathing a collective sigh of relief: now we don't have to deal with Meyer's new book Darwin's Doubt; why? Because the doubt has been replaced with certainty. The paper announces confidently, "The Cambrian explosion (evolution's "big bang") is compatible with Darwinian evolution." (Emphasis added.)

In a nutshell, the paper asserts that evolution ran 4 to 5.5 times faster during the Cambrian than its usual slow-and-gradual speed. To come up with that measure, Lee and Soubrier from Australia and Edgecombe from London's Natural History Museum compared 395 phenotypic characters and 62 genes from living arthropods, "the most diverse phylum in the Cambrian and today." Since evolution ran faster, all the "major phenotypic innovations" were able to "suddenly appear" in a shorter time interval. (They assume that whatever sped up evolution for arthropods also accelerated the other phyla that "appeared" in a geological instant: "This study concerns arthropods, but the results are likely applicable to most of life.")

Like magic, the problem is solved. "The findings, published online today in the journal Current Biology, resolve 'Darwin's dilemma': the sudden appearance of a plethora of modern animal groups in the fossil record during the early Cambrian period," a press release from the University of Adelaide announced proudly, their Associate Professor Michael Lee standing in the limelight. The Cambrian explosion was nothing more than standard evolution running in time-lapse.

A look into the paper reveals damaging admissions, glaring omissions, and lapses in logic. Let's look at these in turn.

Damaging Admissions

The authors admit that the Cambrian explosion was sudden. They know it gave Charles Darwin grave doubts: "Darwin famously considered that the sudden appearance of complex morphologies in the lower Cambrian was at odds with normal evolutionary processes." They also know that subsequent studies concluded the same thing:

Many subsequent workers have reasonably contended that this pulse of diverse fossils is not explicable without either positing a lengthy cryptic Precambrian prelude or invoking "unknown evolutionary mechanisms." Similarly, initial molecular analyses concluded that the extensive molecular divergences between arthropods, echinoderms, and chordates could not be fully reconciled with the abrupt Cambrian fossil record, assuming even the fastest modern rates of molecular evolution.

They also know that critics of Darwinism are waving these facts in their faces: "These legitimate reservations have predictably been exploited by opponents of evolution."

Another fact they acknowledge is the lack of evidence for a long Precambian "fuse" leading up to the explosion. Their own work, in fact, supports the "emerging consensus" that any Precambian lead-up to the explosion had to be short, not only because there's no fossil record of it, but also because it doesn't solve the problem that animals "acquired many novelties simultaneously across the early Cambrian." The Ediacaran fossils, therefore, do not help.

Consequently, they agree that the time of rapid innovation was brief, fitting within 40 million years (Meyer provides evidence it was as short as 5 million years, 1/10 of 1% of Earth's history, p. 72). Although they assume the generous evolutionary estimate of 40 million years, they recognize the period of rapid arthropod divergence is compressible to less than 10 million years in the Lower Cambrian.

They also admit that this period was unique: "evolution during the Cambrian explosion was unusual (compared to the subsequent Phanerozoic) in that fast rates were present across many lineages."

Glaring Omissions

The paper assumes that speeding up natural selection solves all the problems and brings the Cambrian diversification safely back into Darwin's fold. What they fail to acknowledge is that each phylum appears abruptly in the fossil record, with no transitional forms. The first trilobite is all trilobite. The first Anomalocaris is all Anomalocaris. The Cambrian explosion is not just a matter of brevity of time. It's a gap between microbes (or bland multicellular colonies, if one considers the Ediacaran animals) and fully integrated body plans with jointed legs, complex eyes, guts, brains, nervous systems, and a whole new ecology.

Speeding up the evolutionary clock, therefore, doesn't solve the real problem Meyer emphasized in his book: where did the information come from to build all these new body plans? If you doubled or tripled the time interval, it wouldn't change that issue. The absence of transitions and the sudden appearance of complex tissues, organs, and systems cry out for explanation, however one might quibble about the duration of the explosion.

At one point, after declaring that evolution ran 4 to 5.5 times faster than normal, the authors claim that their conclusions are robust, even when compressing the explosion to the briefest interval:

Surprisingly, these fast early rates do not change substantially even if the radiation of arthropods is compressed entirely into the Cambrian (∼542 mega-annum [Ma]) or telescoped into the Cryogenian (∼650 Ma). The fastest inferred rates are still consistent with evolution by natural selection and with data from living organisms, potentially resolving "Darwin's dilemma."

That assertion, however, relies on transitional forms that are not found in the fossil record. They need transitions to show that natural selection, even if running at high speed, built these animals piecemeal by selecting small variations. Even Lee and team would never assert that a microbe divided and a trilobite hatched out.

Let's take them up on compressed rates and see what it means. Suppose you are on MythBusters testing a new model of explosions. A mythmaker alleges that explosions are really slow and gradual, and occur by natural processes of sunlight hitting soil, instead of by someone assembling a bomb. The equipment measures the duration of an explosion at 20 milliseconds. Suppose that the mythmaker then claims that it was really 10 seconds, if you consider the lead-up and the aftermath. Then he boasts that he can even compress that interval by half to 5 seconds, and his natural model of the explosion still holds. Would the MythBusters accept that story? No; they would laugh the guy off the set. The essence of the explosion was its suddenness. It wouldn't matter if you "telescoped" or "compressed" the time around the explosion; the explosion itself was abrupt. In the same way, when you find a whole trilobite in a layer of rock with no precursors, that's the issue! Quibbling about how many million years passed before and after it "suddenly appeared" adds nothing to our understanding.

Lapses in Logic

Lee and team play with the "speed dials" of natural selection, assuming that evolution can run up to 5.5 times faster than normal and still fit within a Darwinian paradigm. They've already abandoned the "slow Precambian fuse" explanation, so the only other option is "unknown evolutionary mechanisms" that some have suggested. By asserting that ordinary evolutionary mechanisms, running faster, are sufficient, they feel they have solved "Darwin's dilemma" and answered the "opponents of evolution" who "predictably exploit" the "legitimate reservations" that the Cambrian explosion presents.

They're answering the wrong question. It's not a question of slow evolution vs. fast evolution. It's not a question of evolution by unknown mechanisms vs. known mechanisms. Evolution itself is the issue! The Cambrian explosion poses the question of Darwinian evolution vs. intelligent design, because the sudden appearance of some two dozen distinct body plans without precursors challenges any naturalistic explanation, no matter how fast it runs.

In essence, Lee and team are simply saying, "They evolved because they evolved faster." That's not the challenge the fossil record poses. It's a circular answer that assumes evolution to argue for evolution. Here's another example: "Clades characterized by major phenotypic innovations often exhibit higher rates of evolution initially...."

Meyer's books pose fundamental challenges to evolution and other naturalistic explanations, not just "exploiting" the "legitimate reservations" about the rate of evolution but about evolution itself as a scientific explanation. He's not just poking holes in evolutionary theory. He's making a positive case for design: whenever you find information-rich systems with integrated parts contributing to function, whether it be a computer or a trilobite, we know from our uniform experience that intelligence played a role in its origin. They need to stop attacking straw men and face these issues.

Lee and team also commit a common evolutionary fallacy we might call the "opportunity knocks" theory of evolution. They assume that natural selection, filled with creative power and desire to invent endless forms most beautiful, will rush to fill new environmental opportunities. Here's how they dress this idea up in jargon: they speak of "ecological opportunism coupled with a more complex fitness landscape, which might have unleashed latent evolutionary capabilities" -- a complicated way of saying, "vacant space brings entrepreneurs." While that may work in economics with intelligent human beings, microbes are under no obligation to become trilobites, just because of "ecological opportunism." This talk of "latent evolutionary capabilities" personifies the simple organisms before the Cambrian explosion, making them out to be contestants in an invention challenge, chomping at the bit to innovate.

Media Hype

Of the papers we've examined that try to answer the Cambrian explosion, this one be Lee et al. must surely rank as one of the silliest. They dodge the important issues. They argue in a circle, using evolutionary assumptions to defend evolution. They employ ad hoc reasoning to avoid falsification of evolutionary theory. They fight straw men. Despite the jargon, their conclusions are vapid, evasive, and illogical.

Yet the hype-to-data ratio has been off the charts: the media trumpeted this as the answer to all the critics, the scientific "findings" to finally rescue Darwin from his dilemma. At Live Science, in an article echoed around the Internet, Tia Ghose wrote, "Lightning-Fast Evolution Clocked During Cambrian Explosion" as if Lee was holding a stopwatch.

A crustacean with 3,000 lenses in its eyes, 6-foot-long shrimplike creatures and organisms that looked like tulips emerged hastily (from an evolutionary perspective) on the scene some 520 million to 540 million years ago. And now scientists have figured out just how quickly evolution was occurring during evolution's "big bang."

Acknowledging that the Cambrian explosion saw the "sudden emergence" of "most of the planet's modern animal groups," including creatures with eyes, antennae, biting jaws, jointed legs and much more, Ghose triumphantly announced that Lee and his colleagues have stood up to those pesky creationists:

Researchers have long debated exactly how animals could have evolved so quickly during the period. Creationists have even used the Cambrian explosion to raise doubts about the theory of evolution, suggesting some divine hand must have played a role....

Why are we not surprised at that red herring?

The team found that the emergence of many sea creatures during the Cambrian explosion could be explained by an accelerated -- but not unrealistic -- evolution by way of natural selection, or the process in which organisms change over time due to changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits.

Giving lead author Michael Lee the pulpit for the benediction, her article ends,

"In this study we've estimated that rates of both morphological and genetic evolution during the Cambrian explosion were five times faster than today -- quite rapid, but perfectly consistent with Darwin's theory of evolution," Lee said.

At least Science Magazine offers a hint of caution in its otherwise gushing praise:

"It's an excellent first step," says Douglas Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., but the exact rates of evolution in the study might not be reliable. He points out that while the study uses fossil data to determine when a given arthropod branch emerged, it doesn't include the known characteristics of these extinct ancestors in its comparisons of physical traits, which involve only living creatures.

Some of the assumptions the authors make in estimating these emergence dates are also problematic, says Philip Donoghue, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

That coverage led to a lot of lively comments from readers, many mocking intelligent design with the usual ad hominems and conflation with creationism, plus some well-meaning but misguided responses misrepresenting ID. Won't one of these people just get a copy of Darwin's Doubt and read it?

On the bright side, the lack of substantive responses to the arguments of Meyer and others provides tacit admission that the case for intelligent design remains robust.

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Each Cell in Your Body Is a Walled City Besieged by Enemies

Howard Glicksman March 2, 2015 3:53 AM 

Editor's note: Engineers and physicians have a special place in the community of thinkers and scholars who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar in very practical ways with the challenges of designing or maintaining a functioning complex system on the order of a jet airplane, or the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News & Views is delighted to present this new series, "The Designed Body," and to welcome Howard Glicksman MD as a contributor. A graduate of the University of Toronto (1978), he presently practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization. Find Dr. Glicksman's introduction to the series here.

Just as a brick is the basic building block of a wall, the human cell is the basic functioning unit of the human body. Our body has about a hundred trillion of them. And just as with a brick wall, the requirement that it not collapse means being sturdy enough to stand up to the forces of nature, our cells likewise need to stand up to nature. For this reason, and others, the two hundred different types of cells in the body have common features that allow them to follow the rules to live, grow, and work properly.

In Darwin's day, a cell was considered to be just a bag of chemicals containing within it various structures of unknown function. During the last century it has been shown that the cell is a huge software-driven micro-sized city containing many different nano-sized buildings with programmed pico-sized machines that are able to use energy to build the structures and perform the functions necessary for life. Here is a brief summary of some of the aspects of the human cell which must first be understood to appreciate why it must take control to survive in the world.

A very thin wall, called the plasma membrane, surrounds the cell. The plasma membrane defines the limits of the cell and separates it from other cells and from the outside world. It serves to keep what is needed inside the cell and what is not needed outside the cell. The important chemicals and vital structures of the cell would not be very useful if they were not kept in one place.

The main substance of the cell, which fills up the space within the plasma membrane, is a fluid called the cytosol. The cytosol consists of water with different chemicals dissolved within it. The amount of water inside the cell is its volume and the total number of chemical particles dissolved within each unit volume of water is its concentration. The cytosol is said to be more concentrated when there are more chemical particles per unit volume of water and less concentrated when there are fewer chemical particles per unit volume of water. Also, for a given number of chemical particles in the cytosol, an increase in volume results in a decrease in concentration and a decrease in volume results in an increase in concentration.

Each cell not only consists of water, but is also surrounded by water. The water inside the cell has a high concentration of potassium and protein and a low concentration of sodium. The water outside the cell has a high concentration of sodium and a low concentration of potassium and protein. In other words, the chemical make-up of the water inside the cell is exactly the opposite of the water outside. The plasma membrane serves to separate the two different solutions from each other.

Since the water in the cell takes up space, it applies a certain amount of pressure against the plasma membrane. Think of a bicycle tire. The more it is pumped up, the more air pressure is applied against the tire wall. Since the plasma membrane is made up of matter with a specific structure, like the bicycle tire, it too has physical limits when it comes to remaining intact and functional under pressure.

Suspended within the cell are structures, called organelles, and important proteins which together perform functions that allow for life. These include the nucleus, which contains the genetic information the cell needs to live and reproduce, the mitochondria, where the energy for cell function is obtained, the rough endoplasmic reticulum and the golgi apparatus, which are the factories that produce proteins, the lysosomes, which are the recycling plants where used cellular material is broken down, and the microtubules and microfilaments, which are the supportive cytoskeleton that allows the cell to alter its shape in response to changes in its environment.

Now consider what some of the laws of nature demand for the cell to survive in the world. Real numbers have real consequences. If the cell can't take control to follow the rules, then life will quickly turn into death.

Whether it's a mountain, a molehill, or a molecule, all material objects have mass and so energy is needed to change them. Therefore, to produce, move, or control anything requires that the cell have enough energy. Like a light bulb short on electricity or a car short on gas, without enough energy the cell is as good as dead.

The chemical content in the cell must be kept relatively constant for it to live and work properly. This means that the fluid inside the cell must maintain its high level of potassium and protein and its low level of sodium. If the chemical content of the cell isn't in the right range, then the cell dies a quick death.

Finally, as noted above, the plasma membrane surrounding the cell has definite physical limitations and is therefore sensitive to changes in pressure. Think of blowing up a balloon. There is only so much air pressure the wall of the balloon can handle before it explodes. So too the volume of the cell must be kept within certain limits. If the water pressure against the plasma membrane rises too high, then, as with a balloon, cell death will take place, literally by explosion.

Note, too, that the cell is not self-sufficient. To survive it needs to constantly receive new supplies of chemicals, like glucose, for energy. It must also constantly rid itself of toxic chemicals, like carbon dioxide from the breakdown of glucose. However, to survive, the cell faces a major dilemma. In letting these chemicals pass through its plasma membrane, the cell is exposed to the chemical content of the water just outside its doorstep. And remember, the chemical content of the water outside is totally different from that of the water inside the cell. The cell, remember, must control its chemical content and volume to stay alive.

Think of a walled city besieged by enemies. The residents of the city are slowly running out of food and water and are in desperate need of new supplies to stay alive. They must somehow be able to open the gates wide enough to bring in what they need without at the same time being overrun by the enemy.

In allowing these chemicals to pass through its plasma membrane the cell comes up against a dilemma, a result of the laws of nature that govern chemical and fluid movement. In letting down its guard to allow some chemicals to come in and go out, the cell runs the risk of losing control of its chemical content and volume. If that happens, the cell will perish.

Which laws of nature are involved in the cell's dilemma and, if not resisted by some ingenious design, how do they bring about the catastrophe that is cell death? Come back next time and we'll find out.

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Religion's week from hell

By Daniel Burke, CNN Religion Editor

(CNN)Whether you believe that religious violence is fueled by faith or is a symptom of larger factors -- political instability, poverty, cultural chaos -- one thing seems clear: Last week was hellish for religion.

Across several continents, including North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, scores of religious believers suffered and died in brutal attacks over the past seven days. Christians, Muslims and Jews alike all fell prey to assaults.

The causes of violence are complex, and reducing them to talking points only adds to the problem, scholars say. But if you want to rally troops to your side, few tools are more powerful than religion, said Michael Jerryson, co-editor of "The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence."

"If you can turn a battle into good versus evil, or doing God's will, you will get so much more devotion," he told CNN. "It's a calling that invokes more than the mundane; it raises the stakes."

 Experts in religious violence say it's too soon to tell whether last week witnessed more terrorist attacks than usual. It often takes several months, if not longer, to tally all of the assaults in a given period of time.

Even so, the brazenness of the attacks -- a gunman shooting up a cafe and a synagogue in a European capital, ISIS decapitating 21 Christians -- makes the past seven days stand out as particularly brutal.

Here are just some of the assaults carried out since last Monday.

Monday

One of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, Boko Haram threatened to continue its assaults, even as several African nations amassed armies to confront it.Boko Haram, the Muslim militant group based in Nigeria, attacked several towns in neighboring Cameroon, kidnapping 20 people. The Islamic extremists also detonated a car bomb in Niger, according to The Associated Press. The death toll is still unclear.

"Your soldiers are infidels, and God's soldiers are victorious," Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram's leader, said in a video recently posted to YouTube.

Tuesday

Craig Stephen Hicks, an ardent atheist who railed online against religion, was accused of killing three young Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Police said the shootings likely resulted from a long-running dispute between Hicks and his neighbors over parking spaces.

But Muslims immediately urged the Obama administration to investigate the murders as a hate crime, and the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter trended on Twitter.

Suzanne Barakat, the sister of one of the victims, said her family members were targeted because they were Muslims and that the slayings should be considered an act of terrorism.

"It's time people call it what it is," Barakat said.

Wednesday

ISIS, the Muslim militant group that calls itself the "Islamic State," launchedseveral attacks across Iraq, striking Kurdish forces in the North and Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.

At least 31 people were killed in Baghdad, including a top Sunni Muslim leader and 10 Shiite Muslims, according to international reports, as ISIS bombs exploded in several neighborhoods.

Thursday

Al Qaeda killed four Yemeni soldiers while seizing a critical military base in the town of Baihan, taking control of its weaponry, according to local security officials.

U.S. officials consider al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen, the most dangerous branch of al Qaeda. Its sworn enemies, the Houthis, have taken over the nation's capital, throwing the country into chaos.

By Friday, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Italy closed their embassies in Yemen, following the United States and other nations.

"Yemen has turned into another failed state in the Middle East," former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told CNN, "giving al Qaeda a free hand to do what it wants."

Friday

Boko Haram continued its cross-border attacks, killing four civilians and a soldier in neighboring Chad.

The deaths came hours after 21 people were killed in two separate attacks on Akida ‎and Mbuta villages near the northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri, according to residents and a local community leader.

The violence in northeast Nigeria, Boko Haram's home base, has caused more than 157,000 people to flee into Niger, Cameroon and Chad, according to Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Also on Friday, an attack on a Shia mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, killed 19 worshippers and injured dozens of others, the U.N. reported.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to Reuters.

Saturday

A gunman opened fire at a free-speech forum in Copenhagen, Denmark, where a Swedish cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet Mohammed was scheduled to speak.

By the end of the melee, the gunman had wounded three officers and killed a 55-year-old man.

Hours after the cafe attack, police said, the gunman made his way to a Copenhagen synagogue and once again opened fire. Two officers were wounded, and a man providing security for a bat mitzvah party behind the synagogue died.

Danish authorities theorize that attacks may have been modeled on the assaults that killed 17 in Paris last month, and Jewish leaders say they are worried about a rising tide of anti-Semitism sweeping across the continent.

Sunday

In a new video released Sunday by ISIS, the militant group claims to have beheaded over a dozen members of Egypt's Christian minority on a Libyan beach.

The video shows jihadists in black standing behind each of the victims, who are dressed in orange jumpsuits with their hands cuffed behind them.

The five-minute video, released by the terror group's propaganda wing al-Hayat Media, includes a masked English-speaking jihadi who says, "The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden's body in, we swear to Allah, we will mix it with your blood."

All the victims are then shoved to the ground and beheaded.

CNN's Holly Yan, Susanne Gargiulo. Laura Smith-Spark and Aminu Abubakar contributed to this report.

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Romans1:20NIV"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."

Looking at Nature with an Engineer's Eye

Evolution News & Views February 23, 2015 2:13 AM 

Here are two examples of researchers looking for "design principles" in living organisms, showing that an engineering focus leads to scientific progress.

Cell Replication as System Engineering

The job of an efficiency expert is to find better ways to get more things done in less time at less cost. From "Taylorism" in the early 20th century, through "Operations Research" in the days of World War II, to "systems engineering" today, efficiency expertise has grown into an essential discipline for manufacturing and project scheduling. Recently, Rami Pugatch, a systems biologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, looked at the humble lab bacterium E. coli with the eyes of an efficiency expert. PhysOrg explains how he approached "cellular replication as a systems engineering problem" --

The paper describes the problem of task scheduling in cellular replication processes and ultimately produces a mathematical distribution that characterizes an optimal replication strategy for E. coli cells. The scope of Pugatch's work encompasses individual cellular processes, algorithmic descriptions of optimized replication,systems engineering concepts, and even the history of the concept of the self-replicating factory. [Emphasis added.]

The history referred to is John von Neumann's 1948 theoretical work on how to build a self-replicating factory. Pugatch finds that a replicating bacterium meets those requirements: it keeps all ingredients in well-stocked reservoirs for each task, it schedules them optimally, and duplicates the instructions as part of the job. The bacterium even succeeds when resources are scarce, a "hard-to-solve scheduling problem" according to the paper published in PNAS.

Bacterial self-replication is a complex process composed of many de novo synthesis steps catalyzed by a myriad of molecular processing units, e.g., the transcription -- translation machinery, metabolic enzymes, and the replisome. Successful completion of all production tasks requires a schedule -- a temporal assignment of each of the production tasks to its respective processing units that respects orderingand resource constraints. Most intracellular growth processes are well characterized. However, the manner in which they are coordinated under the control of a scheduling policy is not well understood. When fast replication is favored, a schedule that minimizes the completion time is desirable. However, if resources are scarce, it is typically computationally hard to find such a schedule, in the worst case. Here, we show that optimal scheduling naturally emerges in cellular self-replication. Optimal doubling time is obtained by maintaining a sufficiently large inventory of intermediate metabolites and processing unitsrequired for self-replication and additionally requiring that these processing units be "greedy," i.e., not idle if they can perform a production task. We calculate the distribution of doubling times of such optimally scheduled self-replicating factories, and find it has a universal form -- log-Frechet, not sensitive to many microscopic details. Analyzing two recent datasets of Escherichia coli growing in a stationary medium, we find excellent agreement between the observed doubling-time distribution and the predicted universal distribution, suggesting E. coli is optimally scheduling its replication.

The paper makes no mention of evolution or natural selection; neither does the PhysOrg summary. Instead, one finds the language of "PERT" (project evaluation and review technique), "critical path," and other terms familiar to system engineers.

When von Neumann proposed the self-replicating factory, it was a futuristic idea that science fiction writers latched onto, envisioning space-traveling robots that could replicate themselves with resources found on planets they landed on as they spread throughout the galaxy. But right here on earth, we have a perfect example in one of the smallest, "simplest" living organisms.

Surprisingly, our analysis of recently measured datasets of E. coli exponentially growing in a stationary medium reveals that the measured distribution of doubling times fits well to the predicted distribution of doubling times of an optimally scheduled self-replicating factory. [PNAS]

Such a [von Neumann] factory is called "non-trivial" if it includes a universal constructor as a component. The duplicative process is not considered to be complete until a copy of the instructions is provided. Instead of directing their own replication, the instructions are instead duplicated from a template by a separate dedicated machine that is not triggered until the completion of the factory replication phase. This is closely analogous to actual cellular processes. [PhysOrg]

It took an engineer's eye to see this connection. Now, our understanding of bacterial replication is enriched accordingly, with no reference to natural selection. In fact, this revelation of the process creates new problems for neo-Darwinism: how could a self-replicating von Neumann machine emerge in piecemeal fashion, without all the parts, instructions, and "universal constructor" already present?

Materials Science

Meanwhile, the strongest biological substance known has come to light. This material can withstand 5 gigapascals of tension, equivalent to a string the width of spaghetti holding 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar, according to the BBC News. What is it? It's the radula, or tooth, of the humble limpet, a snail-like aquatic animal with a spiral shell. And who found it? An engineer. The University of Portsmouth explains:

Professor Asa Barber from the University's School of Engineering led the study. He said: "Nature is a wonderful source of inspiration for structures that have excellent mechanical properties. All the things we observe around us, such as trees, the shells of sea creatures and the limpet teeth studied in this work, have evolved to be effective at what they do.

"Until now we thought that spider silk was the strongest biological material because of its super-strength and potential applications in everything from bullet-proof vests to computer electronics but now we have discovered that limpet teeth exhibit a strength that is potentially higher."

Aha! the Darwinist says. See? Barber said they "have evolved to be effective at what they do." Upon reading the material, though, evolutionary theory had nothing to do with the findings. It was little more than a throwaway line that the professor uttered probably out of habit. He's an engineer, after all, who knows good design when he sees it:

"This discovery means that the fibrous structures found in limpet teeth could be mimicked and used in high-performance engineering applications such as Formula 1 racing cars, the hulls of boats and aircraft structures.

"Engineers are always interested in making these structures stronger to improve their performance or lighter so they use less material."

Barber's work involved testing the tensile strength of the limpet teeth with specially designed instruments. It was difficult work. The teeth are only a millimeter long, and very thin. The limpet uses its radula to scrape algae from the rocks on which it feeds. Barber's team found that, because the way the teeth are constructed with a mineral called goethite, its properties would scale: i.e., the same principles would work on larger sizes, since the strength of the material is not dependent on the size.

Finding out about effective designs in nature and then making structures based on these designs is known as 'bioinspiration'.

Professor Barber said: "Biology is a great source of inspiration when designing new structures but with so many biological structures to consider, it can take time to discover which may be useful."

"Bioinspiration" -- there's a neologism that's a keeper. Think of the prospects for finding more designs out there! As the BBC News article says, "We should be thinking about making our own structures following the same design principles." Good idea. Design is an inspiration to explore, discover, understand, then imitate.

Fear itself VI

Fear itself V