Biologic Institute

When evolutionary biologist Andrew Parker strolls through the vast collection of once-living specimens on display at the Natural History Museum in London, he sees “a treasure trove of brilliant design” [1]. If he’s right about that, then the current fascination with living designs among engineers should come as no surprise. The hot new field of biomimetics was born out of this fascination, fueled by the irresistible thought of translating some of these brilliant designs into lucrative technologies.

But are engineers really even needed for this? What if these technological advances could be had ‘on the cheap’, without any design expertise? A recent National Geographic article put it this way: If “every species, even those that have gone extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection”, then “why not learn from what evolution has wrought?” [1] Indeed, why not?

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On the first day of this month, thousands of people traveled to a narrow strip of land stretching across Siberia, Mongolia and China. Their common purpose was to observe an uncommon phenomenon—a total solar eclipse. However, minutes before totality, observers in one popular location in China were despondent. Clouds were covering the Sun. Then, just moments before the big show began, the clouds parted like curtains opening to reveal an actor on a stage. The sky darkened and the Sun’s pearly white corona became visible. When it was over, the observers broke into applause—a scene that was repeated at many other locations along the eclipse path.

People go to great lengths to witness events like this. Not only did they have to travel (considerable distances, in some cases) to position themselves along the narrow eclipse track, they also needed to maneuver to avoid cloud cover. No one on the ground would have seen the eclipse if the clouds had prevailed along the entire eclipse path.

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One of Biologic Institute’s research projects goes public this week, with a paper in PLoS ONE describing a new model for studying protein evolution [1] and a project at SourceForge.net providing the software to implement it [2] (both free of charge).

Okay—it’s not free beer, but here’s why we think it’s an exciting development anyway.

The challenge Darwinism currently faces is about broad explanatory principles—what kinds of things can be produced by undirected causes and what kinds of things can’t (even in billions of years). So, while the main goal is to explain the things of biology, it should be possible to advance that goal by examining things that are like the things of biology in some important way.

Computer models may prove very useful here.

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Darwinists have always recognized the existence of an intuitive barrier that prevents many of us from joining them. Human understanding of complex things is strongly shaped by our experiences with human technology. You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate in some way the extraordinary difficulty of getting physical systems to perform extraordinary tasks. Technology doesn’t just happen. It only comes with sizable investments of genius and diligence, along with more than a little patience.

So Darwin’s suggestion that genius and diligence are optional if patience is plentiful is a stretch for most of us. Richard Dawkins put it this way:

It took a very large leap of imagination for Darwin and Wallace to see that, contrary to all intuition, there is another way and, once you have understood it, a far more plausible way, for complex ‘design’ to arise out of primeval simplicity. A leap of the imagination so large that, to this day, many people seem unwilling to make it. [1]

I doubt anyone, Dawkins included, would generally recommend sweeping aside all intuition to accommodate leaps of imagination, particularly when the intuition is your own and the leap is not. If Darwinism really is plausible, it must instead be the case that Darwin leapt to something of substance—something that really explains how, contrary to our intuitions, the remarkable gadgets we see in biology can be chalked up to mindless inevitability. What exactly is this explanation? It needs to be compelling, whatever it is, since the intuition we’re being asked to abandon is so tied to real-world experience—the very stuff of science.

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