Posted on 05/14/2014 9:02:19 AM PDT by fishtank
Millions of Years of Evolution Equal Engineering?
by Brian Thomas, M.S. *
Increasing numbers of innovative researchers borrow from biology when they examine and incorporate living systems into man-made designs. We know how man-made designs originate— people design them. But what about living designs? Two recent biomimicry research programs let slip major logic errors when accounting for the origin of the creatures they copy: the seahorse and kangaroo.
In a video posted online about a year ago, researchers led by the University of California's Joanna McKittrick were seen mimicking the seahorse tail's expert balance between flexibility and rigidity in their hopes to copy seahorse armor to make robotic arms.1 As the tail flexes, its bony plates slide over one another to both protect its sensitive internal spine as it grasps objects under the sea, like stems or corals.
How did the ingenious seahorse armor arise? According to Reuters, "The next step is to create artificial bony plates connected to polymers that would act as muscles, the beginning of a process adapting millions of years of evolution for modern scientific solutions.”1
How do they know that evolution crafted seahorses and their splendid armored tails? After all, smart and trained people exercised focused intent when they selected the right materials, shaped them and then joined the man-made tail model parts together. "Evolution” never uses intent. Will, volition, and desire are not part of evolution's supposed process, and neither is intelligence.
...more at link ...
The Intelligent Designer is very benevolent indeed to allow us to infringe on his intellectual property.
Yes, He is gracious and loving indeed.
Survival is an excellent engineer. There are 350 myo fossils every bit as ingeniously engineered as is the seahorse. Most were unlucky enough to come to an end due to changes in their environment the did not survive. However, some are around today, like the scorpion or the horseshoe crab who dodged the mass extinction bullet.
Evolution, however, selects for survivability not perfection. The trilobite was one of the most efficient and successful designs but they didn’t survive the Permian Extinction.
Is it a fish or a horse?
“Watch your cornhole, Bud.”
You betcha, gator.
1Ti 6:20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:
Hillarious - the tech guys were discussing pulling off a huge white collar crime, and the walls are so thin that the construction worker guy next door heard them and commented.
Survival is a selector, not an engineer. Variability around the genetic norm means several closely related forms existed or were coded to exist— not that new genetic material was added. Survival could not engineer new species.
Peter Gibbons: [about the plan to steal from Initech] Before we go any further, all right, we have to swear to God, Allah, that nobody knows about this but us, all right? No family members, no girlfriends, nobody.
Samir: Of course.
Michael Bolton: Agreed,
Lawrence: [from the next apartment through the wall] Don't worry, man. I won't tell anyone either.
Michael Bolton: Who the **** is that?
Peter Gibbons: Uh, don't worry about him. He's cool.
Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ‘cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? What would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he’s broke, don’t do ——.
Survival could however select for the creatures best “engineered” for changing environments. Engineered, I understand, supposes that an “engineer” designed and built the creature. I don’t mean that. What I do mean is that “design improvements” have often been the unintended result of evolution ie. teeth gradually replacing the shell like “teeth” in fish over time. Over time, you can follow an amphibian to reptile and mammal like reptile to mammals and dinosaurs. It happened through incremental steps over long periods of time. A million years is a long time and a lot can happen over that period. We’ve only been around in our current form for some 200,000 years and preceding species very similar to us go back 2.6 my. Before that is still unclear exactly who is in our line though we can have a good idea but not proof currently. We find more fossils and things become clearer.
Well put. I tend to think of evolution as the survival of the least inadequate.
It is this layman’s opinion that “time” and natural selection do not explain the current state.
Simply take any complex creature having: a brain, heart, lungs, waste/circulatory/nervous systems, eyes, ears, nose, and a skeletal structure. Then extrapolate backwards to a mass of simple, single-celled organisms.
Ah! One of the simple organisms mutates! The very first cell towards an eventual eyeball. Another mutates! And the first step towards a heart begins.
And yet, we know that neither of the above mutations is in any way helpful to the organism; the extra “eyeball” cell doesn’t help the cell to “see”, the extra “heart” cell doesn’t provide for better circulation - because there isn’t any circulation.
Take every system in our body; without a functioning system to begin with, mutations have nothing to aid.
Am I missing something? Please explain to me how ‘mutations + time’ give us a new bodily system/function.
You posted that here before, and several of us either answered a bunch of the questions or showed why the questions themselves were nonsense. To refresh your memory, and for the amusement of anyone else interested:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3063687/posts
Having a cell that senses the direction from which light is coming would certainly give the organism an advantage. It’s basically simple, mutations which benefit survival are are retained. Take a fish that has leg like fins and a proto lung can get away from predators limited to the water.
"simple mutations which benefit survival" would have to start out as a single microscopic mutation of a cell. Then, continue mutating in a fashion that would eventually be a benefit - a "happy accident".
It seems to me that a mutation within a given species which initially serves no purpose - would disappear.
Are suggesting that "happy accidents" are the primary driver of most of evolutionary gains?
No but a bottom dwelling swamp fish might get fins that, over a long time, increasingly help it to maneuver on the bottom by becoming more leg like. In fact, that’s what the fossil record shows. Further, the organism might find that going further toward the land is helpful in avoiding predators and over time you get amphibians. I’m oversimplifying but that’s what fossils show happened. With very few land animals, laying eggs on shore would have been an advantage in survival. Of course this happened over a long time. Some came in rather quick spurts but most over millions of years. Having a new land environment and plenty of oxygen brought quick proliferation of species.
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