Well then Dr James Shapiro is huffing and puffing about nothing.
What significance does an emerging interface between biology and information science hold for thinking about evolution? It opens up the possibility of addressing scientifically rather than ideologically the central issue so hotly contested by fundamentalists on both sides of the Creationist-Darwinist debate: Is there any guiding intelligence at work in the origin of species displaying exquisite adaptations that range from lambda prophage repression and the Krebs cycle through the mitotic apparatus and the eye to the immune system, mimicry, and social organization? Borrowing concepts from information science, new schools of evolutionists can begin to rephrase virtually intractable global questions in terms amenable to computer modelling and experimentation. We can speculate what some of these more manageable questions might be: How can molecular control circuits be combined to direct the expression of novel traits? Do genomes display characteristic system architectures that allow us to predict phenotypic consequences when we rearrange DNA sequence components? Do signal transduction networks contribute functional information as they regulate the action of natural genetic engineering hardware?
Questions like those above will certainly prove to be naive because we are just on the threshold of a new way of thinking about living organisms and their variations. Nonetheless, these questions serve to illustrate the potential for addressing the deep issues of evolution from a radically different scientific perspective. Novel ways of looking at longstanding problems have historically been the chief motors of scientific progress. However, the potential for new science is hard to find in the Creationist-Darwinist debate. Both sides appear to have a common interest in presenting a static view of the scientific enterprise. This is to be expected from the Creationists, who naturally refuse to recognize science's remarkable record of making more and more seemingly miraculous aspects of our world comprehensible to our understanding and accessible to our technology. But the neo-Darwinian advocates claim to be scientists, and we can legitimately expect of them a more open spirit of inquiry. Instead, they assume a defensive posture of outraged orthodoxy and assert an unassailable claim to truth, which only serves to validate the Creationists' criticism that Darwinism has become more of a faith than a science.
We also need to look at how computers and networks evolve. What new hypotheses about the evolutionary process, which after all underlies all of biology, can we formulate? In the information world there are survivals and extinctions. We read about these more on the front page and the economics page than on the science page, but these are in fact evolutionary processes occurring in real time.
We can see in computer systems the appearance and interaction of distinct genera - for example, the PC, the Macintosh, and the Unix machines are distinct genera. And there are even distinct species, so within the PC genus we have IBM and Dell and Compaq and Hewlett-Packard and so forth. On the network, we see viruses appearing, and we also see defensive immune systems evolving to recognize and neutralize or eliminate these viruses. Studying these processes may in fact tell us a lot about how biological systems have evolved.
The newest Internet development, of course, is the introduction of autonomous agents, such as applets and cookies. It will be very interesting to see what happens to these as they circulate around. Do they become parasites? Do they become new organisms? Do they create problems or open up opportunities, and do they lead to further diversification?
Seems evolutionary to me. But we've been doing this in our manufacturing areas for the last 20 years. What is non-scientific about it (or non-Darwinian as you call it)?