Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The latest from the journal Nature, of all places: An engineering theory of evolution

Denyse O'Leary
June 9, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design
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”Evotypes:”

Biological technologies are fundamentally unlike any other because biology evolves. Bioengineering therefore requires novel design methodologies with evolution at their core. Knowledge about evolution is currently applied to the design of biosystems ad hoc. Unless we have an engineering theory of evolution, we will neither be able to meet evolution’s potential as an engineering tool, nor understand or limit its unintended consequences for our biological designs. Here, we propose the evotype as a helpful concept for engineering the evolutionary potential of biosystems, or other self-adaptive technologies, potentially beyond the realm of biology.

Castle, S.D., Grierson, C.S. & Gorochowski, T.E. Towards an engineering theory of evolution. Nat Commun 12, 3326 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23573-3

A friend in science says that he couldn’t have imagined Nature publishing anything like this thirty years ago.

How long will it be before people discover?: Engineering without engineers, taken seriously, means — among other things — that the consciousness of engineers is an illusion.

Otherwise, there is no design without intelligence.

The paper is open access.

Comments
Querius - yeah, you don't get it. You are now suggesting that Denyse is so clueless she just goes by the web address. Doe that mean that you think she should refer to the journal Wiley when a paper is published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology? Or Cell for any journal published by Cell Press? Bob O'H
No, you still don't get it. The New York Times, The Ties (sic) of London, and the Seattle Times are not subsidiaries of a publishing company named "The Times." Notice the "clueless" link that was provided . . . https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23573-3 But keep fighting and never admit this is a trivial objection. -Q Querius
Querius -
And you asserted that abstracting Nature Communications with Nature, two peer-reviewed journals published by Nature Research, a division of the international publishing company, Springer Nature is an error not surprising to you.
Well, not surprising, because Denyse has form in cluelessness when it comes to understanding how scientific publishing works. But it's still cluelessness. I mean, you wouldn't confuse the New York Times with The Ties of London, or the Seattle Times would you? But they all have Times in their titles. We're at a similar level of competence here. It might be excusable from someone who wasn't familiar with scientific publishing. Bob O'H
Bob O'H @7, And you asserted that abstracting Nature Communications with Nature, two peer-reviewed journals published by Nature Research, a division of the international publishing company, Springer Nature is an error not surprising to you. But since you're into quibbles, I thought it might also be appropriate to note that similarly I was also not surprised at the number of punctuation errors in your posted quibble, for whatever that's worth (i.e. not much). -Q Querius
AnomatedDust - no, I'm not alleging no affiliation. I am saying they are two different journals. Because they are. Bob O'H
Bob @ 6: Are you alleging no affiliation? They both originate from nature.com. AnimatedDust
Bob O'H @ 4, It's not a great surprise either that your punctuation is wrong. -Q Querius
I guess it's not a great surprse that the title is wrong: this isn't from "the Journal Nature". It's from the journal Nature Communications. Bob O'H
Querius, That’s a provocative question. :) jawa
So, in that case, who designed us? Just think of the possibilities. (Smile) -Q Querius
Maybe we will design our own successors. Just think of the possibilities. Seversky

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