Recently I came across some amazing animations of various kinds of engines and other machines at the following Web sites, which I thought I might share with readers:
Here, here, here, here and here.
Two questions to ponder:
(1) How many of these machines have analogues in the world of living things?
(2) What predictions does Intelligent Design theory make regarding which of these machines will be found in organisms?
Enjoy!
Very interesting. Thank you for posting this.
I refuse to read this post because vjtorley was wrong about something once and is therefore not a credible source for anything.
j/k <3 vj. 😀
Although, I don’t know how to answer your questions properly at this time, here are a few notes that may be helpful to you in regards to meaningfully answering them in the future.
The first thought I had when I saw the bacteriophage virus is that it looks similar to the lunar lander of the Apollo program. The comparison is not without merit considering some of the relative distances to be traveled and the virus must somehow possess, as of yet unelucidated, orientation, guidance, docking, unloading, loading, etc… mechanisms. And please remember this level of complexity exists in a world that is far too small to be seen with the naked eye.
The following article has a list of 40 molecular machines in the cell:
A few comments on the complexity being dealt with:
Although the page is a bit disorganized, Perhaps you can find a few more useful notes here Dr. Torley:
Of course much more is out there on the web Dr. Torley, but hopefully this will provide a good start to answering your questions,
I would not mind to have the scientific knowledge Dr. Torley has, and be wrong about something [science-related] once 😉
I’ve been wrong about many things many times 🙁
Dionisio @ 8
Follow-up to comment #2 by tragic mishap
a few more notes:
William Bialek: More Perfect Than We Imagined – March 23, 2013
Excerpt: photoreceptor cells that carpet the retinal tissue of the eye and respond to light, are not just good or great or phabulous at their job. They are not merely exceptionally impressive by the standards of biology, with whatever slop and wiggle room the animate category implies. Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the smallest possible packages in which light comes wrapped.
“Light is quantized, and you can’t count half a photon,” said William Bialek, a professor of physics and integrative genomics at Princeton University. “This is as far as it goes.” …
In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants.
http://darwins-god.blogspot.co.....an-we.html
Cells Are Like Robust Computational Systems, – June 2009
Excerpt: Gene regulatory networks in cell nuclei are similar to cloud computing networks, such as Google or Yahoo!, researchers report today in the online journal Molecular Systems Biology. The similarity is that each system keeps working despite the failure of individual components, whether they are master genes or computer processors. ,,,,”We now have reason to think of cells as robust computational devices, employing redundancy in the same way that enables large computing systems, such as Amazon, to keep operating despite the fact that servers routinely fail.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....103205.htm
Systems biology: Untangling the protein web – July 2009
Excerpt: Vidal thinks that technological improvements — especially in nanotechnology, to generate more data, and microscopy, to explore interaction inside cells, along with increased computer power — are required to push systems biology forward. “Combine all this and you can start to think that maybe some of the information flow can be captured,” he says. But when it comes to figuring out the best way to explore information flow in cells, Tyers jokes that it is like comparing different degrees of infinity. “The interesting point coming out of all these studies is how complex these systems are — the different feedback loops and how they cross-regulate each other and adapt to perturbations are only just becoming apparent,” he says. “The simple pathway models are a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/j.....0415a.html
Learning from Bacteria about Social Networking (Information Processing) – video
Excerpt: I will show illuminating movies of swarming intelligence of live bacteria in which they solve optimization problems for collective decision making that are beyond what we, human beings, can solve with our most powerful computers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJpi8SnFXHs
“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must first magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is 20 kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would see then would be an object of unparalleled complexity,…we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.”
Michael Denton PhD., Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, pg.328
None.
One might, of course, offer one’s speculations about what kinds of things another designer might do. But it would not be a “prediction” flowing from ID.
Furthermore, and I say this knowing some may get upset to hear it, ID is not primarily about making predictions. Nor is Darwinism.
Both ID and Darwinism (or “evolution” more broadly) are primarily attempts to use current evidence and observations to explain historical events or to explain current artifacts we see around us.
True, we might perhaps be able to come up with a couple of predictions here and there that would be inevitable predictions of the theories. However, they would be general to the theory.* But for the most part, neither one says much of anything what specific kinds of organisms or features of the natural world or biological characteristics will be discovered. And, unfortunately, many of the enthusiastic attempts to tie such suppositions and predictions to ID as though they flow inevitably from the design inference do ID a disservice.
—–
* For example, ID “predicts” that unintelligent causes on their own will never be shown to produce complex specified information. But ID doesn’t predict anything about whether this or that organism will have a particular gene, or a particular molecular machine, or any other specific biological feature. ID and Darwinism/evolution share quite a bit in this regard, because they both play a similar role.
Eric Anderson @ 11
Is that a general prediction based on the empirical fact that all complex specified purpose-oriented functional information we know of, has been produced only by intelligent causes?
Is the Darwinian theory based on the scandalous extrapolation of the Galapagos finch adaptation story?
Does modern science show that such adaptation is associated with the built-in adaptive mechanisms present in the biological systems?
Can unintelligent causes produce those sophisticated built-in adaptive mechanisms present in the biological systems?
Can unintelligent causes produce the elaborate molecular and cellular choreographies and orchestrations observed within the biological systems?
Does this debate continue only because there are two opposite irreconcilable worldviews?
It strikes me, BA77, that ‘OID’, for Optimal Intelligent Design’ should be substituted for ‘ID’, in references to the innumerable sublimely-sophisticated designs evidenced in the natural world.
It seems that eventually, all Nature’s designs prove to be not just smarter than man’s, but optimally so. Such a neologism would ratchet up the adversarial assertiveness of your contentions, aiming to put them in their rightful place: ‘on the back foot’.
Remember, this blog has an enviable ‘cachet’ among the denizens of dirt-worship, since rejection of their posts here seems to cause them anxiety and petulance. As in the history of science up to the present day, if the truth be told, the best brains in science who post in the English language, post here and to kindred theistic blogs.
Which brings me to another matter: You are often accused by the more thoughtless noggin-heads of materialism of spamming, as, again and again, you are reduced to repeating what seems to me to be the findings of QM, founded entirely on a mathematical basis, i.e. mathematically proven, checked and double-checked.
Is it not high time you and similarly competent boffins collaborated in drafting a comprehensive compendium of the unfalsified, indeed, de facto, unfalsifiable, truths of physics, the theistic implications of which the aforesaid, irrational materialists refuse, point blank, to accept, manifestly on purely religious grounds – and IN THE TEETH OF MATHEMATICALLY-VERIFIED PHYSICS.
In terms of the ultimate study of matter, the days of classical, Newtonian, mechanistic physics are long past, now, and they must be forced to get over it. Hinting that QM is weird, woo-woo, and can’t really be seriously taken into account from a theoretical viewpoint.
Eugene Wigner et al are not conjectural ‘outliers’, just eccentric mavericks with a woo-woo ‘bee in their bonnet’, are they? Mathematical proof of the human mind’s ability to influence the past, surely merits the closest, most assiduous attention on the part of all physicists; yet it is marginalized by the dirt-worshippers in favour of unalloyed nonsense, such as the infinitely ‘shape-shifting’ multiverse.
Should it not be broadcast, popularized as a sovereign achievement of science, by the mainstream media, as were Einstein’s findings?
Axel, I certainly think that many findings of Quantum Mechanics should receive much more acclaim than they have so far. They certainly turned my simplistic materialistic notions of reality upside down,,,, There are only two options really to consider. Consciousness is either foundational to material or material is foundational to Consciousness. And from every angle, some angles more clear than others, Consciousness is found to be foundational in quantum mechanics. And that is the one thing that materialists either can’t, or refuse, to see and has Naturalists invoking all sorts of bizarre scenarios trying to deny the reality of their own, and God’s, mind,,,
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”
Niels Bohr
Yes, BA77. That is the pivot, and the key to QM identified by the very founders of QM, Planck, Bohr, and seemingly unwittingly, by Einstein in his work relating to light and its observer.
‘Axel, I certainly think that many findings of Quantum Mechanics should receive much more acclaim than they have so far.’
I think you are far too diffident, BA. Is it not a single-answer question: yes or no? Is it not beyond the conjectural, beyond the theoretical (for all practical purposes (in a very literal sense, seemingly, also. Ironically, it has to be said, in view of its evocations of woo-woo, in the materialist’s wee bonce …!!!), and has now long been established as an iron-clad truth.
In short, for them, it’s ‘the elephant in the living-room’. ‘Off the dial’ scandalous. Imagine if a high-school student refused to accept quadratic equations, or a grade-school pupil, the first half of the alphabet!
I understand that in science, as in any professional field, one would have to go along to get a long, to a certain extent, so I understand your patience and diffidence with said ‘ostriches’.
Nevertheless, I am absolutely dumbfounded that ‘our friends’ have been permitted to get away with ignoring this primordial physical fact, very much concerning matter, as well as mind, of course, and to freely range the heavens in gratuitous flights of metaphysical fancy, all of which latter seem to signally fail to throw any light at all on anything.
It is not even as if it were a question of their having their own facts, in lieu of their own opinions.
It seems a hilarious irony that the likes of Lewontin, in the forays into Quantum Mechanics I imagine he is obliged to make, on occasions, simply CANNOT avoid thereby allowing God ‘a foot in the door’. So what do they do they? Effectively stick their fingers in their ears, and chant, ‘Woo-Woo! Woo-Woo! Woo-Woo!’
Dionosio @12:
Basically, yes. Think of it this way:
What is intelligent design? In essence, intelligent design is the claim that certain things are best explained as the result of intelligent activity rather than unintelligent natural processes. And what kinds of things fall in that category? Things that exhibit complex specified information.
So we can reword slightly and say: ID claims that things which exhibit complex specified information are the result of intelligent activity. That’s it. Nothing about the designer. Nothing about what kinds of designs might be implemented in particular cases.
If we reformulate the ID claim as a prediction, and formulate it in a way that is falsifiable, then we can say: ID predicts that we will not find complex specified information arising solely from unintelligent natural causes. But that is it. ID doesn’t, nor can it, predict anything about the identify of the designer, which designs will be implemented in particular cases, whether (in addition to design) there might be some broken machines, messiness, natural processes at work in the world.
It is true that once we have concluded design in a particular case we might — based on our general understanding of design approaches and processes — put forward some hypotheses, some working assumptions, some research questions that can guide us in further inquiry.
For example, I have personally stated on this forum that I anticipate only a small percentage of DNA (5-10% or less) will end up being non-functional. But that is based on my experience with and understanding of what is required for an information-rich, highly-functional, robust, engineered system. It is not a “prediction” of ID. And I try to be careful when sharing such working assumptions or engineering expectations that I am not presenting them as flowing from, or being predictions of, ID.
Without a desire to step on anyone’s toes, I would just reiterate that I think every ID proponent should use similar caution. The design question is very limited and specific. Implications, expectations, additional avenues of inquiry may flow from an affirmative answer of design. But we must not conflate the latter with the former.
That is why the answer, the only correct answer, to vjtorley’s second question in the OP is “None.”
Hi everyone,
Here are a few more links I’ve dug up:
http://www.nature.com/nnano/ar.....12013.html
Molecular machines and motors archive
http://www.icmr.ucsb.edu/progr.....ribay2.pdf (Excellent slides; contrasts between macroscopic and molecular machines)
http://www.gracevalley.org/tea.....hines.html (Two-stroke engine ATP)
http://www-als.lbl.gov/index.p.....ality.html (Rotary or radial engine)
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....68501.html (ATP)
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....71511.html
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....70451.html
http://www.gracevalley.org/tea.....hines.html (F1 Rotary motor)
No biological analogues of 4-stroke engines, Stirling engines, Boxer engines or Wolfhart engines, so far.
Eric Anderson @ 17
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain the subject so clearly.
I’m learning quite a bit from what some of you write in this blog.
#19
I agree, Eric is a sharp (and even-handed) resource on UD.
Axel @ 13: Batting on the back foot . . . a cricketing expression. Let’s enlighten the benighted heathen — look, even Piltdown man was playing Cricket. [The hint is deliberate.] On the back-foot, one is forced to play defensive strokes against aggressive bowling; as the batting stance has — for RH batsman, L foot forward, R back, somewhat sideways to the bowler at the other end of the pitch and with head turned to watch the bowler, bat gripped in hands to stroke at the ball and defend the wicket behind. On the defence, one is simply stopping the ball, not trying to hit it some distance to run or if it crosses the boundary, an automatic 4 or 6 . . . 6 if you hit cross the boundary without the ball touching the ground inside the boundary once it has been hit. Though, once, Sir Vivian Richards (next island over) turned such a stroke into a 6. KF
EA: Spot on, keep that line and length. Under that kind of pressure, sooner or later you will get an edge, and the ball will duly be caught in slips or gully. KF
PS: For BH, line towards wicket, & length of the point of bouncing up from the pitch are main tactics of the bowler. A batsman under pressure tends to err, and if the ball is struck by the edge not the sweet spot “meat” of the bat, it tends to pop up, an easy catch for the five most aggressive fielding positions. “Catches win matches.”
PPS: The force of the minimal, core ID claim is why clever and ruthless Darwinist objectors so often try to divert focus or obfuscate the issue.
Pity American baseball clubs are able to offer immeasurably more to West Indian players, KF, as I believe most of your most gifted cricketers or potential cricketers ‘took the President’s shilling’, so to speak. Your cricket team were regular world-beaters at one time, weren’t they?
A metaphor I have adopted for the issue of design in nature is the double play in baseball as described at:
http://ayearningforpublius.wor.....-baseball/
Hard to understand how undirected forces could arrive at the machine that was Tony Kubec > Bobby Richardson > Moose Scowron
Flailing Blindly: The Pseudoscience of Josh Rosenau and Carl Zimmer – Jonathan Wells – April 17, 2014
Excerpt: Kinesin (a motor which hauls protein cargo around the cell) is considerably more energy efficient than man-made machines. It has been called “a stunning example of cellular nanotechnology” and “positive evidence for design.”
kinesin moves quickly, with precise movements, to get from one place to another. A kinesin molecule takes one 8-nanometer “step” along a microtubule for every high-energy ATP molecule it uses, and it uses about 80 ATPs per second. On the scale of a living cell, this movement is very fast. To visualize it on a macroscopic scale, imagine a microtubule as a one-lane road and the kinesin molecule as an automobile. The kinesin would be traveling over 200 miles per hour!
The fact that the cell’s cytoplasm is quite crowded makes this even more remarkable — like an automobile going 200 miles per hour through a traffic jam.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....84521.html
Dionosio and UB:
Too kind, but thank you.
Happy Easter!
Suck eggs Eric!
🙂