Biomimetics — A Subdiscipline of ID

Actually, I take that back, sort of. This particular invention of mine http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,936,608.WKU.&OS=PN/5,936,608&RS=PN/5,936,608 was indeed inspired by nature. I thought about how the eye and brain sorts out the visual information of immediate concern from the huge amount of visual data that floods into the eyeball and figured out a way to have the computer sort out on the screen what's important at the moment and gradually dim the rest of it resulting in electrical power savings (extended battery life for laptops) when using a new display technology called cold cathode electron beam flat panels where each pixel is essentially a miniature CRT, independently addressable, and power consumption of a given pixel is directly proportional to the brightness of it. DaveScot

"This seemed to me to imply that that inventions come completely from out of the blue." Some do. I never said they all do. Nature suggests a lot of things. You can look up four of my inventions here but you'll have to take my word that I didn't come up with this stuff whilst plowing a field. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=0&f=S&l=50&TERM1=springer&FIELD1=INZZ&co1=AND&TERM2=dell&FIELD2=ASNM&d=ptxt DaveScot

jay "the moment of inspiration coming, according to legend, while he was tilling a potato field back and forth" Nice story. Even if the legend is true, nature doesn't plow fields into neat symetric rows to say nothing of modulating the plow with visual information whilst plowing so the field becomes a 2 dimensional recreation of a scene unrelated to dirt farming. DaveScot

By the way, cmfawn, it seems I beat you to the punchline already. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=davescot+quantum+dna DaveScot

Oops. Forgot to insert the quote that is the joke.

"Perhaps the most amazing discovery in biology in recent years is the one made by the Russian Academy of Sciences and Wave Genetic Inc (presented at the CAYSE fourth annual conference Vol 10. read at http://www.intellectuallyhonestscience.com/dna-wave[1].doc )."

DaveScot

It's a joke, right? That paper was generated by a computer program which is able to construct loosely grammatical text composed of randomly selected technical buzzwords. It's brilliant! Especially the part of implying it's written in Russian and translated by someone with poor English language skills to disguise the fact that it is gibberish generated by a computer. My hat is off to the perps. Very good. DaveScot

"Someone clearly had problems getting along with his peers in childhood. Unfortunately, it’s carried into adulthood." Some of us are peerless. :-) DaveScot

My point has been to refute what's implied by DaveScot's declaration, "...but let us not forget nature didn’t show us how to put a man on the moon." This seemed to me to imply that that inventions come completely from out of the blue. DaveScot's subsequent incredulous statements seem to show that this is how he intended it. Let's not overdo it. The role of intelligence in invention is very often (not always) to identify the suitability of patterns and concepts from some other field (pun intended), and to adapt them to, and develop them for, the problem at hand. By the way, this is fully consistent with the Latin roots of the word "intelligence" (pointed out by Dr. Dembski): "inter" meaning "between", and "lego" meaning "to choose or select." jay

But inspiration is a gift of God. If we believe, we can do it. There were scoffers who said we could not fly. Christ healed people simply by touch or word. Today, Doctors can heal people by sound without touching the patient with a physical instrument. How far will we go in the future? We are only limited by our imagination. For this reason Einstein gave imagination as much if not more importance than knowledge. Man looked to conquer the tallest mountain because it was there. Man long ago in history dreamed of going to the moon before any science field ever came close to predicting it would ever happen. We have a unique capacity to see objects intelligently, to interpret them, to dream about them, conquering them, attaining lofty goals because of them. Nature inspires many technological achievements, but it alone is not responsible or course not. It is the brain given to us by a gifted Creator. Michaels7

Inspiration is a wee bit different from copying a physical mechanism/concept. Gumpngreen

DaveScot: "Oh sure, and magnetic deflection yokes that steer electron beams in a raster scan across a shadow mask onto phosphor coated glass in a vacuum was all inspired by nature too." Actually it was inspired by the humble art of farming (from http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/farnsworth.html ): Philo Farnsworth The key to the television picture tube came to him at 14, when he was still a farm boy, and he had a working device at 21. Yet he died in obscurity By NEIL POSTMAN Monday, March 29, 1999 [Philo T. Farnsworth] was actually born in a log cabin, rode to high school on horseback and, without benefit of a university degree (indeed, at age 14), conceived the idea of electronic television — the moment of inspiration coming, according to legend, while he was tilling a potato field back and forth with a horse-drawn harrow and realized that an electron beam could scan images the same way, line by line, just as you read a book.... jay

Josh, it's the phenomenon of internet anonymity. Many of the tough-talking folks on forums are really timid in the real world. ;) Bombadill

Someone clearly had problems getting along with his peers in childhood. Unfortunately, it's carried into adulthood. Josh Bozeman

Oh sure, and magnetic deflection yokes that steer electron beams in a raster scan across a shadow mask onto phosphor coated glass in a vacuum was all inspired by nature too. How silly of me to think there was anything both novel and artificial that wasn't somehow inspired or anticipated by nature. It was probably in the bible somewhere too, right? DaveScot

Perhaps the most amazing discovery in biology in recent years is the one made by the Russian Academy of Sciences and Wave Genetic Inc (presented at the CAYSE fourth annual conference Vol 10. read at http://www.intellectuallyhonestscience.com/dna-wave[1].doc ). A multinational team spanning points all over the globe used laser lights and interferometers to explore DNA and discovered that it is a functioning quantum computer that reads its lines of code (“genetic texts”) in order to make “decisions” about information it obtains via intra and extra biological contact that is made on a holographic grating system using both acoustics and light pulses (think wireless communications and fiber optics). With this data we now can appreciate the very sophisticated mechanism by which DNA makes deliberate adaptive changes to its code to morph output to accommodate both inner and outer environmental changes. This explains why the finch beaks Darwin spoke about reverted to fall within normal limits after the climate conditions normalized some years later. This also explains why adaptive changes are both timely (deterministic) and do not EVER change a creature into some other kind of creature (as understood by the fossil record). That DNA is grinding out operational options based on pre-programming has to be the most staggering and undeniable proof of intelligent design we can ever hope to discover! We are only just lately beginning to play with quantum computing which, when mastered will launch humanity so far forward technologically it would be easier to list what we could not then do than list what can. Aside from the level of sophistication in question, it cannot be intelligently argued that any random system can produce not ONLY a specified and complex language to operate on but ALSO a biocomputer that interprets the code for autonomous operations exploiting quantum effects on particle behavior like super-positions and entangled states. Ker Than writing for Livescience.com wrote an article about IDers slamming them for believing that a certain bacteria that developed the ability to digest nylon obtained this ability by a “Supreme Being” who inserted the new genetic code for the novel enzyme nylonase just in time to save the little critters from starvation. I wrote his editor and him that the creatures were functionally designed and pre-programmed to respond to the environment via a holographic grating system that scans the world and a biocomputer that deciphers genetic texts for solution options (the ability to have options based on calculated outcomes stems from DNA’s quantum computing capacity) based on sensed information and conditions. I stated further that no one in the ID scientific community believes that the designer of biology micromanages nature as it moves through time. Our position is that life is designed to not only live and operate but to survive in an ever changing world. Neither of them wrote me back. Now that the mechanism for intelligent control of life in a sort of automaton fashion is understood (at least in part) we can now play with the biocomputer and make it do things of our command using laser light and sound waves. The researchers behind the paper linked above were able to reanimate a dead seed from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site and cause tubers to grow on above ground plant stalks. As frightful as it is to play with biology in this way it is still exciting that credible confirmation of DNA as an intelligent quantum computing device is in hand. I had not seen any comments on this information on any ID sites and wanted to share it here. I believe there is an opportunity to advance the ID model by exploiting the Geriev et al paper that should not be missed. I’m writing a book of my own to get this before the public but would love it if the right people heard of it and repeated the experiments for confirmation. cmfawn

Maybe there aren't examples of things travelling *to* space, but there are the previously mentioned examples of the Moon and planets traveling *through* the vacuum of space, and the feasibility of rocketry being implied by Newton's fundamental laws of motion. Once heavier-than-air flight was mastered, the next natural challenge was how fast, how far, and how high (with that bright orb hanging in the night sky a pretty obvious challenge). And of course there was the example of *natural* satellites before there were *artificial* satellites. The idea of bouncing signals off of objects is implied by something as simple as reflections in pools of water. And while signal amplification and digital transmission didn't have readily observable examples in nature, they did have examples in human culture. Far be it from me to minimize the genius it takes for the development of technology -- to figure out how to turn dreams into reality -- but having analogous examples as sources of inspiration is important, too. jay

Alright then, Jay. Maybe nature inspired us to fly to the moon without actually giving us any examples of how to travel to and through the vacuum of space. How would you posit nature inspired us to make satellite TV? DaveScot

Patricia Princehouse says, "Meanwhile, the scientific data supporting evolution continue to pour in on a daily basis and produce spinoff applications...." https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/index.php/archives/581 The implication in her letter was that ID produces no such data and applications. My guess is she would even say that THIS research--exploring the design of the scum-dwelling pond microbe--is the result of Darwinism. But this is research predicated on the idea of finding and mimicing DESIGN! ID will propose much more such research because the assumption of ID is that all living systems are evidence of Intelligent Design, design worth exploring, worthy of duplication and incorporation into useful technology. Red Reader

DaveScot: "...but let us not forget nature didn’t show us how to put a man on the moon." Let us also not forget that it sure did provide alot of inspiration. The existence and visibility of the Moon and planets in our solar system, and the example of flight provided by birds have been perpetual invitations to ponder what makes it all tick, and to figure out how we, too, might fly, even to the moon. jay

Intelligent Design: answers to William Dembski William Dembski is one of the most active intellectual promoters of Intelligent Design. He also has a blog... We will answer his questions about biology and clarify his misconceptions about the apparent similarity between uncertainties in quantum gra... Lubos Motl's reference frame

Biomimetics: A Subdiscipline of ID; Lenny Susskind; and Chauvin Critiques Darwin As you read the following extract, ask yourself the following: (1) Why does biology hand us technical devices that human design engineers drool over? (2) Why don’t we ever see natural selection or any other unintelligent evolutionary mechanisms produ... Intelligent Design the Future

"way beyond anything we are capable of" I'd agree it's beyond our present capability. Whether it's way beyond is arguable. Nature shows us some technologies, especially some of what's possible using organic molecules at the nanometer scale, but let us not forget nature didn't show us how to put a man on the moon. DaveScot

A painful thing happened to me the other day, I was walking along the windy shoreline near where I live,staring out to sea; when my toe was stubbed by the strange object jutting out of the sand. It was a heavy metalic looking spring, the sort of spring I've seen in car suspension systems-but of course i knew it was not from a car suspension sytem because it was n't part of a car -I couldn't see the car .It just looked like a spring from a car system,it was similar. I realise now that it was the action of the waves,wind plus lots of time (although not as much time as first thought) influenced by a whole load of random and nonrandom forces acting at an atomic level to produce that car suspension system looking spring. My toe is better now! WormHerder out WormHerder

The fantastic world of microbiology gives us thousands of examples of things that appear to be designed. I am constantly amazed about the things microbes are engineered to do. I am also amazed at what we can do: think, love, see, employ reason, alter our own consciousness etc. The appearance of design is all around us, in our sense of beauty, in our language, in our technology, everywhere. Bling Bling