Now that some enterprising researchers have figured out how they do it:
Vital as that negative feedback is, however, biologists have been hard pressed to explain how cells and more complex organisms implement feedback systems with the necessary responsiveness and precision. Only within the past couple of decades have they been able to sort out some of the fundamentals. Most recently, in an important advance this past summer, a team led by Khammash demonstrated a synthetic feedback system that could be installed in cells to help them adapt perfectly to disturbances, just like the robot. The work is backed by a mathematical proof that no simpler answer exists — a good indication that natural feedback systems probably work the same way …
Negative feedback is a powerful example of the remarkable similarities between biology and engineering. In 1948, the mathematician Norbert Wiener proposed that regulatory systems in both animals and machines should be studied together, in a field he named cybernetics (from the Greek kubernētēs, meaning “steersman”).
“What math and engineering and biology have in common, at least modern engineering, is enormous hidden complexity,” Doyle said. Take, for example, a cellphone. It seems simple to operate, but underneath, many layers of control circuits are built atop one another.
“Biology’s kind of like that,” he said. “We live day to day in the complexities of our bodies; unless we’re sick, it’s largely automatic and unconscious. We are hardly aware of it.”
XiaoZhi Lim, “Math Reveals the Secrets of Cells’ Feedback Circuitry” at Quanta
And the only other examples we know of are all acknowledged to be designed.
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
See also: J. Scott Turner and the giant crawling brain Come to think of it, Turner was not banished for his 2017 non-Darwinian evolution book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It
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as to this comment from the article “that there’s really only one underlying topology that should be able to achieve this”:
In regards to that comment, this following research states, “There are a surprisingly limited number of ways a network could be constructed to perform perfect adaptation.”,,, Moreover, the “amazing and surprising” outcome of the study is applicable to any living organism or biochemical network of any size.,,,”
And as to this comment from the article
In regards to the mathematics behind “robust perfect adaptation”, here is a look at the fairly daunting mathematics that lay behind PID controllers:
Moreover, the ‘engineering’ of feedback loops, and as the article also touched upon, extends down to proteins themselves. As the following article states, “A mathematical analysis of the experiments showed that the proteins themselves acted to correct any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations and restored the chain to working order.”
It seems readily apparent to me that highly advanced mathematical information, PID control mathematics to be precise, must somehow reside ‘transcendentally’ along the entirety of the protein chain, in order to achieve such ‘cruise control’ of the overall protein structure. This fact gives us even more evidence that there is far more functional information residing along the entirety of a functional protein chain than meets the eye. Moreover this ‘oneness’ of cruise control, within the entire protein structure, can only be achieved through quantum computation/entanglement principles, and is inexplicable to the reductive materialistic paradigm that undergirds Darwinian thought. A paradigm which holds that the amino acids themselves are, basically, independent entities!
And indeed Quantum criticality in now found in a wide range of important biomolecules
Many times Darwinists and ID advocates will argue over the probability of random Darwinian processes finding functional proteins in sequence space. Yet, since quantum information is now shown to be its own independent entity that is separate from matter and energy, then the probabilities of finding various ‘specific’ configurations of amino acids to form functional proteins simply do not even apply, at all.
The reason why probabilities don’t even apply anymore is because the ’cause’ of the non-local quantum information does not even reside within the material particles in the first place (i.e. falsification of hidden variables and of local realism; Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger etc.. etc..).
Simply put, Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, have no beyond space and time cause to appeal to in order to give an adequate explanation for the massive amount of non-local quantum entanglement/information that is now found pervasively throughout molecular biology. Whereas, on the other hand, Christian Theists do have a cause to appeal to:
It’s amazing what natural selection can bring about!