On Wednesday, February 14, 2018 at 11:26:30 AM UTC-7, John Clark wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 , Lawrence Crowell <goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> *> we like to make comparisons between biological and molecular >> biological systems with nanotechnology, but there are departures. * > > Yes there certainly are departures between biology and engineering > because intelligent designs are, well, intelligent, but the stuff evolution > comes out with is idiotic. Mother Nature (Evolution) is a slow and stupid > tinkerer, it had over 3 billion years to work on the problem but it > couldn't even come up with a macroscopic part that could rotate in 360 > degrees! >
*Mother Nature did come up with a wheel; a rotating tail on some specie. I forget its name. AG* > Rational designers had little difficulty coming up with the wheel. The > only advantage Evolution had is that until it managed to invent brains it > was the only way complex objects could get built. > > I can think of 5 reasons for nature’s very poor design skills, the last > one is the most important: > > 1) Time Lags: Evolution is so slow the animal is adapted to conditions > that may no longer exist, that's why moths have an instinct to fly into > candle flames. I have no doubt that if you just give them a million years > or so, evolution will give hedgehogs a better defense than rolling up into > a ball when confronted by the major predator they face today, the > automobile. The only problem is that by then there won't be any automobiles. > > 2) Historical Constraints: The eye of all vertebrate animals is backwards, > the connective tissue of the retina is on the wrong side so light must pass > through it before it hits the light sensitive cells, and the optic nerve > must pass through the retina creating a blind spot. There's no doubt this > degrades vision and we would be better off if the retina was reversed as it > is in squids whose eye evolved independently, however It's too > late for that to happen now because all the intermediate forms would not be > viable. Once a standard is set, with all its interlocking mechanisms, it's > very difficult to abandon it completely, even when much better methods are > found. That's why we still have inches and yards even though the metric > system is clearly superior. That's why we still have Microsoft Windows. > Nature is enormously conservative, it may add new things but it doesn't > abandon the old because the intermediate stages must also work. That's also > why humans have all the old brain structures that lizards have as well as > new ones. > > 3) Lack of Genetic Variation: Mutations are random and you might not get > the mutation you need when you need it. Feathers work better forflight than > the skin flaps bats use, but bats never produced the right > mutations for feathers at the right time and skin flaps are good enough. > And an animal doesn’t need to be perfect or even close to it, all it needs > is to be a little better than the competition. > > 4) An Advantage on one Level is a Disadvantage on Another: One gene can > give you resistance to malaria, a second identical gene will give you > sickle cell anemia. > > 5) Evolution has no foresight: This is the most important reason of all. A > jet engine works better than a prop engine in an airplane. I give you a > prop engine and tell you to turn it into a jet, but you must do it while > the engine is running, you must do it in one million small steps, and you > must do it so every one of those small steps immediately improves the > operation of the engine. Eventually you would get an improved engine of > some sort, but it wouldn't look anything like a jet. If the tire on your > car is getting worn you can take it off and put a new one on, > but evolution could never do something like that because when you take the > old tire off you have temporarily made things worse, now you have no tire > at all. With evolution EVERY step (generation), no matter how many, MUST be > an immediate improvement over the previous one. it can't think more than > one step ahead, it doesn't understand one step backward two steps forward. > > And that's why there are no 100 ton supersonic birds or nuclear powered > horses, and that’s why we can’t > even > move our head by 360 degrees. > > *> If von Neumann probes do migrate into space and throughout a galaxy >> they probably do so in a pretty conservative fashion. In fact over time >> they would evolve instead of performing in a designed manner.* > > A von Neumann probe wouldn’t evolve unless the probe makers designed them > to, and they’d be pretty stupid to do that. Evolution needs mutation, > errors that change the information in DNA when a copy of it is made. The > typical error rate for DNA reproduction is about one error per 100 million > nucleotides. > > Each nucleotides contains 2 bits of information so that’s one error per 50 > million bits. > > > https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-replication-and-causes-of-mutation-409 > > One error in 50 million bits is bad, its lousy! Your computer wouldn’t > work it it had a error rate that huge, the internet would not work, our > entire information economy would collapse. But it hasn’t collapsed because > Claude Shannon showed us 70 years ago how to encode information so it can > be transferred and duplicated with arbitrary low error rates, vastly lower > than anything biology managed to come up with. And modern computer > engineers have embraced Shannon’s work with gusto and so would the > designers of von Neumann probes. > > > John K Clark > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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