Biologists Are Getting to Be Less Reticent About Using the Phrase "Design Principles"

We're seeing more instances of biologists (especially cell biologists) writing about "design principles" in their papers. Phrases like that are hard to square with blind evolutionary mechanisms. Yes, they still believe that natural selection finds ways to optimize things, but that gets harder to justify the more the focus is on design. Here's a recent example in a PNAS paper about signaling networks.

Cells continually have to sense their environments to make decisions -- to stay put or move,...