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Collisions of this sort presumably happened countless numbers of times, but on (at least) one occasion, one cell engulfed the other, and instead
This was perhaps the first successful instance of technology transfer, a case
evolution is a process that depends on amplifying things that almost never happen.
“Everything is the way it is because it got that way.”
(Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots!) —Headline for an interview with me by Giulio Giorello in Corriere della Serra, Milan, 1997
People are calmly prepared to be instructed about the chemical properties of calcium or the microbiological details of cancer, but they think they have a particular personal authority about the nature of their own conscious experiences that can trump any hypothesis they find unacceptable.
That’s a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions
No. This work demonstrates the futility of all the various sorts of arguments—the argument from design, the God of the gaps, the argument from personal incredulity—that rely on ignorance as their chief premise.
A living thing must capture enough energy and materials, and fend off its own destruction long enough to construct a good enough replica of itself. The
It is possible, and more likely, I think, that a rather inelegantly complicated, expensive, slow, Rube-Goldberg conglomeration of objets trouvés was the first real replicator, and after it got the replication ball rolling, this ungainly replicator was repeatedly simplified in competition with its kin. Many of the most baffling magic tricks depend on the audience not imagining the ridiculously extravagant lengths magicians will go to in order to achieve a baffling effect. If you want to reverse engineer magicians, you should always remind yourself that they have no shame, no abhorrence of
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The biosphere is utterly saturated with design, with purpose, with reasons.
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), I argued that natural selection is an algorithmic process, a collection of sorting algorithms that are themselves composed of generate-and-test algorithms that exploit randomness (pseudo-randomness,
Even the simplest bacterial cells have a sort of nervous system composed of chemical networks of exquisite efficiency and elegance.
Before we can have competent reproducers, we have to have competent persisters, structures with enough stability to hang around long enough to pick up revisions.
The project proved one point beyond a shadow of a doubt: it is possible to create very reliable levels of high competence with almost no comprehension for rather insulated tasks.
Top-down intelligent designing works. The policy of planning ahead, articulating the problems, refining the tasks, and clearly representing the reasons for each step is a strategy that has not just seemed obvious to inventors and problem-solvers for millennia; it has proven itself in countless triumphs of foresight and ingenuity in every field of human endeavor: from science and engineering to political campaigns and cooking, farming, and navigation.
