Biomimicry: Artificial Photosynthesis - Mission Accomplished

Fig.1. Artificial leaves

Another proof of concept for Intelligent Design, artificial photosynthesis has now been achieved as part of the Silk Leaf project by a Royal College of Art graduate Julian Melchiorri.

Decision making in biosystems

What is decision making and why do they say sometimes that biosystems make decisions? 

The most energy efficient memory

My translation into English from here.

Human proteome more complex than previously thought

Human proteome is more complex than was previously thought.

Evidence of Design In Nature: An Inter-Faith Centre Seminar, Suffolk, UK

On Wednesday 16 July I gave a talk at the Inter-faith Centre in Ipswich, Suffolk. The slides are available here. Due to the Google presentation viewer still having glitches, it is advisable to download the presentation.

There were a few noteworthy comments from the audience. The first was quite irrelevant to the subject matter. The computer science perspective, I was told, was not the only one possible (true) and perhaps not as interesting as the psychological or emotional aspect of meeting with God. I agree, that is important but this is beside my point. I have already been accused of 'mechanicism' but it is what seems specifically interesting to me given my professional background. The cybernetics of life vehemently testifying to intelligent agency, to me, deserves attention as a scientific case. 

The second comment was that my God is not the God of Spinoza. Thank you for recognizing that! 

Thirdly, somebody said that I had greatly underestimated the (creative?) power of selection. Prove it, show it to me on a concrete unambiguous example how selection creates novelty. Just a single yet demonstrable piece of strong evidence, not just the usual evolutionary story telling. In the 21st century this is not enough. 

Fourthly, according to an Anglican-Hindu priest (a very strange combination indeed), Dawkins is a saint. I am not commenting that. 

Michael Behe's edge of evolution prediction confirmed

Dr Michael Behe's prediction about the minimum number of simultaneous mutations needed to confer resistance to a drug in malaria parasites, is now confirmed.

Jon Cohen on human and chimp genomes: "Relative Differences: the Myth of 1%"

• Jon Cohen, "Relative Differences: the Myth of 1%", Science, vol. 326 (29 June 2007), p. 1836.

How efficient is technology compared to biology?

Fig.1. Efficiency of modern technology and biology compared: the portion of resources of various kinds (color-coded) used in an artefact (left) or biosystem (right) is shown for various dimensions ranging from nanometers to kilometers. Courtesy of my colleagues, [1].

An interesting selection of readings regarding the philosophical roots of ID

Here it is.

A succinct definition of intelligence

Intelligence  is the operator brackets IF-THEN-ELSE. 

Evidence of Design in Nature: A Presentation for Cambridge Christian Students Interest Group

Today I gave a talk in Cambridge, UK at a seminar of the Christian Student Interest Group. The talk is called "Evidence of Design in Nature". I am grateful to the organizers for the opportunity to speak.

Press here to download the slides.  

Structural isomorphism and functional similarities of the human brain and computer networks

Fig.1. Topological structure of the human brain. Source - vesti.ru.

Fig.2. Topological structure of the internet. Source - Wikipedia, Opte project.

Assume we study some object X (the human brain). In particular, we would like to establish whether anything can be said about the origins of X: artificial or natural, non-intelligent?

Irreducibility

The notion of irreducible complexity in relation to biological systems was first considered in detail by Michael Behe in "Darwin's Blackbox" in the 1990-s. As an example he looked at autocatalytic cycles of blood clotting. The main counter-argument against his anecdotal claims is the ability of living systems to switch, or co-opt, between functions. His famous mousetrap, an epitome of functional systems, could have been used for a different purpose initially. It is quite likely that for concrete cases it is possible to provably demonstrate co-optational chains. Nonetheless, the principal problem of irreducible complexity cannot be explained away like that.

A Note for Those Who Struggle to Find Evidence of Design in This World

Recently my friend, who admitted that he could not see any evidence suggesting our world had a designer, asked me to produce such evidence. As I have seen other people struggling with it, I decided to summarise it below in the hope that somebody may find it useful.

Protein Life is an AI system

Below is a quote from a Russian textbook on Artificial Intelligence [1]. This is exactly what ID claims in relation to protein life, whose core is an irreducibly complex cycle DNA-protein-DNA.

Why is methodological naturalism not scientific?

Naturalism postulates sufficiency of methodological atheism in science.

Why is genetic information stored in digital form?

The answer is short yet profound [1]. 

Decision making in biosystems

Decision making is one of the distinguishing properties of biosystems. Decision making of course does not necessarily mean conscious decision making, which is exclusively human. On the contrary, the ability to make decisions can be observed in every living organism even in unicellular species as a type of molecular logic, in the form of chemotaxis). Chemotaxis is chemistry-driven motility: towards areas of increasing concentrations of friendly chemicals (positive chemotaxis) and away from increasing concentrations of hostile chemicals (negative chmotaxis).

Macroevolution = Machines Creating Other Substantially Different Machines

By definition, biological macroevolution is the hypothetical emergence of higher taxa (new classes, phyla, kingdoms) from the ones that exist at any given point in time, by itself, i.e. without recourse to intelligent agency. Many authors maintain that combinations of law-like necessary factors (such as natural selection) and stochastic factors (mutations, genetic drift and recombination in the case of sexual reproduction) are causally sufficient to explain hypothetical macroevolution.

Creepy-Crawlies Use Cogs

The cogs used in hind legs of Issus coleoptratus.

To synchronise mechanical motion of their legs when jumping, chrysalises of small insects Issus coleoptratus use cogs. Thanks to such a simple mechanical device the insects reduce asynchrony of their hind leg movements down to about 30 microseconds.