As you read the extract below, ask yourself the following: (1) Why does biology hand us technical devices that human design engineers drool over? (2) Why don’t we ever see natural selection or any other unintelligent evolutionary mechanisms produce such systems? (3) Why don’t we have any plausible detailed step-by-step models for how such evolutionary mechanisms could produce such systems? (4) Why in the world should we think that such mechanisms provide the right answer? (5) And why shouldn’t we think that there is real intelligent engineering involved here, way beyond anything we are capable of?
Spring-loaded microbe inspires nanomachines
17 December 2005
Peter Aldhous
New Scientist Magazine issue 2530The scum-dwelling beast boasts a tiny spring that, for its size, is more powerful than a car engine — bioengineers hope to use similar springs in nanodevices
A SCUM-DWELLING pond microbe is the inspiration for minute springs that bioengineers hope will operate tomorrow’s miniaturised devices.
Danielle France at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is studying a protozoan called Vorticella convallaria, which can attach itself to rocks, lily pads and even other creatures in the plankton using a stalk called a spasmoneme. When the protozoan is disturbed, the spasmoneme contracts abruptly, like a stretched telephone lead springing back into a coiled shape. “We think that it operates on stored energy,” says France.
This striking behaviour was first observed by the inventor of the microscope, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, in 1676. But only now have France and her colleagues revealed how this spring-like structure works – and just how powerful it is.
France told the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Francisco last week about experiments in which she spun Vorticella cells on a revolving microscope stage, exposing …
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18825303.900.html