Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life - Richard A.L. Jones
Nanoscience and Nanotechnology are the up-and-coming disciplines of the Twenty First Century, involving length scales between as little as 1-100 nanometers. In this book, Richard Jones, Professor of Physics at Sheffield University, explains these subjects for a general audience.
This text covers all the important areas of Nanoscience, and is clearly written by someone who knows what he is talking about. If you are looking for something substantial to get your teeth into, then this is one of the best books going on the subject.
This text covers all the important areas of Nanoscience, and is clearly written by someone who knows what he is talking about. If you are looking for something substantial to get your teeth into, then this is one of the best books going on the subject.
From the very beginning, Jones recognises that because the rules of physics are different at the nanoscale, Nanotechnology may turn out more like biology than conventional engineering. On the topic of biological origins, although a convinced evolutionist, he makes some very frank comments about molecular machines. For instance, here is what he has to say about the lack of good evidence for molecular evolution:
'The problem with the field of molecular evolution is that we have no molecular palaeontology, and not much in the way of comparative molecular biology. It is as if we only had a single specimen of a single species - one horse, for example - and we had to try and reconstruct the whole history of life from that one specimen, with no fossil record and no other organisms to compare it with. This is pretty much the situation we have in trying to understand how ATP-synthase came into existence. For all their external variety, this machine is pretty much identical in every living organism. If it evolved from something simpler, then we have no trace of what is was. For all that we think that bacteria, for example, are immeasurably simpler organisms than us, at the molecular level they are fantastically sophisticated and highly evolved. If we are to believe in an evolutionary origin of life, then we have to accept that there were billions of years in which molecular soft machines were evolving from unknown primitive forms to their current state of perfection, a process of evolution that has left no trace whatsoever. We have, not so much a missing link, as a completely missing history.' (page 121).
Despite the lack of hard evidence for how molecules are meant to have evolved via natural selection, Jones believes that evolution must have occurred because it is possible re-create a sort of molecular evolution 'in silico' - or via computer simulation. However, as more is discovered about the immense complexity of molecular systems, such simulations become increasing difficult to swallow.
In the final chapter, 'Our nanotechnological future', Jones acknowledges that our '...only true example of a nanotechnology...is cell biology...'. Could that lead to an inference of design?
Quote
Evolution by natural selection...has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong.
Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2005)
Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2005)
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