Anika Smith at Evolution News and Notes links us to a surprising post. According to the Biologic Institute, physicists studying biological systems are assessing them to be perfect or near perfect in their design:
When we think of simple, elegant, unifying principles in science, we think of physics. It's not surprising then that physicists who examine living systems are looking for principles of this kind.
And it seems they have found one. Simply stated, it is that biological processes tend to be optimal in cases where this can be tested. Life's complexity can make it hard to pinpoint what "optimal" means, but sometimes physical limits provide a crisp definition. Because these limits cannot possibly be exceeded, they serve as an objective standard of perfection. Interestingly, in cases where it is clearly beneficial to edge right up to this standard, that's exactly what life seems to do.
For decades enzymologists have recognized that certain enzymes are catalytically perfect - meaning that they process reactant molecules as rapidly as these molecules can reach them by diffusion. That hinted at a principle of physical perfection in biology, but no one anticipated its breadth until recently. According to Princeton physicist William Bialek, one of the leading proponents of the emerging principle,...."While it is popular to view biological mechanisms as an historical record of evolutionary and developmental compromises, these observations on functional performance point toward a very different view of life as having selected a set of near optimal mechanisms for its most crucial tasks."
In other words, Bialek is saying that the optimal nature of the systems these physicists have looked at cannot plausibly be explained in terms of chance mutation and natural selection. Thus, the people at the Biologic Institute wonder, doesn't this mean that the evidence of perfection coheres better with a Design view of nature than it does with the Darwinian view?
It must be frustrating being a Darwinian. Here you have this beautiful, comprehensive theory that explains so much but which just refuses to conform to so many empirical facts.
RLC
