Here's a short but interesting introduction to one of the most fascinating creatures on the planet - spiders. How and why did spiders evolve the ability to produce three different kinds of silk and the ability to not only extrude it, but also the "knowledge" required to construct sometimes elaborate webs? Moreover, how does it happen that every spider of the same species "knows" what specific pattern of web it is to build?
How is that information encoded in the individual spider and passed on from generation to generation? Is it in the spider's genes or somewhere else in the organism? And how does random mutation and natural selection produce new information in the first place?
These are all questions evolutionary biologists struggle to answer. Of course, information, as far as we have experience of it, is always the product of a mind, never of chance. Why, then, should we think that the information in living things is the product of a lucky concatenation of atoms repeated millions of times in the history of the species?
Anyway, think on these questions as you watch the video:
