Category: Life Sciences
Teleophobia: Cassell on the Unreasonable Fear of Intelligent Design
What do biologists make of the apparently purposive nature of all these different kinds of complex programmed behaviors?
Animal Algorithms: Desert Ants and Honey Bees
Eric Cassell argues that these innate skills point to algorithms programmed into the ant’s brain and genome.
The Miracle of Spiderwebs
Spiders are another of nature’s master engineers. About half of known spider species (order Araneae) construct webs made of silk.
Xenobots: Researchers Claim to Have Created New Form of Biological Self-Replication
Xenobots are artificially interconnected biological tissues whose arrangements are determined by some algorithm.
Long Story Short — A Strikingly Unnatural Property of Biopolymers
Scientists have been trying for decades to get monomers to link up into biopolymers under “prebiotically plausible conditions.”