Biomimetics and Design

A few short comments on the topic of biomimetics and design.

Quotes and comments;

1. "Nature has one very big advantage over any human research team: plenty of time. Billions of years, in fact.'' [1.]

- There may be some truth to this if we restrict ourselves to dealing with an earth that has living organisms on it, but before this occurred it seems to me that time (if anything) would have been a disadvantage. i.e. wouldn't it have merely led to ever increasing disorder based on the effects of entropy? Doesn't 'nature' display the effects of entropy over time if there are no life forms to 'counter' this effect? Let's think of Mars. Let's assume there are no living organisms on (or in) the planet. Would anyone expect such forms to 'emerge' in the future? Hasn't the planet become more and more inhospitable over time?

2. “Nature ... often has to make do with whatever is readily available locally, and whatever structures have been created through the lengthy trial-and-error of evolution.”

- I'd note that this is not an observational statement. No one observed these structures (eg. diatoms) being produced by trial and error over aeons. (Isn't science supposed to be anchored in observation?)

3. "It all comes down to assembling complex structures from small, simple building blocks, Buehler explains.

- The person who rejects ID has to assume this 'assembly' of complex structure happens solely by chemical reaction. In my opinion most such assembly processes require a blueprint in the form of genetic code, and that this code needs an intelligent source.

4. “Buehler suggests that just as biology has done, humans could engineer materials with desired properties such as strength or flexibility by using abundant and cheap materials such as silica, which in bulk form is brittle and weak.”

- Biology isn't a person, and hasn't engineered anything. (One reason I reject materialism is that even atheists find it almost impossible to even describe what they see without resorting to reification and anthropomorphism.) So if 'biology' didn't engineer the diatom (etc.) who or what did? The e. can't expect to escape this dilemna by resorting to sloppy language and personalization.

Summary;
I guess we have to say that if our brightest engineers can't yet duplicate 'nature' then the source of the life forms on this planet is more intelligent and wise than all of them combined. (It's my hunch that this source is personal, and not impersonal.)

Notes;
1. Biomimetics: Does It Flatter Darwin? Creation/Evolution news 10/24/2010
MIT news; ''Nature has one very big advantage over any human research team: plenty of time. Billions of years, in fact. And over all that time, it has produced some truly amazing materials – using weak building blocks that human engineers have not yet figured out how to use for high-tech applications, and with many properties that humans have yet to find ways to duplicate."