Trending: Evolution’s Information Technology

What Next?

Art may not imitate life but evolution certainly does. Once the leading edge in biology was breeding and so evolution was cast as a natural breeder. Now the state of the art is genetic engineering and, so, evolution is cast as a natural genetic engineer. And of course the unquestionable trending topic of our time is Information Technology. Just check the employment pages. Do you know Networking, Epic, SAN Citrix, Notes, NextGen, BES, Android, VMware, TCPIP, UNIX, Windows, Active Directory, EMC, Peoplesoft, iPhone, iPad, LANWAN, blade, VoIP, CAT5 and Avaya? If so then you’re trending. And so is evolution. After all, as Matt Ridley explained, “it’s from information technology.” Or as Paul Davies writes this week, “Life's origins may only be explained through a study of its unique management of information.” And Emory University evolutionists are now telling us that chemical evolution includes the “capture, mutation, and propagation of molecular information.” And within Information Technology the trending term is “network,” and so it is with evolution as well:

Chemical evolution includes the capture, mutation, and propagation of molecular information and can be manifested as coordinated chemical networks that adapt to environmental change. The robustness of a chemical network depends on the diversity of its membership, which establishes the probability for the successful selection of superior chemical species and populations. A dynamic exchange of network component structures and assemblies, via both covalent and noncovalent associations, is fundamental for the network’s ability to learn, to capture and integrate information about an environment that ensures the network’s future response to similar conditions, as an inherent part of chemical evolution.

For as one evolutionist has explained, “Molecular cell biology has uncovered sophisticated networks in all organisms.”

If this doesn’t exactly strike you as the stuff of random mutations, consider the most recent evolutionary epicycle, molecular intelligence:

These diverse approaches to deconvolution and reintegration of the origins of the cell, projected in collaboration through the lens of chemical evolution, suggest a remarkable degree of intrinsic molecular intelligence that guide the bottom-up emergence of living matter. … A population of simple molecules, storing and copying information to ensure their own survival prebiotically, argues that intelligent behavior is not restricted to complex genomes but is an inherent property of matter. Darwin’s hypothesis further predicts the emergence of new intelligent materials, ones not limited to what can be deduced from biology’s “archeological” remnants but even more diverse and exotic realms of dynamic chemical systems that might never have been explored by extant biochemistry.

Molecular intelligence, networks, platforms for molecular information, management of information, information technology?

Does evolution also know VMware and TCPIP?

Why is it that evolution follows whatever is trending? Could it be that evolution, rather than uncovering new and remarkable truths about nature, is actually a cultural construct, meeting our needs and expectations for an origins narrative? Could it be that rather than creating life, evolution imitates life? Just Sayin’