Attaching jet reactor engine to horse carriage (draft); (Feb. 6, 2010)
The famous biologist GG Simpson said: “The secret of life is the DNA and not vice versa.” We still are unable to comprehend how out of an inert universe living organisms emerged. The French biologist Francois Jacob in his book “Game of possibilities: Essay on the diversity of the living (1981)” wrote that the massacres in history of living species are far more the actions of priests and politicians rather than scientific processes.
“Strange solutions in our evolution cannot be the outcome of a rational God: he would have never applied them. There are no choices to select from such as magnetic tapes or phonograph disk: all that is possible to function is practically used by life history: basically, nature tends to re-use the old working solutions on new entities” wrote Jacob. There is this haunting perspective of hybrid specimens that are counter to nature, a chaos of an anti-world” said Jacob.
There is this illusion of better adaptation of species to nature but biology is refuting this illusion: mankind was not within the realm of the acceptable possibilities to exist; we are one among the 500 million historical structures that could have existed but only one million made it.
Although the constituents of mankind such as codons and nucleotides are finite the number of combinations and permutations exceeded what history allowed to exist. There is this neo-Confucian saying “Respect of nature implies that things follow their natural course; that mankind desists of tampering with pre-conceived systems of ideas”
Nature does not act based on the rational principle of sufficiency that is arbitrated from the outside. The process of energy production in living organisms started from fermentation, then evolved to photosynthesis, and mankind ended up with lung breathing process. We are using jet reaction engine attached to horse carriage to produce energy; this is not at all an efficient engineering design. Thus, nature uses “bric and broc” of minor engineering ingenuity that are not optimal or acceptable.
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