The following paper is a summary of a session presented at the fifth annual German-American Frontiers of Science symposium, held June 10-13, 1999, at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Potsdam, Germany:

?Intelligent structures do not always function the same way; they adapt to local functional requirements. Even the simplest plants and animals sense their world, integrate information, and act accordingly. Feedback-control mechanisms are extremely important features that endow organisms with flexibility and robustness. Even plants, which lack a nervous system, can nevertheless grow leaves and branches toward light, roots toward water, or spatially regulate growth so as to minimize mechanical stress. The functions of biological structures cannot be fully understood or accurately mimicked without taking this complex dynamic feedback into account. Of all the properties of biological entities (with the possible exception of self-replication), it is their intelligence and flexibility that is perhaps the most difficult to duplicate in an artificial device.

The next decade should be exciting for the field of Bionics. Just as biologists are discovering the structural and physiological mechanisms that underlie the functional properties of plants and animals, engineers are beginning to develop a fabrication tool kit that is sophisticated enough to capture their salient features. As the performance gap between biological structures and our mechanical analogs shortens, engineers may feel increasingly encouraged to seek and adopt design concepts from Nature. Although the devices they construct may at first appear alien, their origins in the organic world may endow them with an odd familiarity.? 1

Interesting: ?intelligent? structures, ?intelligence? in biological entities, and ?design? concepts in nature. Does that spell ?intelligent design??

1. Michael H. Dickinson (Department of Organismal Biology, University of California, Berkeley), ?Bionics: Biological Insight into Mechanical Design,? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 (25), 14208-14209 (December 7, 1999) www.pnas.org).

The Guardian published a book review of Genesis Machines: The New Science of Biocomputing books.guardian.co.uk). I would like to comment on the following excerpt from the review:

?Amos's fascinating book shows how such miniature manipulation is a step on the road to "truly programmable matter". Researchers dream of a microscopic "doctor" robot that travels around in your bloodstream and dispenses drugs at the first sign of illness. But it will not be a submarine shrunk by a miniaturising ray, as in Fantastic Voyage; it won't be electronic at all. Why reinvent the wheel? Nature's "machines" already contain the components we need ? The book also shows how hard it is to get away from the constant application of engineering metaphors, such as Amos's claim that genes are "computing components", and anthropomorphic language, as when it is said that ribosome works by "interpreting mRNA messages". This is manna to creationists, who insist that where there is a computer, there must be someone who designed it. Amos skips lightly over such philosophical problems, but it is a serious question whether appeals to "self-organisation" or "information" are themselves in some sense metaphysical, even if one rejects the epistemological nihilism of "Intelligent Design".?

Familiar tirade: design inference is a ?philosophical problem? and appeal to ?information? might be a ?metaphysical? proposition. Therefore, ID does not deserve a fair treatment in the science classroom. At best, set aside ID exclusively to religion, philosophy, or mythology classes. Nonetheless, it is ?hard? to avoid the ?constant application of engineering metaphors? to describe sub-cellular ?computing components? and ?machines.? So following court ruling, this is what we might do without breaking the rules of constitutional law: in religion, philosophy, or mythology courses let?s attribute to design the origin of these computing components and machines by studying in-depth probability and information theory, nanotechnology, biomimetics, and bioinformatics, or else in science courses let?s indiscriminately attribute all biological features to naturalistic origins. Given this arrangement, philosophy courses would tend toward science and science courses would become more philosophical in nature (not to imply that evolutionary theory isn?t already predisposed to philosophical presumptions).