Reverse-Engineering Biological Networks Challenges Caltech Scientists 06/25/2005 Evolutionists love to
quote Dobzhansky saying, “Nothing in biology makes sense apart from
evolution.” An article in the current issue of Caltech’s magazine
Engineering and Science,1 however, might change that
proverb to, “Nothing in biology makes sense apart from information theory
and systems engineering.” The article makes no mention of evolution,
but rather looks at biology as a model of complex information processing,
computation, control, logic circuits, optimization and error
correction. “TMI, meet IST,” is the title, meaning “too much
information meets the office of Information Science and Technology.”
The IST is an interdisciplinary initiative at the prestigious university
that draws together mathematicians, information theorists, physicists,
biologists, and social scientists with the goal of understanding how
information works in complex systems – biological systems providing
the guiding example. Author Douglas L. Smith opens by
wowing the reader with the complexity of a worm. A tiny roundworm
controls its development and biological systems in a manner that staggers
the researchers with its precision and complexity. Smith compares
worm information processing to modern intelligently-designed
automobiles. A sedan can contain more than 35 million lines of code
in its computers, he says; but that creates a problem for human designers
– the cars are getting so complicated, “future development is actually
getting stuck because they don’t know how to manage the software.”
Enter C. elegans for a little humility lesson:
But Nature [sic] controls far more
complex mechanisms with ease: Consider the nematode
Caenorhabditis elegans. A lowly roundworm about the size of
this comma, it grows from a single-celled egg to an adult containing
exactly 959 cells. The little fellas are clear as glass, and
entire generations of lab students have spent countless hours hunched
over microscopes tracking the career of each cell. The whole
process takes 24 rounds of cell division—79 of the 959 cells line
the guts from mouth to anus, 302 become nerve cells, and 131 die along
the way. “Everything has been mapped precisely,” says
[Jehoshua] Bruck [Moore Professor of Computational and Neural Systems
and Electrical Engineering, and director of the IST], who has a framed
poster of this developmental tree on his wall [the article contains this
diagram]. “But we, as engineers, don’t understand how to handle
all the information in that map. We don’t understand what the
principles are.” But, somehow, the cells
understand. The egg divides, and one cell has to call heads
and the other, tails. The process involves the random
diffusion of signaling molecules, but the result is very
precise—you never end up with a two-headed worm. Then the
other divisions have to follow in the correct order. “And
even when every cell has a clock and the timetable,” Bruck points out,
“they still need to coordinate their actions. It’s like
driving on the freeway—sometimes you need to slow down and let another
car pass.” Organisms are just information made flesh.
(pp. 8-9; emphasis added in all
quotes.)
Sidebars in the article provide the history of
information theory, from George Boole’s binary algebra to Claude Shannon’s
Boolean circuitry. Information storage and processing, guidance and
control of circuits dealing with vast amounts of information under
constraints of time or bandwidth, are some of the technical challenges
discussed in the article. The overlap between biological and
engineered systems throughout the article is almost seamless, except for
the fact that biological systems are vastly superior to anything man has
invented so far. For example,
But building complex machinery from molecule-sized parts is no
cakewalk—how do you put all those tiny pieces in the right places?
Nature uses a program encoded in the genes. Inspired by
this, Senior Research Fellow.... [pp. 11-12]
Cells do amazing things with seemingly slap-dash
components. The body heals broken bones and fights off diseases,
and we walk around and we do crossword puzzles, all with flimsy, floppy
protein molecules packed into cells that keep dying. There’s
nothing magical about the stuff we’re made of, so clearly the
miracles are in the circuits—broadly defined—that they’re
organized into. How do these circuits work? And what
else can be done with the same components? [p. 12]
The goal of the Center for Biological Circuit Design (CBCD),
says Paul Sternberg, Morgan Professor of Biology, investigator, Howard
Hughes Medical Institute, and director of the center, “is to learn
about biological circuits by trying to build them.”... There are
actually three nested levels of circuitry, says Sternberg:
networks of signaling molecules within a cell that handle such
things as regulating metabolism or allowing an amoeba to find and engulf
its prey; circuits consisting of several cells, such as the ones
that coordinate our defense against infection; and the vast neuronal
circuits that are responsible for, say, understanding speech.
The CBCD will initially tackle the first two, leaving the brain to the
ganglion of neuroscientists on campus.
By biological standards, the human brain is only middlingly
complex–a protein molecule can have 10 thousand atoms, a
cell can contain a billion macromolecules, and the heftier
E&S reader might consist of 100 trillion cells.
That’s 27 orders of magnitude of organization from an atom to a
person, which is like going from the diameter of an atom to the
distance to Sirius [p. 12. For a visualization, see Secret
Worlds: The Universe Within.]
[Sidebar] A schematic of Arnold’s cellular band-pass filter.
The sender cell emits molecules of ALH... [He describes the
complex interactions of seven parts in the cascade]. Got all that? And this is a very simple regulatory
scheme, as things go.... [p. 13].
Says Sternberg, “...we’re just trying to get anything to
work.” It helps that the CBCD houses people who are building
artificial circuits and people who are reverse engineering real
ones. “Now we say, ‘This cell has switchlike behavior—what
mechanism is it using?’ It would be nice if you could say,
‘Well, there are four different ways that cells usually do
that.’ It would be even better if you could say, ‘Well, there’s
one way that they usually do it, let’s go test that one first.’” [p.13]
“Everything we do in CNSE [Center for Neuromorphic Systems
Engineering] is IST-related,” says director Pietro Perona, professor of
electrical engineering. “We take neurobiological principles and
use them in engineered systems, and use engineering expertise to try to
understand the brain.”
The Information Age is as
monumental as was the Industrial Age to the way people live, Smith
comments as he wraps things up whimsically:
Says Bruck, “In time, I think ‘information’
will be a first-order concept. So in 20 years, if a high-school
student asks her friend, ‘Do you like algebra?’ the other girl will say,
‘Yes,’ or ‘No,’ or ‘Yes, but I hate the teacher.’ But the other
day I asked my daughter, a high-school junior, ‘Do you like
information?’ and she said, ‘What?!!’”
1Douglas L. Smith, “TMI, Meet IST,” Engineering and
Science (LXVIII:1/2), [summer] 2005, pp. 6-15.
OK, Intelligent Design Movement,
charge! Grab this paper and wave it in the faces of the Darwin
Party, and say, “Look! The future is information, reverse
engineering, and treating biological entities as intelligently
designed circuitry. That is what ID is all about. This
entire article had absolutely no use whatsoever for Darwinism.
These systems could only be understood in terms of their
information content, their logic, circuitry and programming–i.e., their
design. The design is so extraordinarily complex that
Caltech’s brightest stars are at square one trying to figure it
out. Darwinism is an impediment, an 18th-century, Industrial
Revolution paradigm that is not up to the requirements of the
Information Age. Step aside! ID is the future.”
This article is one of many recent entries at the intersection of
biology and nanotechnology that illustrates the power of a
design-theoretic approach to science. Although it does not mention
intelligent design (and, undoubtedly, many of the participants are
probably evolutionists), the content of the article plays right
into the hands of the intelligent design movement.*
Look: a large interdisciplinary scientific enterprise (IST) has been
organized around the attempt to understand and capitalize on the
information content in biology. The same topics in this article
are prevalent in the ID literature: information theory, reverse
engineering, understanding and detecting design, programming, circuitry,
complexity and communication. The identity of the Designer, though
a vital and interesting subject,** did not enter into the
discussion, and was not vital to achieving the goals of the IST.
This shows that ID is a non-religious scientific approach; it can bear
fruit in a multicultural, secular setting. Rather than bringing
science to a halt, it promotes, stimulates and encourages
scientific discovery—findings that will promise to revolutionize
society, help cure disease, remove the drudgery of our lives and fulfill
the promise of Daniel 12:4 that “many shall go to and fro, and knowledge
shall increase.” It’s past time to remove the ball and chain of
Darwinian mythology and speed ahead into the Information Age—the golden
age of intelligent design.
[2005/06/25] Reverse-Engineering Biological Networks Challenges Caltech Scientists
