In his book, Vital Dust, Nobel Laureate Chritian de Duve writes, "A bioengineer attempting to construct a cell designed to proliferate as fast as possible could not come up with anything better than a bacterial cell." Indeed. In fact, as I point out in The Design Matrix, reproduction is the means by which a front-loading designer can perpetuate designs far into the future. Yet the simple perpetuation of design through reproduction would not be enough. The cell, as a vehicle that both expresses and carries the design, would be designed with sufficient resiliency to persist across deep time. It is this inherent resiliency that prevents the blind watchmaker from relying entirely on mutation and reproduction such that the original designs would all be erased over deep time due to countless selection pressures. Resiliency, in essense, represents a phenotypic space where the blind watchmaker is not needed. This combination (balance?) of enhanced proliferation and resiliency would allow the designed life forms to spread a network of deep roots into and througout the entire Earth, further ensuring many existing populations are significantly tied to their original ancestral states "“ the designed state (ie., front-loading).

Recent discoveries about the resiliency of bacterial life continue to impress scientists. One recently discovered species, Chryseobacterium greenlandensis, is quite remarkable:

In Greenland, a drilling team sponsored by the National Science Foundation discovered dormant bacteria eking out a living 1.8 miles (about three kilometers) below the island's enormous ice cap. Loveland-Curtze described the finding Tuesday at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston.

The cells were so small that 1.5 billion of them would fit in a tablespoon. They apparently survived by feeding off nutrients in tiny veins of water inside the ice. Their metabolism was barely enough to preserve their DNA, and they'd have had enough energy to divide only once in thousands of years.

"We know that they had survived for at least 120,000 years," Loveland-Curtze said in an e-mail message. "The proof that they were alive is that we grew them in the laboratory." That's a standard scientific proof and the same test that gardeners apply to seeds.

What a remarkable example of resiliency! Of course, it is best to wait for the paper to eventually come out, but assuming this is all sound, a question arises. Is this ability to survive by basically keep things going at a level sufficient for reproduction every few thousand years an adapatation? Or is it a pre-adaptation?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Cell, The Design Matrix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/the-resiliency-of-life/trackback/