>Much as the Benedictine monks thought they were glorifying God with their
>suberb time mechanisms for controlling the labour of their workforce, in
>the thirteenth century, the feature of machinery is that it is so designed
>that each cog is massively stable relative to what it has to do, and does
>not equlibrate chaotically with the external environment. Human clockwork
>and other machinery operates with a regularity that is *unlike* that of
>planetary bodies for example.
Yes. Both within and beyond cells, organic structures are continually dissolving and rebuilding. It's a dynamic kind of structure, as opposed to the static structure of machines. In a machine, every part must do precisely two things. It must first perform its function and then reset in order to perform it again. This is totally alien to the landscape of an organism. To prove that organisms are machines, it's not enough to show how a particular event is facilitated by a particular mechanism. We must also show how this mechanism itself is able to appear in exactly the right place and time to carry out its function. (Is there a secondary mechanism to account for the primary mechanism, and then a tertiary mechanism to account for the secondary one, and so on and so on?)
The basis of cellular activity is the interaction between molecules and proteins. Their mutual shaping is strictly a result of standard chemical reactions. But first the proteins have to line up in the proper sequence. It's somehwat like an assembly line but one that appears out of nowhere when it's needed and disappears when its job is completed. Neither chemistry nor strange attractors can account for this process. It's the kind of thing DNA was supposed to explain with its "blueprints."
>But could Newton explain why there is an asteroid belt in the solar system.
>Did he understand that the three body problem is unsolvable in any strictly
>predictable way? No.
I'm not familiar with this. Could you elaborate a little?
Ted