Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines

• Publisher: Landes Bioscience
• Number Of Pages: 341
• Publication Date: 2004-10-30
• Sales Rank: 999392
• ISBN / ASIN: 1570596905
• EAN: 9781570596902
• Binding: Hardcover
• Manufacturer: Landes Bioscience
• Studio: Landes Bioscience
• Average Rating: 5
• Review:

  Engineering becomes Biology

  In our lab this is universally known as "The Bunny Book", for reasons that you can deduce by looking at the cover. You may also deduce that we refer to it sufficiently frequently to have given it a nickname. The reason it is simple - it is an outstandingly comprehensive work of reference for all the ideas and history in the burgeoning field of artificial replication.
  
  Biology is the study of things that copy themselves. It used to be that the only examples we had of such things were those that had come about naturally by Darwin's Law of Evolution. But for the first time we are entering an age of intelligent design, with the only intelligence available to do the designing being our own. People are starting to build biological machines to go along with the natural living machines (including ourselves) that have evolved; at the small scale they are mostly doing this using the construction kit supplied by biochemistry; at the large scale they are simply using the ordinary mechanical and electronic components of conventional engineering.
  
  This is one of the main the books upon which the biological revolution that will result will be founded. None of the consequent creations (nor our children) can escape Darwin's Law, of course - that is as fundamental as the Second Law of Thermodynamics upon which it depends. But we are adding an extra source of change to the random mutations that have driven evolution for three and a half billion years: thought-out innovation deduced from accurate scientific models of how matter, energy, and information behave.
  
  Buy this book to get in at the start of the revolution that will give us the most exciting, terrible, and wonderful machines that have ever been made.

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