The book, Engineering and the Ultimate: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Order and Design in Nature and Craft (editors Bartlett, Halsmer, and Hall) gets 5 stars from me especially for having an excellent beginning and ending. The cover, showing an engineered hand holding something infinitely more advanced against the backdrop of da Vinci’s designs, is artistically displayed, and the last words of Mignea are well worth receiving into the soul. Other aspects of the book are interesting, too. Page 5 says “that reverse engineering is a fruitful methodology for natural investigations.”On page 14, we learn that da Vinci said that “the human foot is a masterpiece of engineering.” I was not familiar with the term affordance, but it is discussed on page 24ff. Another word I did not know was palimpsest (cf. pages 79ff). The appropriateness of architecture being designed for particular settings and the ideas of John Ruskin were considered. The concept of a Turing machine was new to me. On page 111, the idea was presented that if man can “solve incomputable functions,” then physicalism “is false.” On page 146, we read that folding protein sequences “were not generated randomly….” Biomimetics was discusses—how engineers are more and more looking to biological organisms to inspire their work (cf. p167). Mignea pointed out that man, in all his present scientific sophistication, is not able to produce even a simple “self-replicator,” but such exist in nature in abundance (p209). On page 210, we read, “The NASA REPRO study was the most exhaustive attempt to design a self-replicator, which estimated the replicator to weigh 100,000 tons (unfueled) and reproduce every 500 years.” The butterfly image on the front cover does not weigh 100,000 tons and does not take 500 years to reproduce. On page 217, we read these words of wisdom: “The belief that the laws of nature and any sequence of natural events and circumstances could have created a self-replicating cell does not have a rational foundation.”
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