Volume 46, Number 7 · April 22, 1999
The Top Designer
By M.F. Perutz
Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People
by Steven Vogel, illustrated by Kathryn K. Davis, by Steven Vogel
Norton, 382 pp., $27.50
Of Flies, Mice, and Men
by François Jacob, translated by Giselle Weiss
Harvard University Press, 158 pp., $24.00
We owe chemists and physicists our knowledge of the composition of living matter, of the conversion of the sun's heat into chemical energy, and of the myriad molecular interactions that sustain life. Steven Vogel's Cats' Paws and Catapults is the first book that has made me look at biology through the eyes of an engineer and compare the mechanics of animals and plants with the objects produced by man. At first sight this project looks unpromising. How can you compare organisms that consist predominantly of carbon with machines that are made of metals? Many of nature's engines are on the molecular scale, which means that they are about 100 million times smaller than a car engine. Man's artifacts are deliberately designed, while nature's structures have evolved blindly, haphazardly, over millions of years, by the reshuffling of genes, by mutation and natural selection of features that have led to more successful offspring. On the other hand, this very success requires living organisms to be constructed on sound engineering principles, which Vogel tries to explain.
Review, 4904 words
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