Can natural selection account for the origin of these complex molecular machines?
A. Not at present. Again, we don’t have the mechanism. I think that natural selection can preserve them, and this is in part I think where we may, you know, if I could look at in a crystal ball and see a melding of these two ideas. Natural selection is definitely a preservative. The question is whether or not it’s generative and if it can produce these novel structures de novo, but certainly once these structures are around it has a preservative effect, which is very, very, very important in our study of biology.
