Hes not talking about design engineering, is he, introducing design engineering into the biology curricula?
A. If you look at the acknowledgments, I am indebted to Jonathan Alberts for his explanations of how engineers analyze machines. On the other part, if I can find the right quote, at the heart of such methods is a simplification and the idealization of a real world machine as a composition of discreet elements. Engineers recognize certain fundamental behaviors in nature and then create an idealized element to represent each of those behaviors. Most simply, they classify elements as those that store kinetic energy, and those that store potential energy, and those that dissipate energy. Any particular part of a machine might be modeled as consisting of one or more of these basic constituent elements. It seems reasonable to expect that different, but analogous approaches, could probably be applied to the protein machines that underlie the workings of all living cells. This is an engineering approach to looking at the intricate coordinated interaction of molecular machines. And I agree with
