Joseph P Farrell – This story was shared by so many regular readers here that I have to talk about it, for they suspect – and I agree with them – that this story is fraught with long-term implications that can only gladden the frigid hearts of transhumanists, bent on their merger of man and machine to create New Transhumanist Man,. in this article from Nature by Davide Castelvecchi:

Living cells bind silicon and carbon for the first time Modified bacterial enzyme taught to make bonds that evolution avoids. [see article]

The article is clear enough on why the non-appearance silicon-based life forms, which would seem to be implied by some versions of evolutionary theory, do not appear naturally, but must be made to appear:

Silicon is all around us: after oxygen, it is the most abundant element in Earth’s crust. So why living beings never incorporate it into their biochemistry has long been a puzzle.

Now chemical engineers have discovered that living organisms can be nudged to bind carbon and silicon together. They showed that a natural enzyme from a bacterium that lives in hot springs can form C–Si bonds inside living Escherichia coli cells — when the cells are fed the right silicon-containing compounds. And by engineering the enzyme, the researchers created a biological catalyst that performs the reaction more efficiently than any artificial one. Continue reading →