title: Nature versus design: synthetic biology or how to build a biological non-machine.
abstract: The engineering ideal of synthetic biology presupposes that organisms are composed of standard, interchangeable parts with a predictive behaviour. In one word, organisms are literally recognized as machines. Yet living objects are the result of evolutionary processes without any purposiveness, not of a design by external agents. Biological components show massive overlapping and functional degeneracy, standard-free complexity, intrinsic variation and context dependent performances. However, although organisms are not full-fledged machines, synthetic biologists may still be eager for machine-like behaviours from artificially modified biosystems.
authors.affiliation: Cavanilles Institute for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, University of Valencia, Spain. manuel.porcar@uv.es juli.pereto@uv.es.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Porcar
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Peretó
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D057005:Bioengineering / Q000379:methods*; D005075:Biological Evolution; D001709:Biotechnology / Q000379:methods; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000378:metabolism; D006801:Humans; D060847:Metabolic Engineering; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000379:methods*; D049490:Systems Biology