Honeybees, Traffic Accidents, and the Immaterial Genome

An RV strangely burst into explosive flames yesterday afternoon in a traffic accident in the Mount Baker tunnel that leads from Seattle across Lake Washington to the city’s Eastside. It trapped a number of us without a way to get home without taking a far longer and more circuitous route to the north, which was itself crowded with many other inconvenienced drivers.

Why do I mention this? Because I turned my nightmare commute into a delight by listening over the course of it to physicist Eric Hedin’s discussion of the intelligent design of honeybees — their behavior, their hives, their migrations, their reproduction — in a talk he gave at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. It’s a new video that’s out now. How all that complexity and agency could somehow be captured in the bees’ relatively simple and bare protein-coding DNA alone is a good question. It’s also one that, I was thinking as I listened, stalled in traffic, seems a lot clearer to me now in light of biologist Richard Sternberg’s immaterial genome thesis. Enjoy:

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