A NEW WEB

I have a new spider’s web complete with a baby spider in my bathroom. They were there for the first time this morning when I got up.A day or so ago the spider existed as just one egg in a clutch of a dozen or so cocooned in spider gossamer and glued onto the inside of the bathroom window frame. Today it is in residence sitting squarely in the middle of a newly constructed web waiting for its dinner.

Have you ever watched a baby spider spin a web? Waiting for a late train one evening at Sellafield Station I did.

First a framework of individual sticky silk threads are spun and attached to any convenient projections. This supports the web. The spider then meticulously and carefully traverses this framework, starting at the centre, and using its legs as a measuring tool spins and attaches the sticky threads that make the body of the web. The fine sticky thread is spun from a spinarette on the tail of the spider and is spun out as required.

The tiny baby spider has never known its mother or father and has never received any instruction on how to spin the silk thread or how to apply it to build the web which is essential to it in order to survive. And yet every baby spider does it perfectly.

We know today that the baby spider, like us, is composed of millions of cells each containing intricate DNA instructions for the assembly of a complete new spider, and also programmed “operating instructions” for the basic life principles which it needs to survive - including how to extract and spin material from its spinarette and precise instructions on web construction.

In plain terms the spider is actually a tiny biological machine controlled by an operating system programmed in DNA code - very similar to the computer on which you are reading this. And just as the computer on which you are reading this, and its operating system and programmes, accidentally evolved themselves into existence through an accumulation of chance errors during the last billion or so years without any intelligent designer, so did the spider.

Marvellous, isn’t it?

This entry was posted on 08/09/2007 at 07:19 pm and is filed under Family Chat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.