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ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
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Why Human Skeletal Joints Are Engineering Masterpieces, Pt. 1

Episode
1660
Guest(s)
Stuart Burgess
Duration
00:34:37
Download
Audio File (22.1 mb)
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On this ID the Future, Stuart Burgess, one of Britain’s top engineers, explains how the skeletal joints in the human body are masterpieces of intelligent design. He also responds to claims by some evolutionists that human joints are badly designed and supposedly evidence of Darwinian evolution’s blind trial-and-error process. This presentation was taped at the 2022 Westminster Conference on Science and Faith in the greater Philadelphia area, which was jointly sponsored by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and Westminster Theological Seminary. Here in Part 1, Burgess focuses on the ankle joint, showing that it packs an extraordinary amount of functionality into a small space, beyond anything human engineers have managed to achieve either in prosthetics or robotics.

Stuart Burgess

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Professor of Engineering Design at University of Bristol
Dr Stuart Burgess has held academic posts at Bristol University (UK), Cambridge University (UK), and Liberty University (USA). He has published over 200 scientific publications on the science of design in engineering and biology. In the last three Olympics he was the lead transmission designer for the British Olympic Cycling Team, helping them on each occasion to be ranked in first place for track cycling. For the last two decades his gearboxes have been used successfully on all the large earth-observation satellites of the European Space Agency. He has received many national and international awards for design, including from the Minister of State for Trade and Industry in the UK. In 2019 he was given the top mechanical engineer award in the UK out of 120,000 professional mechanical engineers. He has been an invited speaker in over 30 countries.
Tags
ankle joint
arthritis
bad design arguments
biomechanics
Design
dysteleology
four-bar linkage
Great Britain cycling team
Leonardo da Vinci
Nathan Lents
Stuart Burgess
wrist joint