namaqua sandgrouse
Namaqua sandgrouse drinking water
Image Credit: Alta Oosthuizen - Adobe Stock
ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
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This Sandgrouse Just Took the Royal Society to Design School

Episode
1744
With
Casey Luskin
Guest(s)
Brian Miller
Duration
00:23:25
Download
Audio File (12.3 mb)
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Today’s ID the Future takes a look at how scientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University are picking up clever engineering tricks by studying the feather design of the Namaqua sandgrouse. Ordinary bird feathers are already a master class in ingenious design, but as Jochen Mueller and Lorna Gibson show in a recent Royal Society Interface paper, the males of this desert-dwelling sandgrouse from southwestern Africa “have specially adapted feathers on their bellies that hold water, even during flight, allowing the birds to transport water back to the chicks at the nest.” Episode guest Brian Miller details the ingenious design of these feathers and tells how they are inspiring human inventions, one of which could help desert communities collect water from the air more efficiently. From there Miller takes listeners through a flyover of other inventions inspired by ingenious designs in biology and discusses how this invention strategy is proving so fruitful that it’s now treated as an interdisciplinary subdiscipline known as biomimetics. For more from Miller about this exciting field and how it repeatedly highlights evidence of intelligent design in biology, see his chapter in the new book Science and Faith in Dialogue, available as a free digital download.

Brian Miller

Research Coordinator and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Dr. Miller obtained a BS in physics with a minor in engineering from MIT and a PhD in complex systems physics from Duke University. His research focuses on thermodynamics, information theory, protein rarity, and the origin of life. Dr. Miller is a Senior Fellow and Research Coordinator for the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. He helps manage the ID 3.0 Research Program and helped launch the biannual Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS).