Examples of Recurring Design Logic in Living Systems
Architects, painters, musicians, and other creators apply recognizable patterns of thinking to their craft, resulting in a trademark style that sets them apart from others. Can similar patterns of thinking also be found in nature’s design? On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Jonathan McLatchie, a resident biologist and fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, dives into the microscopic world to explore examples of what he calls recurring design logic in living systems. These recurring themes and logic are widespread in diverse, often unrelated biological systems. On the perspective of intelligent design, they’d be expected. But an unguided evolutionary perspective would have difficulty explaining this compelling line of evidence.
In his book Darwin’s Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe encourages us to bite the bullet of complexity in order to understand why Darwinian explanations fall short of explaining the origin and diversity of life. In this conversation, Dr. McLatchie gives us a nice dose of that stunning complexity as he discusses these key examples of recurring design logic:
- Two-component regulatory systems in bacteria, which sense and respond to environmental changes, such as E. coli’s regulation of outer membrane proteins in response to osmolarity
- Chemotaxis, a signal transduction system that enables bacteria to move towards attractants or away from poisons, featuring a fascinating chemical “memory system”
- Quorum sensing, a mechanism allowing bacterial populations to coordinate actions based on density, like secreting toxins or bioluminescence, and its implications for pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance
- Transcriptional hierarchies, regulatory systems where genes are expressed in a specific, ordered sequence, highlighted by the intricate assembly of the bacterial flagellum in Salmonella and sporulation in Bacillus subtilis
This discussion offers us a journey into the unseen ingenuity of the bacterial realm, presenting these systems as powerful evidence for intelligent design in nature.
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