When Engineering Meets Biology: More From Our Scientist Roundtable
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When biologists use principles of engineering to study living systems, they can gain a richer, deeper understanding of how and why life works. But most biologists are trained to view design as the product of a blind, purposeless, gradual evolutionary process. Today on ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his discussion with four scientists who are helping to change the study of biology for the better: geologist and lawyer Casey Luskin, biochemist and metabolic nutritionist Emily Reeves, biologist Jonathan McLatchie, and physicist Brian Miller. In today’s concluding segment, the discussion turns to the fruitfulness of an engineering approach to biology. The scientists provide examples of engineering principles at work in living things. They also respond to occasional claims from Darwinists of flawed or suboptimal design in organisms.
In this episode, Dr. Jonathan McLatchie explains that researchers find recurring engineering logic and common design patterns—such as four-bar linkage systems in anatomy and two-component systems in bacteria—in different, often genetically unrelated, organisms, suggesting these systems share a common intelligent source. Emily Reeves then shares the example of glucose transporters, which function similarly to engine throttle valves and demonstrate that biological systems share high-level design concepts with human engineering but are also optimized differently based on specific constraints.
Like any scientific theory of origins, intelligent design will rise or fall on the strength of the scientific evidence. So ID scientists are laser-focused on research projects that they hope will illuminate the strength of design arguments. CSC Research Coordinator Dr. Brian Miller explains that this focus is at the heart of everything he and his colleagues are doing: “The whole ID 3.0 research program is showing not only that design detection is reliable and applies to life, but when you start with a design framework, it allows you to make better predictions and it also allows you to have much, much deeper insights and greater understanding of what you see in life.”
This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Watch or listen to Part 1.
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