ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
Topic

engineering

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3d rendered medically accurate illustration of a sprinter

The Human Body As a Marvel of Engineering

Is your body engineered? Or did it evolve through impersonal, random processes over millions of years through natural selection? On this ID The Future, host Wesley J. Smith interviews engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman about their recent book Your Designed Body. In their book, Laufmann and Glicksman evaluate the causal factors of Darwinism - heritability, random mutation, natural selection, and time - and find that they are both inadequate and incapable of producing the interconnected systems of the human body. "The systems that are required to make the human body work," says Laufmann, "are exactly the kinds of things that engineers design and build." Instead, they explain the body through the lens of engineering, showing that design is the most adequate mechanism currently available to explain how the origin of our amazing human bodies. Says Glicksman: "The more we understand how life actually works, the more the neo-Darwinian narrative becomes impossible." This is Part 1 of a two-part interview, originally airing on the Humanize podcast, a production of Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism. Read More ›
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Galapagos Darwin Finch

Is Adaptation Actually a Fight to Stay the Same?

On this ID The Future, host Casey Luskin talks with Eric Anderson on location at this year's Conference on Engineering and Living Systems (CELS). The two discuss an intriguing new engineering-based model of bounded adaptation that could dramatically change how we view small-scale evolutionary changes within populations of organisms. In presenting his argument for natural selection, Charles Darwin pointed to small changes like finch beak size and peppered moth color as visible evidence of an unguided evolutionary process at work. Many have adopted this perspective, quick to grant the Darwinian mechanism credit for micro, if not macro, evolution. But Anderson and other attendees of the CELS conference are starting to promote a different view. "We need to stop saying organisms are partly designed," says Anderson. "We need to view them as deeply designed and purposeful, active and engaged in their environments, and capable of adapting within their operating parameters." Tune in to get a fascinating glimpse of this novel approach to biology. Read More ›
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industrial blueprint

Is a New Design-Based Paradigm of Biology Emerging?

More biologists are returning to the use of design-based assumptions, tools, models, and language to study the natural world. Dr. Brian Miller explains why in Part 1 of a conversation with Casey Luskin. Read More ›
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A Neurosurgeon and an Engineer Explore Your Designed Body

On today’s ID the Future, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor hosts systems engineer Steve Laufmann, author with physician Howard Glicksman of the new book Your Designed Body. Egnor makes the surprising confession that his medical library is full of engineering texts because at some point he discovered that engineering texts, and engineering principles, often shed more light on human physiology than did his physiology books. Egnor, then, is extraordinarily well prepared to interview Laufmann about the amazing engineering of the human body. Tune in for Part 1, and stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3.

Stuart Burgess: Biology’s Designs Tutor Our Top Engineers

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a Bristol University engineer whose design work helped Great Britain’s cycling team win gold in the most recent Summer Olympics. Stuart Burgess, currently on a visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge and an expert on linkage mechanisms, discusses with host Eric Anderson how top engineering firms are paying big money to learn from the extraordinary designs found in biology so as to improve their own designs. Burgess has designed groundbreaking linkage mechanisms, but he says the human knee is still well ahead of what even the most advanced human engineers have managed in this area, even accounting for the fact that wear and tear and misuse can lead to knee problems. He walks listeners through some things that make the knee an engineering marvel, and takes a look at some other masterfully designed linkage mechanisms in nature, including those found in the jaws of fish. The occasion for the discussion is Burgess’s recent scholarly paper in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

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Engineers Crash the Evolution Party, Rethink Biological Variation

On today’s ID the Future, physicist and engineer Brian Miller sits down with host Casey Luskin to survey exciting developments in intelligent design research that are driven by an engineering model for understanding and studying variations in species. ID researchers are pushing this work, but so too are systems biology researchers outside the intelligent design community. Tune in to hear Miller and Luskin discuss everything from fruit flies, finch beaks, and stickleback fish to mutational hotspots, phenotypic plasticity, and the gravity well model of biological adaptation.

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Abstract mechanism with cogwheels on green meadow

The Role of Engineers in the Systems Biology Revolution

Today’s ID the Future spotlights systems biology and the role engineers can play in some leading-edge biology. According to guest Steve Laufmann, systems biology is taking the biological world by storm, an approach that treats biological systems as optimally or near-optimally engineered systems and, using that working assumption, seeks to better understand the system. Laufmann says this provides an opening for engineers to contribute, since they have a deep understanding of what it takes to make a complex system work, and what’s required to change one core aspect of an engineered system so that it continues to work with all of the other crucial parts of the system. Many biologists aren’t trained in this, Laufmann says, and most engineers aren’t trained in the details of biology. Laufmann argues that the way forward is to get engineers and biologists talking, train biologists in engineering principles, and train engineers in biology. Laufmann and host Eric Anderson also discuss a recent conference they helped organize, the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS). Near the end of their conversation, Anderson asks Laufmann to tease some of the research work coming out of the conference, and Laufmann points to one researcher’s work on the bacterial flagellum, and promises more to come.

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Discovery: Renin Nanotech for Blood Pressure Control, Pt. 2

On this ID the Future, physician Howard Glicksman and host Eric Anderson dive deeper into the body’s exquisite blood pressure control system, cueing off a new discovery described at Science Daily as uncovering “the location of natural blood-pressure barometers inside our bodies that have eluded scientists for more than 60 years.” According to the primary research paper at Circulation Research, “Renin-expressing cells are essential for survival, perfected throughout evolution to maintain blood pressure (BP) and fluid-electrolyte homeostasis.” How did evolution perfect the system? How did it originate the system? The paper never says. The mention of evolution appears to be little more than a de rigueur genuflection before the reigning paradigm of blind evolution. What is bearing actual fruit, according to Glicksman and Anderson, is a systems biology approach that has little or nothing to do with evolutionary theory. Systems biologists assume for the sake of research that a biological system under investigation is optimally engineered, and then, working from this assumption, seek to discover the purposes of hitherto mysterious parts and processes in the system. * Dr. Glicksman flagged one point in his podcast commentary in need of correction. Although the lack of aldosterone is generally incompatible with life, a person likely could live several weeks as their hormone levels plummeted. What he meant to say was that if the kidneys could not take back any of the sodium that they filter, human life would only last about a half hour. Either way, the details underscore how vital all the parts of the renin angiotensin aldosterone system are for life.

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An Engineer Talks ID, Biomimicry, and Hacking the Cosmos

On today’s ID the Future, host Casey Luskin sits down with Dominic Halsmer, a Senior Professor of Engineering at Oral Roberts University, to discuss Halsmer’s recent book, Hacking the Cosmos: How Reverse Engineering Uncovers Organization, Ingenuity and the Care of a Maker. Dr. Halsmer draws on the engineering concept of affordances to explore how Earth and the universe show evidence of having been intelligently engineered to afford the possibility of life, and even for humans to discover evidence of a grand designer. Also in the conversation, the implications of biologists using reverse engineering to better understand biological systems, and of engineers studying clever designs in the biological realm to make engineering breakthroughs, a creative strategy known as biomimicry.

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Roger Olsen on the Mystery of Life’s Origin on the Early Earth

On this episode of ID the Future, Robert Marks interviews Roger Olsen, co-author of the groundbreaking 1984 book The Mystery of Life’s Origin. In the book’s epilogue they suggested that a designing intelligence stands as the best explanation for the origin of life. And with a revised and greatly expanded new edition of the book now available, he says that 36 years of additional research from the origin-of-life community has left their conclusions stronger than ever. Now an environmental scientist, Olsen has spent his career since then helping homes and families abroad protect children from the ravages of environmental pollution.