[00:00:01] Speaker A: The intelligent design paradigm predicts that biology will not be found to be routinely characterized by bad design.
As with human designers, an intelligent designer of the natural world would not face the key constraints faced by the evolutionary process.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: A good way to evaluate scientific theories of origins is to ask what we'd expect to find if a given hypothesis were true, and then compare that to what we actually observe.
Under a Darwinian explanation of life. We'd expect to see designs cobbled together by a blind, undirected process, substandard designs that work, but that, in the words of one scientist, wouldn't win any prizes at an engineering competition.
The problem with this view is that it doesn't match up with the scientific evidence.
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today, award winning British engineer and designer Stuart Burgess reads excerpts from his new book, Ultimate Engineering. He's going to share just enough with us today to whet your appetite for reading his book, which is chock full of evidence that humans and other organisms contain countless examples of not just so so not just good or very good, but optimal engineering in the design of systems and structures that keep living things alive.
Now, first he's going to share a few pages from the introduction explaining that there are two views on biology and that contrary to Darwinian expectations, intelligent design actually predicts superior design.
Then he's going to jump into a few examples of that ultimate engineering, including the wrist joint, the middle ear, the eye, and the nervous system.
Then he's going to give you a sneak peek of a new way to understand the amazing diversity of living things that we find on Earth. There's a theory that very adequately explains the extreme diversity of sizes, locomotion types, color producing mechanisms and habitats that are on display all around us.
Finally, he'll share a few words about his own journey advocating for intelligent design and what he has learned about attitudes toward intelligent design and evolution on the ground in the halls of academia.
He'll briefly relate the time when he and famed biologist Richard Dawkins debated, and he'll remind us why we're all qualified to evaluate scientific theories of origins, not just the PhDs and the people on researchers and lab coats.
Now, without further ado, here's Stuart Burgess from his base in Bristol, England, reading portions of his new book, Ultimate Engineering.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Hi, my name is Stuart Burgess and I'm going to read you some excerpts from my new book, Ultimate Engineering.
Two Views of Biology the more we learn about living systems, the more we find ourselves stunned by the masterful designs in biology.
Andrea Rinaldi, an evolutionary biologist and world leading fungi expert whose papers have been cited more than 7,000 times, put it this Biologists often find themselves awestruck by the elegant perfection of living organisms.
From molecules to organisms, scientists and engineers have repeatedly been enthralled by nature's handiwork and have emulated natural designs in man made innovations.
I am one of the engineers he's describing. I have helped design prosthetics, spacecraft for the European Space Agency and the fastest track bike in the world for the British Olympic team.
For four decades I've worked alongside top researchers in biology and engineering, and together we are not only awestruck by the engineering marvels of the biological realm, but inspired by them to make significant engineering breakthroughs outside of biology.
That pursuit, now a sub discipline of its own, is known as biomimetics.
Despite all this, some evolutionists, including Nathan Nance, Abby Hafer, Jerry Coyne, and Richard Dawkins, insist biology is characterized by bad design.
They further argue that this supports the theory of evolution, since Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, working on chance variations now understood as random genetic mutations, is a mindless trial in error process that can be expected to have routinely drifted into into decidedly suboptimal design solutions in the history of life.
What's behind this dramatic divide among life scientists?
On the one hand, we have experimental biologists like Rinaldi who are reporting detailed scientific observations from the laboratory that reveal ultimate engineering in biology.
On the other hand, we have biologists such as Lentz and Dawkins who make claims of bad design based on the evolutionary prediction of bad design, and typically do so in areas of biology for which they lack expertise.
This latter group are so keen to see a sub optimal design in biology that they overlook evidence of ultimate engineering.
Intelligent design predicts superior design in contrast to evolutionary theory, the intelligent design paradigm predicts that biology will not be found to be routinely characterized by bad design.
As with human designers, an intelligent designer of the natural world would not face the key constraints faced by the evolutionary process.
Most fundamentally, an intelligent designer, unlike evolution, can employ foresight to envision a solution well beyond anything in existence at the time and then set about making that envisioned solution a reality.
And as this book's title makes clear, I will go further than claiming an absence of bad design.
I will argue that biology contains design that is far superior to human technology, design that is in fact ultimate engineering.
By this I mean design at the limit of what is possible.
Take the lubrication system in animal joints. It's not just optimal, it's at the limit of what is physically possible and far better than the best human lubrication system.
This expectation of ultimate engineering fits comfortably with the intelligent design paradigm, and all the more so when reinforced by a specifically theistic design paradigm.
For if the whole universe, including its laws and materials, is understood to have been made by an intelligent designer, as theism holds, then it follows that this designer would possess intimate knowledge of how to use those laws and materials to produce designs at the limit of performance.
The wrist joint two views of the wrist joint in 2024 I published a state of the art review paper on the multifunctionality of human and animal joints.
The paper shows that multifunctionality is a key reason for the extreme levels of agility found in animals and recommends that robot designers emulate this feature to produce better robots.
One of the paper's main case studies of brilliant multifunctionality in nature is that of the human wrist joint.
The paper was well received, gaining acceptance for publication in the well ranked journal Biomimetics and chosen as the COVID story and lead paper out of 72 for that issue. Further evidence that such a finding are being embraced by the mainstream of experts in the field.
Despite the fact that the wrist joint is superior to any prosthetic wrist that engineers have produced, some critics insist that it is a terrible design.
The wrist bones and ankle bones, writes Nathan Lentz, are the most obnoxious examples of bones for which we have no use.
Here again, he has been drawn into serious scientific error by a paradigm that anticipates poor design. With the evolutionary process assumed to have clumsily evolved a knuckle walking quadruped into a bipedal human.
The incredible Multifunctioning Wrist we so easily take the wrist for granted, but it is one of the key reasons for the extraordinary dexterity of the hand.
We need the wrist joint for activities such as getting dressed, washing up, playing most ball sports and playing musical instruments.
It is also it also made our forebears uniquely skilled at farming, building and hunting.
To perform the complex movements in these activities, the wrist needs to be able to rotate in three perpendicular directions.
Firstly, the wrist can rotate axially for actions like turning a door handle or turning a screwdriver.
Pronation of the forearm rotates the palm of the hand down and supination rotates the palm up.
Secondly, forward bending, moving the palm of the hand towards the forearm is called flexion. Backward bending, moving the back of the hand towards the forearm is called extension and thirdly the wrist can also flex to either side, abduction away from the midline to the thumb side, an adduction towards the midline to the pinky little finger side Actions used in waving and washing.
Some actions, like throwing a curveball in baseball, involve a combination of all these three joint rotations.
Despite these many parts, the wrist is remarkably compact.
It is so slender that it is a good place to feel the pulse in the radial artery.
At the same time, the wrist is remarkably robust. If we use the wrist with care, it is capable of working for an 80 year lifespan performing millions of movements.
The volume of the eight wrist bones is small for an adult, typically about that of a golf ball, and yet the amount of functionality packed into the wrist is astounding.
This is why engineers are in all of the wrist joint.
Carpal Tunnel Function the carpal tunnel is formed from an arch made from six of the eight wrist bones.
The six bones include all four from the top row and two bones from the bottom row shaded in Figure 3.5. There is also a transverse carpal ligament on the palm side of the hand that forms a complete tunnel. As seen in Figure 4.1.
This arch has an important job of providing a protective tunnel for delicate tendons, nerves and blood vessels.
Incredibly, even though the eight wrist bones are fine tuned to produce two joints, the same bones are also perfect for forming a carpal arch.
In fact, the wrist actually forms other arches together with the fingers that give the palm of the hand a naturally concave shape ideal for grasping round objects. This means the wrist forms multiple arches in different directions.
The astonishing degree of precision engineering involved in achieving this multifunctionality is nothing short of a design masterclass.
The Middle Ear the middle ear is an exquisite assembly of tiny precision components.
The bones and muscles of the middle ear are the smallest in the body.
The stapes bone is the smallest bone of all, just 2 to 3 millimeters long.
A unique feature of the ear bones is that they do not grow during childhood.
This is not surprising because the design is so delicate that growing could misalign the precise arrangement.
Fig. 8.3 shows how the three bones form a linkage system to convert pressure waves at the eardrum into pressure waves within the cochlea.
Biology books almost always refer to the bones as a simple lever system, but this is another oversimplification.
A simple lever system would have just one hinge, but the middle ear has four hinges. If you include the connection of the eardrum to the malleus and the stapes to the oval window of the cochlea the exact dynamics of the linkage system are highly intricate and remain under investigation.
The hinges of the bones are formed by the bone joints in tiny ligaments.
The linkage mechanism has various functions. It serves as a lever for amplifying force, it lends elasticity to aid resonance, and it allows for the acoustic reflex discussed below.
The linkage system increases force by a factor of 1.3.
Because the vibratory area of the eardrum is around 14 times greater than that of the oval window, the sound pressure is amplified by a factor of around 18.
As a mechanical engineer, I am very impressed by the fact that the middle ear is suspended by ligaments.
This is a smart engineering choice since it makes for an extremely efficient linkage with low friction and minimal energy loss.
The Ingenious Acoustic Reflex One consequence of having extremely sensitive ears is that they can be vulnerable to loud noises.
When engineering sensitive sound detection, equipment designers implement clever solutions to protect the device from loud noises.
The human ear features a particularly clever solution.
The ear has an ingenious acoustic reflex that rapidly tightens the tiny muscles in the middle ear in response to loud noises.
The stapedius muscle cools the stapes of the middle ear away from the cochlear's oval window, while the tensor tympani muscle stiffens the assembly of the ear bones by pulling on the eardrum and malleus together. These actions dampen the transmission of vibrational energy to the cochlea when confronted with loud noises.
This intricate safety device involves an astonishing level of precision design.
An Ear evolution story from reptile to mammal Recall that evolutionists proposed that the middle ear of mammals evolved from the middle ear of reptile creatures called synapsids.
What would such an evolutionary transition have involved?
Reptiles have a simple inner ear with one bone.
The mammalian in inner ear, as we saw, has a chain of three bones.
Figure 8.4 shows how two of the jawbones of reptiles supposedly migrated and rearranged themselves to become the inner ear of mammals.
The incus supposedly came from the reptilian upper jaw, while the malleus supposedly came from the reptilian lower jaw. There is no evidence of such movements. It is just speculation.
The scenario may seem plausible at first sight, but an engineering analysis reveals huge problems.
The three bones of the mammalian ear are not just static bones, but are joined in a chain with synovial joints, and each joint must be shaped very precisely to provide an appreciable benefit to the creature.
A second problem with the reptile to mammal picture is that it is a gross simplification of the middle ear and that it ignores the ligaments and muscles.
There are at least nine components to the middle ear.
So when evolutionists say they can explain the origin of two extra bones, they are ignoring at least six other parts, each precisely shaped and integrated into the hole.
Chapter 9 the Eye Two Views of the Human Eye during my time designing spacecraft systems with the European Space Agency, I had the honor of working on the solar array deployment system for the Hubble Space Telescope.
It was a great experience with NASA and ESA working together.
Although there was a running debate about which units to use English or metric.
During this project, I saw firsthand how brilliant engineering can produce a powerful vision system.
Yet the Hubble Space Telescope does not begin to compare with the vision system of the human eye.
Computer scientists M. Ponvialo and V. Kumar work on artificial vision systems. They said the human visual system is a remarkable instrument.
It features two mobile image acquisition units. Each has a formidable pre processing circuitry placed at a remote location from the central processing system, the brain. Its primary tasks include transmitting tiny images within a viewing angle of at least 140 degrees and resolution of 1 arc minute over a limited capacity carrier. The million or so fibers in each optic nerve.
That description only scratches the surface of how the eye is a masterpiece of engineering.
Irreducible complexity of the Trochlear Pulley the trochlear pulley is my favorite part of the eye. A very clever design solution for improving the movement of the eye.
Since muscles are anchored at the back of the eye and since muscles only apply a force in contraction, the muscles can only pull the eye back.
This constraint of approaching the eye from the back would restrict the range and efficiency of movement. But for a brilliant design solution to overcome this restriction, use of a ring like device, the trochlear pulley to allow the superior oblique muscle to approach the eye from the side. As shown in the figure 9.2 b, the superior oblique muscle is located behind the eyeball, but the muscle passes through the trochlear pulley to allow the muscle to approach the eyeball from the side and hence pull the eye sideways. This trochlear muscle complex is not just a clever design feature, it is also irreducibly complex. The pulley in the muscle routing are both needed at the same time to be useful. For example, if the pulley suddenly appeared by accident, it would be of no use without the muscle threaded through it. To propose that a pulley developed by accident and that a muscle somehow threaded through it at the same time is not credible answering Claims of Bad Design it has long been a talking point of evolution defenders that the vertebrate eye is wired backwards. That is, in a way that no savvy engineer would have chosen, but that the higgledy piggledy evolutionary process might well have.
In 2015, Ryback reported in Scientific American on a new finding.
He said this until recently, it seemed as if the cells in the retina were wired the wrong way round, with light traveling through a mass of neurons before reaching the light detecting rod and cone cells, setting the scene in what could be best described as an overly generous reconstruction of the evolutionary prior insistence on the backward wiring.
Ryback continues and says new research presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society has uncovered a remarkable vision enhancing function for this puzzling structure.
Specifically, researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology found that the dense glial cells, also called muller cells, which span the retinal depth and connect to the cones, guide light just like optical cables and hence improve vision.
Thus, what some had claimed was a design weakness, backward wiring that points to unguided and suboptimal evolutionary design, is now known to be a design strength on multiple levels.
The researchers started publishing their findings in 2010. By 2015, their research was well established and attracting widespread publicity.
Despite this, evolutionists like Lentz and Dawkins continue to claim that the human eye is poorly designed due to being supposedly wired backwards.
They write, light must travel through a thin film of tissue and blood vessels before reaching the photoreceptors, adding another layer of needless complexity to this already complicated system, asserts Lentz. To date, there is no workable hypothesis that explains why the vertebrate retina is wired backwards.
Lentz published this statement in 2018, three years after the prominent Scientific American article explaining another sound functional reason for the backward wiring, and a year after Jonathan Wells highlighted the findings in his 2017 book Zombie Science.
Once again, Lentz, like Dawkins, Miller and Futuruma before him, is guilty of following his evolutionary paradigm rather than following the scientific evidence.
In her book the not so Intelligent Designer, Abi Hafer was very derogatory towards intelligent design science scientists claiming that ID hates biology. And yet it is Abby Hafer who consistently ignores scientific facts throughout her book in order to follow an evolutionary paradigm.
Hafer published her book in 26, the year after the wired backwards claim of bad design was debunked in scientific American.
Chapter 15 the Nervous System Two Views of the Nervous System I have a deep appreciation of the design of the nervous system having led the design of the wiring subsystem for the solar array on the world's largest Earth observation satellite, Envisat.
The system wiring required immense planning and foresight. I had to route more than 400 wires over a combined distance of more than three miles.
There were many occasions when I had to ask permission to put a hole through a critical structure in order to get the wires to their destinations.
These and other issues impacting two or more design teams called for delicate compromise, collaboration, and planning.
All of us who worked on Envisat's wiring systems are justly proud of the work we contributed to that advanced engineering project.
But compared to the human nervous system, our work was like toddlers playing with shoelaces.
That's a whimsical way of putting it, but it's no exaggeration.
The human nervous system is a vastly more sophisticated design than any wiring system engineers have ever devised, possessing a breathtaking level of detail and precision design and planning are written all over it.
Like other engineers, I am in awe of the human nervous system.
Incredibly, despite the sheer brilliance of the human nervous system, evolutionists such as Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and Nathan Lentz have tried to find fault with some of the design details. But as we shall see, their criticism is a reflection of their lack of knowledge of design principles and not of anything lacking in the nervous systems. Design Quality One challenge with any complex mechanical system is to get wiring to every motor and sensor. In the case of the human body, this task is unimaginably great.
The human body has nerve pathways from the brain to every cubic millimeter of the body.
To give a sense of how fine grained this is, a cubic millimeter is smaller than a small grain of rice, and it takes a thousand cubic millimeters just to make 1 cubic centimeter.
For the nervous system to be so finely branched that it can reach every cubic millimeter of the body is just astounding.
A good example of integration is the way the bones have holes for nerves to pass through. This reminds me how I had to put holes in spacecraft structures to get wiring from one part of the spacecraft to another.
The skull has more than 20 openings to allow nerves and blood vessels to enter and exit the brain.
Figure 15.2 shows several of the major openings.
The best known of these is the large hole for the spinal cord called the foramen magnum. But there are other important openings for major parts, such as jugular veins and optic nerves. Each of these holes need to be planned.
A hole for the optic nerve in the eye is only useful if there is a functioning eye, but an eye is no use if there is no passageway to the brain for the optic nerve.
Ultimate Diversity Throughout Nature A theistic design paradigm anticipates ultimate diversity the previous chapter argued that a theistic design paradigm correctly anticipates ultimate engineering in biology.
Here I want to argue that this designing intelligence can also be expected to produce extremes of diversity in the biosphere, including the extreme diversity of sizes, extreme diversity of locomotion types, extreme diversity of color producing mechanisms, extreme diversity of habitat.
This is an inference drawn partially from observing human designers. I know from my 40 years of experience in engineering that designers like to explore extremes of design.
It makes perfect sense then, to suppose that God, having performed the herculean task of creating a planet for life, would seek to explore extremes of design for pleasure and to demonstrate his wisdom and power.
Another motivation for designing extreme diversity is to provide an abundance of organisms for humankind to use and appreciate.
Yet another reason for diversity is to give examples of brilliant design for humankind to copy.
Whereas evolutionary theory must scramble to throw up strange and ad hoc explanations for the countless manifestations of extreme diversity in the biosphere, such findings are readily accommodated by the theory of intelligent design.
And more than this strongly anticipated under a hypothesis of theistic design.
From dinosaurs at the limit of how big an animal can be to laser beams and peacock feathers and the wondrous riot of extreme diversity in between life points not to a mechanism incapable of thought, foresight, planning, and ingenious leaps of creativity, but to a master designer interested in exploring variety in color, mechanisms and locomotion, extremes of habitat, and the limits of size great and small.
Such a panoply of ultimate engineering points to a singularly intelligent design.
As a concluding aside to this chapter, I can't resist adding an observation that an intelligent designer such as we see coming into focus from the above observations could also be expected to explore a great diversity of designs of stars and galaxies.
Therefore, I would argue that the vast universe is also very much what a theistic design paradigm anticipates.
Chapter 22 my experience advocating Intelligent Design, Intelligent Design and a lunchtime lecture in 2006, I gave a lunchtime intelligent design talk at my university, which turned out to be bigger and more controversial than I planned. It was initially meant to be a low key lecture to a small group of around 10 Pro ID students.
However, one undergraduate managed to find an email list that enabled him to invite the entire university and he did not tell me when the venue was changed to the largest lecture room in the engineering department.
I could not understand why, but When I turned up, the reason became clear.
When I entered the large lecture room, I was surprised to see hundreds of students and lecturers, including many senior professors from the biology and paleontology departments.
I spent 45 minutes summarizing evidence for intelligent design, but also an hour in Q and A.
It became clear that many students were fascinated by my argument that the theory of intelligent design is supported by strong scientific evidence.
But it was also clear that a minority of academics were angry I was giving a pro ID lecture within the university.
The following day, I was passing my dean and I asked him if he had heard about the lecture, to which he replied, the whole university is discussing that ID lecture.
He also told me he strongly supported my right to free speech.
Following the lecture, I was surprised how many academic colleagues came to me and said they also took the ID position or were sympathetic to it.
Most of them, especially the biologist, did not want to go public about it.
In one case, a senior biologist suggested he joined me in teaching a unit that critiqued the theory of evolution.
However, after a few weeks, he said he realized it could cost him his career and so he pulled out.
It was sad seeing firsthand how academic bullying can damage science and education.
Many students also came to me and said they really wish there could be more debates about intelligent design within the university.
They were disappointed when the universities decided they one ID lecture was enough.
I received several friendly emails from students after the lecture. Here are just a few.
The biology department asked people to oppose your point of view and questions had been prearranged, an attitude I find strange as a student, and that was a biology student.
The talk was amazing, people being turned away as we packed out the lecture theater. Thank you for the tremendous gentleness you showed despite a lot of angry biologists.
That was from an engineering student.
I've never seen the lecture have such a big impact on so many people.
That was a biology student really enjoyed the lecture and Q and A. I spent most of the Q and A trying to understand what was being said.
That was an engineering student.
I found this last comment from a engineering student trying to understand what was being said quite funny.
But his difficulty stemmed not from any lack of intelligence, but from being completely new to the IDevolution conversation.
There is a serious point here. Many students are unaware of the extensive arguments against evolutionary theory and for intelligent design.
The educational system up to that point having studiously shielded them from any such dangerous information.
Dawkins Admission I once had a brief debate with Richard Dawkins on the subject of intelligent design. It played out on the letters page of a UK national newspaper, the Guardian.
I, together with one of my colleagues, Andy McIntosh, explained how scientific principles like the second law of thermodynamics support intelligent design.
Dawkins countered by arguing that intelligent design proponents were a tiny minority in academia and took a position radically at odds with the evolutionary paradigm.
He said this maybe Burgess and Mackintosh are right, and all the rest of us biologists, geologists, archaeologists, historians, chemists, physicists, cosmologists, and yes them, are dynamicists and respectable theologians. The vast majority of Nobel Prize winners, Fellows of the Royal Society and the National Academies of the world are wrong.
Not just slightly wrong, but catastrophically, appallingly, devastatingly wrong.
My purpose, dawkins continues in this article, is to convey the full magnitude of the error into which, if Burgess and Mackintosh are right, the scientific establishment has fallen.
When Dawkins writes Maybe Burgess and McIntosh, I agree.
However, it is not the scientific establishment that is in danger of falling, but the Darwinian paradigm.
And Dawkins is mistaken to assume that academics support the paradigm of design for evolution with almost perfect uniformity.
My more than 30 years of academic experience tells me there is widespread lack of confidence in the idea and a growing openness to intelligent design.
You don't need a Ph.D.
like many other researchers today, I am awestruck by the ultimate engineering of biological systems and can see how this points to intentional and purposeful design.
But you do not have to have research grants or a PhD to be awestruck by design. In biology, you only need to look at your own hands and feet, or consider your creative abilities, or contemplate your capacity to sense beauty.
If there is an intelligent designer, people ask, shouldn't he demonstrate his existence?
Will I believe the designer has done so through ultimate engineering, through extremes of design, and most of all through the design of humankind.
[00:35:50] Speaker C: That was Stuart Burgess reading from the pages of his new book, Ultimate Engineering. I hope that's given you a little glimpse into the evidence he's assembled and makes you want to learn more. You can actually get your hands on a copy of this book at the website of Discovery Institute Press, which is Discovery Press. Easy one to remember. Discovery Press.
And if you haven't enjoyed my two part interview with him where we unpack all kinds of evidence presented in his book, be sure to look for that as well. It's on your favorite podcast platform and audio, but it's also available on YouTube on our YouTube channel. You can get to that YouTube.com dthefuture well, I'm Andrew McDermott. Join us again next time. Thank you for being here.
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
