Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone. A quick heads up before we get to today's episode. This fall, Discovery Institute Academy will be offering both high school biology and high school chemistry for the coming school year. These high quality online courses are designed especially for homeschool students.
They cover the fundamentals of biology and chemistry and also introduce students to the powerful evidence of intelligent design in nature.
The courses include video lectures, readings, lab activities, assignments, and more. They're designed to make it easy to teach science to your kids. There are options with a live science teacher and an option that is completely self paced. Even if you don't have kids who can participate, can you help us get the word out to those who do? For a limited time, parents who register their student can get $50 off tuition. These courses are a wonderful way to raise up the next generation of scientists. Scientists who understand that we and our universe are intelligently designed. For more information, visit DiscoveryInstitute Academy. That's DiscoveryInstitute Academy, Idaho. The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Most biologists are trained to view organisms as emerging from a bottom up, undirected process that did not have any end goals in mind.
They might recognize patterns of design in living things, but they're trained to see that design as merely the illusion of design, not the product of intelligence.
But there are scientists who think that view of living things limits scientific study.
The Engineering Working Group at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture is a cohort of scientists who think we can better understand biological systems by applying engineering principles to the study of organismal form.
My guest today is physicist Dr. Brian Miller. He's one of the scientists in the Engineering Working Group and he helped launch a conference that brings biologists and engineers together to share their research and insight with the public. It's called the Conference on Engineering in the Life Sciences, or Cells. Brian, welcome back to the podcast.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back.
[00:02:16] Speaker C: So at the end of July here.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: This year, Discovery Institute will host the third conference on engineering in living systems. This conference is associated, as I said, with the Engineering Research Group. So let's start there. Can you tell us what the ERG for short does and what its mission is?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Certainly. And just to put it in context, what happened with the Intelligent design research program when it first started a few decades ago, they were really asking the question, can we see evidence of design in life?
And the obvious answer to that is yes. And they came up with a lot of sophisticated methods to demonstrate that. But that led into the next question was that if you understand that Life is designed. How does it help you do better research?
So the Engineering Research group is dedicated to that question. So we brought together engineers and scientists and other scholars to really show how engineering principles, patterns, and tools can help you understand biology at a much deeper level.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: Okay, that makes sense.
So how does human engineering, you know, the things that we can build and create, help us to understand life?
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Well, there are several aspects to that. One is that we see a lot of the same engineering patterns that we use in human engineering applied to life.
And one of the best examples of that is based on the work of Stuart Burgess, and you've had him on your program. And I think Eric Anderson interviewed him a few months ago about his latest research.
What he has found is that in human engineering, what's called a four bar linkage system is a very common engineering motif that helps to deliver forces in a very precise location in a very precise amount. He found that the very same engineering pattern is applied to life.
So he was able to apply his engineering understanding to life and show how the different manifestations of that pattern, whether it be in fish jaws or vertebrate limbs, is applied in the most genius way possible. He was also able to use his engineering insights to show that each example of the application was highly optimized for the needs of the organism. We've also had engineers that have applied systems engineering modeling tools like SYSML or OPM to. To biological systems. And by applying these engineering tools to map out the systems, they're able to demonstrate how they work and how the pieces interconnected a much deeper pattern. And also you have people that are system engineers looking at biological systems, like in the human body, and showing how the same design patterns and concerns are implemented in life in a similar way as they're implemented in human engineering. A classic example of that is the work done by Steve Lafman and Howard Glicksman in their book your Design Body, where they showed that the concerns of things like impedance matching or risk management or maintenance and recycling are implemented in life in a truly genius way. And it all points to this idea of a mind planning everything in advance.
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: Such an exciting approach. And, you know, some might wonder, well, why, why hasn't this been done for centuries? Did we have to get to a certain point in our technology before we suddenly saw the connection? Was this an expected connection?
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Well, that is a really very. That's a very profound question. And if you look way back in history, people have been looking at life from the perspective of engineering for millennia. One of the most Famous examples is Leonardo da Vinci, who a lot of his inventions were inspired after living systems.
But the challenge has been that in more recent times, people have assumed that life was simply this product of an undirected process.
So they didn't really expect to see the same engineering patterns that we use in life that much. They didn't expect there'd be this close correspondence. And part of it is because of the assumptions. Because if you assume that it's just an undirected search, then you have to assume, because it's this enormous space of possibilities you're searching in.
The space of possibilities is filled with possible solutions to problems.
So problems like locomotion, information processing, communication, there must be countless ways to solve those problems. So if you have this undirected evolutionary search, whatever it finds shouldn't look like human engineering, because human engineering only represents a very small amount of that space of possibilities.
But in fact, the reason that human engineering applies so well to life is that assumption was false.
That, as it turns out, when you have complex problems, there's only a very small number of ways to solve those problems. And that's why the solution seen in life is very, very similar to the solution seen in human engineering. Also, another assumption of evolution is that life should look like what's called a Rube Goldberg device. And you may have seen those cartoons where you have all these random objects put together for some purpose. Like a great example is you have this very complex device used to wipe your chin. This, again, is a Rube Goldberg device. Professor Potts in the cartoon made this. And you have everything from, like a parrot and a rocket and a. And a candle are all put together for this purpose. Well, these different entities were not designed to fit together for this purpose, but they're just kind of thrown there haphazardly in the same way. That's what a lot of biologists expected life to look like. But in fact, life looks like human engineering, where every system was designed to work with every other system with high levels of precision. So that's another reason why people didn't expect human engineering to apply that carefully. But now that different biologists recognize that that assumption was false, they're starting to apply engineering principles more and more, even outside our circles.
[00:08:06] Speaker C: And so do you think the, you know, the Darwinian revolution, with Charles Darwin's Origin of Species coming out in the 19th century and everything that followed from that, do you think that played a role in slowing down this connection to engineering?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Oh, certainly. Because when you, if you believe that life is just this product of Random mutations and natural selection, then you really wouldn't expect to see this high level design logic in life. You'd expect it to be much more random, much more inefficient, clumsy, suboptimal.
So what happened is that set of assumptions has prevented biologists from naturally looking to human engineering as models for how to understand life. And that's also why biologists have so often thought that some feature in life was poorly designed or even non functional. But only later to find out as, as our knowledge advanced, that it was actually optimally designed and designed according to the same principles that we use in human engineering.
[00:09:05] Speaker C: That's why it's so unfortunate to realize that most biologists are trained in this reductionist bottom up framework.
And it's going to be exciting to release many of them from that. Well, what types of research has the engineering research group initiated so far?
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Well, we have research projects that are very diverse. Like one example would be applying these systems engineering models to living systems. And you have like Jim Johansen that did a beautiful research paper talking about how to apply sysml to chemotaxis, which is bacterial navigation.
And by applying the systems engineering tool, he was essentially looking at it from a top down perspective, like the global perspective of what was the overarching design logic and how did each system work together. And that perspective, that systems engineering perspective, helped to bring out a lot of the engineering principles that may have been missed by other researchers. Emily Reeves has also done a beautiful paper applying another systems engineering model to glycolysis, which is a metabolic pathway in life, and help to really show multiple insights about that pathway from that engineering perspective. Another set of beautiful research project was done by Waldeen Schultz. And what he did was he looked at the bacterial motor, the flagellum, from the perspective of an engineer and asked the question of how would he design a propulsion system? That's nanotechnology. And he came up with all these principles and these different subsystems and interrelationships. And then he looked at the biological literature with the help of biologists and found that what he anticipated was actually what was in the system.
That his engineering framework helped him to understand the global design logic at a very deep level that many other biologists missed.
We also have projects that are looking at how different organisms interact, how they send signals to each other. So it's essentially more of an ecological level analysis and how you have not just engineering principles but, and how an individual species operates, but also there's engineering principles and how they interconnect with other Species.
We've got projects that deal with issues of communication. We've got projects that deal with specific systems. So we have a whole broad list of projects which has been very fruitful. And we've been able to publish several research papers.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great.
[00:11:30] Speaker C: Well, I'm sure that many who are listening or watching would like to know more about cells in particular the conference that you guys put on. So let's share a little of that. Who first should attend the SALS conference?
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Well, the sales conference will be at the end of July. It'll be like July 30th through August 2nd and it'll be in Seattle. And the conference is really geared for people that want to actively participate in doing research showing how engineering principles apply to life. But it's not just for that. It's also for people that might be grad students or postdocs who really want to be inspired and equipped of how to apply design principles to their research, either their current research or their future research. And we've had people that have been grad students or postdocs that have found it very helpful to help them plan the future of their career. It's also a great place for people that really want to understand at a deep level what is the cutting edge research being done in the intelligent design community and how is it going to shape biology in the future? So, so really talking about the future of biology and how really not just us, but many biologists realize that the only way to understand life is from this engineering perspective. So those are the sorts of people that would enjoy coming.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:45] Speaker C: And what can participants expect at this year's conference?
[00:12:48] Speaker B: So what we'll have is several presentations that are by our researchers. So it's really a hands on conference that many people who are participating will also be doing presentations or posters and they'll talk about the research they've done and how they've already applied engineering principles to these biological systems and how that's led to some very deep insights and insights that no one else has actually seen before. And also we'll talk about the research papers we've published. Also what we'll do is we'll plan for the future. Well, people will be presenting talks on just the general idea of how does engineering apply to life and where the limitations of that model. And then people come together and brainstorm of how can we launch new research projects. We'll also be talking about this overarching idea of a theory of biological design, like how do we reformulate biology from the ground up from A design perspective. And how will that guide future researchers? So these are all topics that will be discussed in the lectures. And also probably the most valuable for many people will be the conversations over lunch and dinner and over coffee, just planning how they can bring their skills together to either help current research projects or advance new research projects. So these are all what people can expect in this conference.
Also, we're going to have some of the more prominent leaders of the intelligent design movement from years past and also currently attend to give special presentations. But that's a surprise for people that come.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: Okay, we won't say too much about that, but that's exciting.
And you know, like you were saying, so much can be gained from people coming together in one space who are thinking along the same lines and, you know, fruitful ideas, like you said, you know, project ideas, further research. It really is great when you can bring people together in one space.
Well, what has resulted from previous. This, this is what, the third conference. So what has resulted from previous events?
[00:14:49] Speaker B: Well, what happened with the first sales conference is we're really just trying to really launch these research projects. We're just talking about how should we understand design and biology from an engineering perspective and what could that lead to? What's happened over previous cells is it actually has launched actual projects. So people have come together, they've shared their ideas, they postulated on what could be studied, and that eventually coalesced into real, real research projects that have really brought deep insights into biology and then, as I mentioned before, research papers.
So that is something that's happened in the past. We've also been able to recruit more people to be involved with the projects. And we've actually had grad students have come that have been inspired of how to shape the future of their career. So that's been one of the. One of the. Those have been some of the benefits from the sales conferences of the past.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: Yeah. What do you hope for the outcome of this coming one?
[00:15:44] Speaker B: Well, I really hope for what we've seen in the past, but even to a greater extent. So now we have much more traction, we have much more advanced projects, we've got more research papers, we publish. So we've really gained a lot of momentum over the last few years. So our hope is that we accelerate our research even more, that we hope that people who are participants can add their insights from their specialties to. To help us see things that we may not have seen before, things that we've missed. And we hope this also will help to give us greater understanding of what exactly Is life like, how do we understand life at a deep level from an engineering perspective? How do we really understand the patterns that are repeated in life, the design patterns? What are the foundational principles? What are the most fruitful research ventures in the future? So we hope that from this conference will help to answer a lot of those questions and really help direct the engineering research group over the next few years.
[00:16:43] Speaker C: Now we've recently been speaking about Rick Sternberg's research on separate episodes of Idea the Future.
And that's exciting stuff and that's coming down the pipeline. We're just beginning to enter that frontier. The immateriality of the genome suggests that the control center of life is a mathematical structure lying outside physical systems.
Now Brian, how does engineering relate to life having an immaterial component? At first you might think those two ideas are in conflict.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Yeah. In fact, I've been very much thinking about this over the last few years and it's been somewhat of a puzzle. But the more I've thought about it, the more I've talked to people like Rick Sternberg and talked to other engineers, it's starting to become clearer and clearer. Because what happens is life itself is something that's beyond our comprehension. The complex complexity, the ingenuity, the principles are, are things that we may never, we may never understand. But what happens is you can sort of project out of life patterns, you can identify patterns, and those patterns can be studied with engineering principles very, very well.
So what you find in life is things that I mentioned before, like four bar linkage systems, feedback loops, control systems, overarching design logics, which are very understandable from an engineering perspective. So what happens though is that those systems that can be understood from that perspective are embedded, embedded into a super system which is much more complex.
So life doesn't simply have something like a limb that follows basic engineering principles, but life also supports that system in terms of building it through embryology, in terms of fixing it, maintenance if it gets damaged, in terms of even the overall principles of replication. So what happens is you do have these engineering systems in life, but life is so much more than those engineering systems. So what that means in practice, and those systems by the way, perhaps interface with something non material. So for instance, our brain is something very physical. Our brain has neural networks and to some extent those neural networks can be understood through computer science in our implementation of neural networks. But it's seems highly probable that our mind is beyond our brain. So our mind is something beyond the brain. It's non physical, but in some way it interacts with the brain. And there's certain elements of what happens in our brain that look like engineering and certain aspects that are beyond it.
So these two ideas of the immaterial aspect of life and the engineering principles are not in conflict. They actually support each other.
They're actually integrated. And part of what we'll talk about at the conference is really understanding what is it about life that can be studied easily with engineering? And what about life may represent principles that are so beyond our understanding that we may never understand them, but nevertheless, we can think about them in a way that's sensible and helps support the engineering research.
[00:19:44] Speaker C: Do you think future research will identify engineering principles that explain what Sternberg and others believed to come from immaterial mathematical structures?
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's entirely possible. In fact, what happens is the more human technology advances, the more we see the parallels with life. So if you looked at, let's say, peasants in the Middle Ages, they didn't know anything about computers or encoding information, so DNA would have made no sense. But today, with our understanding of computers, we can get the basic idea that in information is encoded in DNA, kind of like Morse code. We get the idea of how you transmit information. We understand the principles.
So as our engineering advances, we'll understand more and more and more about life. Now the question is, how far will that go? And we simply don't know. We simply have to do the best we can of applying engineering to life. And perhaps engineering will explain all of life. That is a possibility.
Or it might be the case that we'll hit a wall and there'll always be this aspect of life that's beyond the reach of mechanistic approaches, whether it be engineering or algorithms or anything along those lines. So that's an unanswered question, but an exciting question that we're going to explore.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: Yeah. Okay. So we've heard the basics. We get the understanding just a little bit, enough to pique our curiosity. If we're interested in attending this conference, where can we go to learn more and register?
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Well, there's a. At the website is discovery.org, our normal website, but it's discovery.org sells. That's C E L S. Okay, so discovery.org sells is where all the information will be for registration. And what you'll do is you'll apply.
And whenever this podcast comes out, we hope it will come out before the end of the early admission deadline. But if it doesn't, you could just apply and say you heard about this on the podcast and you would like early the rates for early admission. So you can really say that if you, if you apply immediately after hearing this. But that's where all the information is. It's going to be in Seattle, near, near downtown Seattle.
Not in downtown Seattle but in a nice location and it will be at the end of July.
[00:22:00] Speaker C: Okay. Seattle in July couldn't be better.
Well, Brian, thanks for taking the time to unpack this. I'm sure you know we're going to be talking about this over and over because it's exciting, cutting edge stuff, the engineering working group and this conference you work hard to put on. So I really appreciate your time today.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: So again, hop over to discovery.orgcelsels to learn more and register for this year's conference for ID the Future. I am Andrew McDermott with Dr. Brian Miller.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
