[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today, Doctor Emily Reeves discusses the intersection of biology and engineering with Fred Williams and Doug McBurney, hosts of the real science radio podcast, Doctor Reeves explains the importance of using engineering principles to understand biological systems. She shares her journey from being an intern at MIT to studying bacteria in graduate school at Texas A and M and how her faith in God was strengthened through her studies. During the conversation, Doctor Reeves shares her experiences and reactions to promoting the design perspective in biology and emphasizes the predictive and creative potential of a top down design framework in biology. Along the way, she also recommends books and papers that explore the connection between engineering and biology. Let's listen in to Doctor Emily Reeves as she explores this intriguing new perspective in science.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is real science radio. I'm Fred Williams.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: And I'm Doug McBurney. Bible student, science geek, amateur comedian. Fred, it is great to be with you again, talking about real science on Friday.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: So Doug, we had a listener email us in about an article that they saw on Discovery Institute, and it was titled Standard Engineering Principles as a predictive framework for biology. And as you can imagine, that really piqued my interest. And I noticed it was written by a doctor, Emily Reeves. She has a PhD in biochemistry and biophysics from Texas A and M. Pretty impressive. Then I noticed some other well written and interesting articles that have titles that just really hit me and they just compelled me to go read them. One of them, for example, the cell as an embedded computing system. Of course, I'm going to find that interesting as an embedded engineer most of my life. And then another one, application of animal forms in auto styling.
When I first read that, my engineering brain said auto styling. I like automatic styling, but it actually refers to automobiles.
[00:02:20] Speaker C: Oh, it is automobiles. Okay.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: And then another 110 biomechanical animal joints enable extreme performance.
Yet another article, a robot is built using cockroach biomimicry. And I could go on and on, there's so many content.
[00:02:37] Speaker C: So, Fred, we reached out to the Discovery Institute. They quickly set up a communication channel so we were able to get ahold of Doctor Reeves. And she has graciously accepted our invitation to talk about her work right here on real science radio. Welcome to the show, Emily.
[00:02:54] Speaker D: Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, Fred. It's my pleasure to be here. I'm really excited to share some of the things I've learned over the last few years.
[00:03:03] Speaker C: Oh, awesome. Now a little bit more, Doctor Emily Reeves received her bachelor's of science in chemistry with a minor in biology from northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in 2012, and then a PhD in biochemistry and biophysics from Texas A and M 2018. She currently collaborates on several research projects at the intersection of biology and engineering. Which is exactly what landed you here, Emily.
[00:03:31] Speaker D: Yeah, I think for me, it really started in the summer of 2012. So right after I had finished my undergraduate, but before I went to graduate school, so I had an internship at MIT in the laboratory of Doug Lauffenberger. And this lab, they use computational modeling that's based on principles from engineering analysis, and they use that to model mammalian cell behavior. So that summer, I learned some sort of basic python programming, but I had this really invaluable experience of attending lab meetings right at the intersection of engineering and biology.
[00:04:12] Speaker C: An internship at MIT, that's like, that's kind of a dream internship, right?
[00:04:17] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was unexpected that I got it and I really enjoyed it and it was a great, great opportunity. For sure.
[00:04:25] Speaker C: Fred, Fred, we can't go on without the interesting fact of the week. Let's not forget about the interesting fact of the week. Lay it on me.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Good point, Doug. Okay, so here is the interesting fact of the week.
What is the fattiest human organ?
The fattiest.
[00:04:45] Speaker C: Fattiest. The fattiest. Now, I haven't thought about organs in terms of fat content, so you're catching me a little off guard. I'm going to say the liver.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Nope.
[00:05:01] Speaker C: Well, I guess that depends on whose liver you're talking about. Okay, so now, Emily, this is probably right up your alley. Help us out with the interesting fact of the day.
[00:05:12] Speaker D: Okay, let me think about this.
The fat tissue.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: The fattiest organ. Human organ.
Yeah, it may be. It does. But that's not. And I won't. I never buzz my guess. No.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: Now that's, you know, a biology expert. No, a biology expert answers you with the. Oh.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: How about the fact.
[00:05:40] Speaker C: I hadn't thought about the fact.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:43] Speaker D: Okay, let me think. What else? What is the. Oh, it's the brain. Brain.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: No surprise there. No surprise there.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: That's exactly right. So the brain.
So, Doug, I guess you were about 3ft off, depending on the person.
[00:06:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: The proximity between the liver and the brain. But anyways, that was not a bad guess, Fred.
[00:06:10] Speaker C: That's the difference between someone who had their internship at a bar slash liquor store and someone who had their internship at MIT.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: But anyways, so then take us through the whole graduate school and the whole process of the different things you've got into.
[00:06:28] Speaker D: Yeah. So during my graduate studies, I was studying bacteria, and the lab I was in, we looked at the gram positive bacterium bacillus subtilis, and specifically, we were interested in understanding how these bacteria use their nucleoid. So that's like, their DNA structure and their membrane for organizing. So bacteria, typically not all bacteria, but most bacteria do not have membrane bound organelles like the eukaryotic cells do.
But they're still very organized. Right. So we were interested in understanding how.
How bacteria organize themselves using, like, their nucleus and membrane. So my graduate experience was very positive. I had an incredible PI and really amazing lab mates and graduate student colleagues that I went through with. So overall, the experience was great. However, I still, I became sort of disillusioned with the academic system during this time and lost my sense of wonder. And that played into my decision that at the end of it all, I decided I didn't really want to pursue research anymore. After earning my degree and taking a few years and stepping back, I sort of realized that a lot of this disillusionment stemmed from just being immersed in the materialistic nature of academia.
I was originally driven by a fascination for exploring the created world, to go to graduate school to study these tiny, tiny systems like bacteria and other aspects of biology. But that materialistic environment of academia led me to kind of step away from all that because it just, it didn't have the same, like, fun aspect anymore. So after graduate school, I moved to Seattle to be with my fiance, and then I met a man through my connections with Discovery Institute, Brian Miller. Brian is an incredible Christian, and he was really excited about this idea of engineering and biology and how it. How it fits with the idea of faith, belief in God and design. And so he bought me this book, this ebook by Yuri Alon, and he tasked me with reading it over the next couple of months.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay, so you went into, I'm curious, did you have a faith going into college, and so you had to suffer through a lot of the materialistic stuff thrown your way, even though you already had a faith?
[00:09:16] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's good that it didn't chip away at you, you know, like it does other people. Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:24] Speaker C: So your faith actually survived college all the way through a PhD?
[00:09:30] Speaker D: Yeah, more than survive.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: Praise the Lord.
[00:09:34] Speaker D: I think my faith was actually strengthened in graduate school. Like, I had enough sort of understanding and training, I guess, going in that the more I studied these intricate biochemical systems, the more convinced I became of design and I. That there's no way this is just a random happenstance like this is. We're looking at, like, the best design systems in the world here.
[00:10:00] Speaker C: So you maintained that view. I'm going to assume that your professors and the majority of other students really didn't look at things that way. So that wasn't something you were hearing and involved in discussions on a daily basis, or am I wrong? Was there more going on?
[00:10:16] Speaker D: Yeah, there were some. There were some discussions, like side discussions with colleagues and, yeah, overall, the environment for me was definitely. I would not say it was hostile, but I was also pretty. I don't know, I was just a student just learning. I didn't, like, talk a lot about my intuitions, and things weren't as formed in my mind either at that point as they are now. So I just kind of was an observer and listened a lot. But the more I studied the systems, the more convinced I became, like, wow, this is so. This is amazing. This is more complex than I ever dreamed.
[00:10:56] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, I marvel again as an engineer. How could an engineer not believe in God because of just the incredibly elaborate design that so exceeds what we can do. So, Emily, you mentioned a book by Yuri Aron. Could you tell us a little bit about that book?
[00:11:13] Speaker D: Yeah. So, the title is an introduction to systems biology. And systems biology is really the most design based field, I would say, right now, in biology. And so as I started making my way through this book, what I read really started to change the way I thought about biology and the approaches that many biologists use. By reading this book, I started to realize how important it is to have a predictive framework based on design to kind of explore or study biology from. So even though I had believed in God all throughout my graduate studies, I didn't have that predictive framework at that time. So even though I wanted to do design based research at graduate school, I really would say I didn't kind of know how to at that point.
[00:12:06] Speaker C: Okay, well, can you share some of the things you learned from that book? What made you realize that it was so important for biologists to understand engineering?
[00:12:17] Speaker D: Sure. Yeah. One of the things that really stood out to me in the first chapter of the book was that engineering, I think, makes biology less confusing. So biologists aren't trained as engineers, but we are looking at the best design systems in the world. And this is actually a really big problem because we don't recognize the design even though it's right before our eyes.
So, in the second chapter of the book, Yuri Alon explains why you need auto regulation, which is when a gene product negatively regulates its own promoter.
So in the six years that I had been immersed in these fields of molecular genetics, biology and chemistry, I had never learned the reason for why autoregulation exists. Like, why is it there? What is it doing? Just by reading this one chapter, I learned, like, oh, this exists because it speeds the response time of gene circuits. So by reading this book, I sort of learned core concepts that helped me realize the importance of having more overlap between engineering and biology. And the concepts helped me make sense out of a lot of the complexity in biology. So just to go back to that example I gave of autoregulation, if you're just looking at autoregulation, you know, you don't know what it's doing or whatever. It just seems like this kind of useless feature. Why. Why is this even here? But if you understand, like, oh, it's there because it allows a gene to be turned on and off faster.
I don't know. To me, that just gives so much meaning to the system. So, yeah, I found that book very helpful and insightful.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Well, so if you're just. If you're just observing the interaction or the function without really understanding why it's there, once you understand why it's there, then it becomes a lot more interesting. Right? A lot more fascinating. Like, wow.
[00:14:18] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah. And it removes some of the, like, complexity of just trying to, like, place these things and. Yeah, it's incredibly helpful.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned that engineering makes biology a lot less confusing. So we've had Sal cordova on the show several times, and he mentioned how companies that are involved in genetics and biology, they're hiring more and more engineers from MIT because of this intersection that you've talked about between engineering and biology. So, super interesting stuff. Are there other publications or books that you'd recommend for someone interested in learning more about this?
[00:14:58] Speaker D: Sure. So there are a couple of key papers on this topic. Two that I highly recommend are authored by Gregory Reeves and Curtis Hirschuk. Gregory Reeves is a associate professor of chemical engineering at Texas A and M, and he studies systems biology, and he co authored the two papers with Curtis Hirschuk, who's a veteran engineer.
So their first paper was in 2016. Their paper was titled Survey of Engineering models for systems biology. Now, in this paper, they explain how engineering concepts can be used to advance systems biology. And one of the major contributions from this first paper is that they identify the engineering sub discipline that's most like systems biology. They do that by asking this question, what contemporary computing system architecture bears the closest resemblance to the cell's computing system?
[00:16:03] Speaker C: Oh, there you go, Fred.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I have a pretty good feeling. I know which one this is. Drum roll.
[00:16:12] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. So it's embedded systems. That's your domain, Freddy.
You know, out of the different options, they identified that embedded systems is the most similar to what we see in the cell. And they say that's, you know, because in embedded computing systems, we have all these similarities with the cell. Like there's environmental interactions, there's concurrence, there's reactiveness, liveness, resilience, and heterogeneity.
I'm sure, Fred, you can tell us more about that.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, all of those are things that we deal with in embedded engineering. I mean, you know, the authors of those papers, they hit it right on the head. So pretty much all of the products I've worked on have those attributes. I guess one example of so many that I could think of that comes to mind is, you know, I was the lead engineer at Trimble for their GPS product for a caterpillar's heavy highway equipment. Caterpillar wanted to track their heavy highway equipment. Believe it or not, those huge bulldozers, competitors sometimes would steal them, like, oh, what's my tractor doing in Germany across the border? And sometimes they actually, true story, that sometimes they'd actually go steal them back. Well, anyways, that's one of the things we designed for these systems. And, you know, things like Bluetooth and cell, being able to connect to a cell. A lot of that stuff we had managed under one processor. So one embedded system, and then another embedded system would be like the GPS receiver, but all these things you have to know about and plan ahead of time and how they're going to interact with each other. We had yet another subsystem that connected to the tractor itself. It's an interface called J 1939. Everybody has one in their car. It's a little connection, and you can hook up a diagnostic to it. That's what mechanics do when they want to find out diagnostic codes on the system. So all of these things are an embedded part of a product that all interact and have to work with each other. And we have to have knowledge of this stuff ahead of time so that we can plan properly, so that these things can interact. We need to decide which process needs more power, which needs more memory caching, and what's more critical to run faster. And you see the same kind of things in cells. So I just thought that, you know, the stuff that you're doing, Emily, is so cool because. And it's so spot on to what actually we do in engineering. You just can't get the design of the cell from a bottom up approach where, you know, you've got random mutations and selection happening over millions of years. It's what we see as a top down approach.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Well, Emily, you mentioned embedded computing systems include. You mentioned a number of things. Environmental interactions, concurrence, reactiveness, liveness, resilience, heterogeneity.
And that's what all of us civilians who just want to flip open our phone or turn on a computer, that's why we need engineers to help, because I don't ever think in terms of things like that, but the creator obviously did, and so do we.
[00:19:20] Speaker D: It came to mind, Fred, when you were saying all those embedded systems you worked on, there are so many similar features to those types of things in the cell. And I think the key thing for listeners to take away is just like, engineers have to plan ahead to have all those systems work together so that you can find the caterpillar when people steal it. Like, everything that operates together in the cell, like the DNA machinery, ribosomes, the. If you're talking about eukaryotes, the Golgi apparatus, the endoplasmic reticulum, the membrane, all these things, they have to be there at the same place and the same time, doing their allotted task, or we won't have a cell.
[00:20:09] Speaker C: Ah, that goes back to what you just said, Fred. This. This doesn't happen slowly over millions of years. It's not rational to think that. And, Fred, that reminds me, I'd like to interject here and just mention kind of a clickbait news story that I came across recently. It's titled this insect has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature, and it's from back in 2013. But it's a wonderful example and a shout out to our mechanical engineers out there. If you were to ask an expert in the history of mechanical gears, you know, they would tell you that it was invented by mechanics who lived in Alexandria around 300 years before Christ.
But we know that God beat them to the punch. He had a much more elaborate system, as the authors put it. He had a more elegant solution. And it's no surprise that they pay homage at the end of the article to evolution, because, you know, it's. It's Science magazine, but we know we don't refer to evolution. We refer to the apostle Paul, for example, in romans, the first chapter, the 20th verse for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead, so that they are without excuse.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Yeah. You know that article, Doug, reminds me of JBS Haldane. He was this famous british scientist. You know, the atheist just loved him. He was a marxist, but he was very well known. And he made this claim in 1949, basically a prediction for evolution that he said that evolution could never produce various mechanisms such as the wheel and magnet, which would be useless till fairly perfect. So here, this grasshopper that you just mentioned, it totally, totally refutes evolution based on just that prediction. So anyways, Emily, you mentioned other papers that I wanted to get into if we could.
[00:22:13] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. So the second paper, which I can maybe talk about in a little bit more depth, it's one of my favorites, discusses standard engineering principles and how these provide what's called an engineering principle expectation that can be helpful to just the everyday biologist. So thinking about biology from a design standpoint is really a sort of perspective shift. You start from the assumption that an organism is a well designed system, perhaps even optimized to the physical limits of chemistry and physics. Then you start thinking about high level requirements and how these have to be fulfilled by lower level requirements. So it's top down. You consider, you know, what is the function of the organism? What's its role in the ecosystem? What does it do? And then what are the design requirements that have to make these things happen?
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Uh huh, uh huh.
[00:23:11] Speaker C: So is that not how biology researchers look at systems already? They don't look at them assuming that they're well designed?
[00:23:22] Speaker D: No, I would say not. In general, it is a little bit of a mixed bag. Like the way a lot of the community would frame it is like, oh, well, if something is very well conserved, then that means evolution, natural selection must have preserved it for a reason.
[00:23:40] Speaker C: I get it. I get it. Because you really can't help but make that assumption. So it's like they create words to describe it because you can't deny it. Anyway, I'm just an average civilian. All I know is push the button and it works. So what are standard engineering principles?
[00:23:59] Speaker D: Sure. Yeah. So standard engineering principles, they are principles that have to be followed in order to produce efficient, robust systems. So if you want to design a good cell phone, a good caterpillar, if you want to design a good car, you have to use these principles. And so over the years, through lots and lots of engineering and human design work, these principles have kind of fallen out as key things that have to be followed. And so Riis and Hirschuck demonstrate that actually the same standard engineering principles that we use all the time in human engineering are also used in biology. And therefore, those principles are really useful to biologists because they can be kind of an expectation framework for anticipating what we will see in a cellular system. So biologists, I would say, really need to learn what these are. And some of them are intuitive, some of them are less intuitive.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: I'm curious, can you give us some examples?
[00:25:04] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. So, one example from hardware, software co design principles.
One is that an engineer should partition the function that is to be implemented into smaller interacting pieces. And this is basically just modularity. So in the cell, of course, there's countless examples of modularity. One of the obvious ones is that within a eukaryotic cell, there are specialized compartments where unique things take place. So examples are mitochondria, which is involved in energy production, the rough endoplasmic reticulum, where proteins are produced, the Golgi apparatus, etcetera. So you see those kind of specialized, that modularity happening on a physiological level. But then you also see modularity, for instance, and how cellular regulatory networks are built. So the networks are composed of these autonomous acting modules, and those cooperate together. Each part is playing a role in what the system needs, and those cooperate to accomplish a function.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Wow, that's super interesting. It kind of reminds me, you know, I was trying to think of other examples. So, like in our nand technology, we have a background task that does error recovery, that's totally autonomous with other modules, as you speak of. And so there's such a neat correlation here. You know, the cell has its own quality control system. It's really fascinating how there's this connection, this intersect that you've talked about. Can you give an example of how this intersect, and this engineering design principle itself might help a biologist such as yourself?
[00:26:49] Speaker D: Yeah. So just going back to modularity, if we can teach biologists, and if biologists can understand, like, when and what kind of modularity is required for particular designs, that's really helpful. And let me give an example to explain why this is so important. So, for years, biologists have been hypothesizing that bacteria, they don't have organelles because they're less evolved. Right. That's been kind of the just so story. But design principles can actually help biologists understand why these differences exist, for instance, why bacteria don't have organelles, but why eukaryotes do. And that's based on design requirements. So the design requirements for bacteria are totally different than those for you. I shouldn't say totally. They're vastly. They're a lot different than those for eukaryotic cells. So, for instance, bacteria have a volume of like one cubic micrometer, whereas yeast, which is a simple eukaryote, has a volume of 1000. Human fibroblast cell has a volume of 10,000 cubic micrometers. So these differences in size also reflect differences in function. When you have really different sizes and functions, the overarching design requirements are going to be different. And so then that's going to dictate what is the best possible design for each type of cell.
[00:28:18] Speaker C: Okay. Wow. Now, I feel like some of our listeners might not have heard of design requirements before. Can you break this down a little bit?
[00:28:26] Speaker D: Sure. So let's think about cars, which happens to be one of my favorite examples. So an overarching design requirement for a car like a Ferrari would be something like, the car should carry up to two people and be able to go really fast, and then contrast that overarching design requirement with this requirement. The car should be able to hold eight people and make them really comfortable.
So obviously, if you have two different overarching design requirements and you optimize for those requirements, you're going to get slightly different cars. Right? In one case, you're going to end up with a Ferrari. The other case, you're going to end up with an suv. And this is what I think we're seeing in the natural world. We have different organisms, like we have bacteria over here that don't have membrane bound organelles. Then we have, you know, eukaryotic cells that have lots of them. And that's because of these organisms have different overarching design requirements. And so their designs are optimized around what their role is.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, it kind of flashed into my mind, was Noah's ark. God had Noah design that ark to be stable, not to be a speedboat, you know, zooming through the ocean. So specific requirements for a specific need. So any other examples of a design requirement that you would find important for biologists to be aware of?
[00:29:57] Speaker D: Yeah. Another one that I love that we've kind of been talking about a little bit here is hierarchy. So hierarchy just states that the requirements are ranked. They're ranked according to, I guess, cost effectiveness and the building plan. So this ends up ranking requirements differently. So to give a concrete example, a requirement about a car's engine has to be in alignment with the overarching design requirement of the car, that it's either going to be a Ferrari or an suv. So you wouldn't put for, say, an electric motor in a car with an exhaust manifold, because that just wouldn't make sense. Right. If the overarching design requirement of the car is that it's going to use gasoline, then all the lower level parts of the car have to be in alignment with that overarching requirement.
[00:30:50] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Yeah. You don't need a prop on Noah's ark, you know, motor prop.
[00:30:56] Speaker C: Yeah. I don't even. I don't. I don't even think he had a.
What do you call the part of the boat that turns the boat? A rudder. I don't even think he had a rudder. Did he? I don't think so, but he had a. He had a. He had a pilot on board. But anyway, Emily, can you share with us a bit about how you think the design framework flows logically from a belief in God?
[00:31:24] Speaker D: Absolutely. So if one believes in God, that deity is assumed to have capabilities like foresight, knowledge, wisdom and understanding of beauty, the ability to perform math and those kinds of things. So all of these capabilities we experience, right, as a human agent made in the image of God. But in God, those attributes are better, more powerful, and sometimes maybe altogether different. But these capabilities are required to produce design motifs. In engineering, we need foresight. You know, we talked about that a little bit. You need knowledge. You need the ability to do math, like these kinds of things. And we see the same design motifs in biology. So it naturally flows that these same types of capabilities and more advanced than our own, right? Because when we are looking at biology, as I said before, we are looking at the best design systems in the world. So it naturally flows that more advanced capabilities than our own were required to produce these organisms.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: So I'm kind of curious. So you started with faith. You went through college, you got your PhD in biochemistry, and then you got a little bit disillusioned just because of this materialistic worldview being kind of shoved down your throat. And then you came across the Discovery Institute, and now you're actively involved in talking about and promoting these engineering principles and intersection with engineering and biology.
What kind of reaction are you getting from people on this new course that you've taken where you're defending God's creation and his engineering? I'm curious about reactions that you're now getting from people.
[00:33:07] Speaker D: I would say the reactions have been overwhelmingly positive.
I do think some people have this misconception that the design perspective is like a science stopper. They think one just says, God did it, you know, and then you just move on. But I haven't. I personally don't take that perspective or that stance, and I don't think that that really plays out. So instead, I think the design perspective is very helpful and predictive, both for understanding existing designs and for doing future creative design work. And one way I think about this is just to consider human designers. Just because we don't know exactly what went through Gustav Eiffel's head right when he was designing the Eiffel Tower, that doesn't mean that it isn't useful to take the perspective that the Eiffel Tower was designed by him. So taking the design perspective instead, I think it helps us better understand, for instance, the Eiffel Tower. You can study the engineering, you know, you can make predictions about how other buildings might be designed, or you might learn design principles from studying it that help you better design your next building. And you can also even speculate, you know, about the mental musings of the designer based on what you see in the design. Like, for example, if you see aspects of the design that seem to require advanced understanding of calculus, that probably means that Gustav Eiffel and his team of engineers, you know, use that kind of math.
So I really do think it's a big misconception to think that belief in design is a science stopper. There are many great scientists that believe in God and are driven to study the natural world based on their belief in God.
[00:35:04] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, Emily, I mean, what you just said, I don't think the evolutionists, the materialists, the atheists, I don't think they realize what they gave us when they said, oh, you're just going to say God did it because they didn't know Emily Reeves was going to come along and say, okay, well, let me talk to you about how God did it. And, I mean, it's mind boggling and it's enlightening and it's encouraging and it's inspirational.
What you've been able to take from your education and your experience and now pass on to people. I mean, praise the Lord. This is awesome stuff.
[00:35:42] Speaker D: Yeah, it is amazing. I'm very thankful for all the people that have, you know, helped me in this journey and have contributed and have challenged me. I've had great, really smart colleagues challenged me about some of these ideas and helped refine my perspective and the way I talk about them.
[00:36:02] Speaker C: So what's the name of your course? Is there a schedule? How do people find you?
[00:36:07] Speaker D: Yeah. So if you want to read my work, I recommend you check out evolution news. And then under my author profile, you can see all the. All the stuff I'm writing about on there. And, yeah, hopefully you'll have some academic papers coming out soon, which I'm excited about. And, yeah, it's been really a pleasure talking with you guys about these.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: Oh, man, I look forward to some of those papers, Emily. You know, when I was thinking about this show, it occurred to me, I referred to South Cordova earlier, mentioning how MIT engineers are being hired by bioengineering firms and genetics firms. But it also occurred to me, just from the example Doug gave, you also need the knowledge of mechanical engineering. You need the knowledge of chemists. There's so many things that are in the cell. It's not just the DNA and the programming, which I tend to get into a narrow view of, because that's my background. But, you know, it's everything. Hardware, chemistry, mechanical engineering. There's so much that the designer that's involved in biology, and I just really appreciate that you recognize that and your friends do, that you've worked with. And so much more can be accomplished in biology by having this framework, this mindset of, you know, this ultimate engineer and standard engineering principles. And I, we look at his design, and we see that it was a top down design, not something from the bottom up.
It's just a great testimony to the creator.
[00:37:41] Speaker C: Yeah. And, Emily, you had mentioned automobiles. Cars. Is that just, like, one of your favorite examples, or are you into cars?
[00:37:50] Speaker D: It's just one of my favorite examples.
[00:37:53] Speaker C: Okay. Because I'm kind of into cars, or I used to be into cars. And I find it interesting that you include the appreciation for beauty when you talk about automobiles. And I'm hoping that some of the people that are designing automobiles these days, I'm hoping they'll come across you and your ideas, because they could really use some help with appreciation of beauty in the design of the modern automobile. And I think that your perspective could help us in that respect a lot. And we need you.
[00:38:27] Speaker D: I will say that one piece I wrote about automobile styling, I basically summarized the work of Stuart Burgess. So he has done incredible work in this area of intersecting mechanical engineering, specifically with biology. And so he wrote this academic paper on how automobile styling is based a lot on, actually, the designs found in nature. So that summary piece that I wrote was sort of like highlighting his piece. You guys should check that out, too.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: Oh, I'm going to download that as soon as we're done. That's going to be today's reading. That's awesome, Emily. Thank you.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And before we end, Emily, I did want to talk about real quickly. So you wrote an article that was kind of a rebuttal to an MIT biological engineer who said that should scientists play God? I remember seeing that video. One of our listeners had pointed us to it, and it was by this doctor, Erica de Benedictus, if I'm saying her name right. So youve got an article that kind of addresses some of the things that she says, and I encourage listeners to go check that out. Well provide a link to it. Itd be fun to get both of you on this show and have a little debate about design versus evolution.
[00:39:45] Speaker C: Oh, I like that.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: Its neat to have your perspective because shes this young, bright engineer. And here you are, someone whos interned at MIT and has a degree from a prestigious university down at Texas A and M. They're highly regarded in many areas, especially engineering. So, yeah, super cool would like to get your take on that sometime. Or maybe, like I said, we'll try to get real science radio to set up a debate. I have a feeling that she may not be interested, but we'll try. You know, why not?
[00:40:16] Speaker D: I will say Erica de Benedictus, she is doing really cool work. I've been following her and I mean, she's a brilliant young scientist. I think she maybe stepped outside of her realm a little bit, making that video.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: That one video.
[00:40:32] Speaker D: Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully she's.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: Yeah, she's been so much. She's had that materialism thrown down her throat and, you know, and it's hard to, you know, hopefully some point we can convince her that, you know, this is, that materialism doesn't work with what you're doing.
[00:40:51] Speaker C: You know, she's a victim of the fact that if you want to experience significant material success in your career at a high level in science, at some point in your career, you have to make an assertion like she was compelled to make. And like you said, it's outside of her lane. And a lot of times that's what runs us into the truth. And so I just hope that, that it provides an opportunity for someone to reach her. And I'll pray for that because she is obviously brilliant, but she has bent the knee, she has bowed to the powers that be for the sake of her career. And it's a shame that she's gone ahead and done that. I'm glad that you have not done that, Emily. You don't need to do that.
[00:41:43] Speaker D: Yeah, I said I just want to be on the winning side.
[00:41:47] Speaker C: Amen.
[00:41:48] Speaker A: Amen to that. Okay. Well, Emily, it was such a pleasure and honor to have you on the show again. I was super excited that you're willing to come on real science radio, and I know our listeners really love having you on. And hopefully in the future, after you get some of these papers going, we'll like to have you back on for sure. I'll be looking for those.
[00:42:08] Speaker D: Thank you. Yeah, it's been my pleasure. Thank you guys so much.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: That was Doctor Emily Reeves on a recent episode of Real Science Radio, speaking on the intersection of biology and engineering. We're grateful to hosts Fred Williams and Doug McBurney for permission to share this conversation on ID the future. You can find the real science radio podcast on YouTube and elsewhere. Podcasts are enjoyed and we'll include a link to the program in this episode's show. Notes for id the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
