[00:00:00] Speaker A: These are not problems with simplistic or simple solutions.
These take incredible engineering to accomplish, and interestingly, it so rarely goes wrong. Why does it go right almost all the time?
That's truly amazing.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Idaho the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. My guest today is Steve Laughman, co author with Dr. Howard Glicksman of the new book your Amazing Body, a fresh, abridged version of their previous book, your, Design Body. In this discussion, Laughman brings his engineering background to bear on the marvels of human anatomy, showing us how the human body is not just functional, but brilliantly designed.
We'll explore how engineering intersects with biology, how an engineer and a physician worked together to lay out this evidence, and what the new streamlined book can offer readers.
Now, in case you're not yet familiar with him, Steve Laughman is a speaker, author, computer scientist, and consultant in the design of enterprise class systems. With expertise in the difficulties of changing complex systems to perform new tasks. He leads the Engineering Research Group at Discovery Institute and chaired the program committee for the recent 2025 conference on engineering in Living Systems. Steve, welcome to Idea of the Future.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Good to be here. Thanks.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Well, we're here today to discuss your newest book, you, Amazing Body, condensed and Adapted from your 2022 book, you, Design Body, co authored with Dr. Glicksman. Now, for those who haven't come across this new book yet, let me read the jacket copy just to give everyone an idea of what it covers.
Every day, your body must solve hundreds of hard engineering problems simultaneously, or you die. Your body enables you to see and hear. It heals you from injuries and disease. It maintains your temperature. It makes it possible for you to wield a sledgehammer during the day and then play piano sonatas at night. Every minute, your body choreographs a host of complex systems and that are required for you to live.
So in this book, you're joining engineer Steve Laughman and physician Howard Glicksman as they take you on an incredible journey exploring some of your body's greatest marvels, including how your hearing and vision work, how you coordinate your movements, and perhaps the greatest miracle of them all, how you developed from a single cell at conception. Along the way, you'll discover compelling evidence that our bodies are the handiwork of a master designer and engineer.
So that gives a little bit of a sneak peek as to what is included in this book. Now, Steve, first things first. What led you, as an engineer, to co author a book on the human body's design.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Well, it is a bit of a different turn for me from my architectural work in the past, but I had been reading Howard Glicksman's incredible series of articles at Discovery Institute in and I realized that my perspective as a systems architect would add a quite different but complementary perspective and result in a much richer and compelling argument.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it really is a match made in heaven when you bring the biologists together with the engineers. So I'm glad you you sensed that and you were able to make that happen. So what was it like working with Dr. Glicksman, a physician, on these projects?
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Well, Howard. Howard's actually quite brilliant.
It's been a real pleasure working with him and I have learned so much from him about, not just about how my body works, but how the combination of the problem solving in the body combines to generate this incredible human experience that we all know and love.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now, a couple of years ago, you filled 500 pages of a book, you know, just pouring the evidence the two of you came up with and assembled into your design body. How does your amazing body differ from that book in scope and tone?
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. So your design body was intended as a complete walk through, through the engineering concepts that are present in the human body. In order to do that, we needed to dive deeper into how things work, how they don't work, how they break, how they stop working, and then.
But we had to cover quite a lot of bases in order to draw sound conclusions at the end. So it's really a holistic end to end argument.
So obviously it's got to be more technical and more detailed.
Your amazing body is much less technical. It's much shorter.
Although it makes the same basic arguments, it draws only on a few key examples.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Okay, well, let's briefly discuss some of the topics you explore in the new book so we can get a taste of what's there. Your amazing body kicks off with one of the most amazing feats of all, how we all go from one cell to trillions. Tell us about the engineering challenges involved there.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Yeah, so this one, this one really is amazing. And I don't think you have to be either a physician or an engineer to be amazed at this. In fact, we just need to think about it.
At conception, you are one cell.
At birth, you are around 2 trillion cells.
Wow. And as an adult, you're around 30 trillion cells. Or some of us, maybe more.
And that. That's an amazing thing to do. How do you generate a whole body from one cell?
So obviously this is going to Take some kind of a plan. It's not, there's nothing random happening here. This, this is, this is problem solving at its finest.
So for instance, cells have to differentiate during development.
There are at least a couple of hundred different types of cells. And there's.
It's been proposed that there are hundreds of different kinds of neurons. So there may be several hundred types of cells in your body. And those cells have different shapes, they perform different functions, they are running different internal programming.
So how do all those things happen from one cell at conception?
They're organized. The cells are not in random places.
These different cells are located in different places and in different concentrations. For instance, your immune cells are scattered throughout your body in different concentrations in different places.
Your cells are organized hierarchically in layers in tissues and organs.
And one of the things that I think is most interesting is that the shapes of these things are defined and they have to be unfolded during development. Like the bones in the middle ear, the ossicles have very precise, very complex, three dimensional shapes. How does the zygote, the one cell at conception, know how to make those bones? And turns out those are the only bones in the human body that don't grow after you're born.
So it's, this is an amazing process of organizing. So you have differentiation, you have organization, you have integration.
So all these cells and different body parts and systems and subsystems have to be integrated mechanically, electrically. They have to have fluid integration, there's chemical integration, there's all kinds of combinations for different types of functions.
So where that, where's that integration inside that zygote? How does it know what to do? And then finally, all these, all these things have to be coordinated. When do the different systems and parts do their function?
When do they come online? During development. So we all know that our lungs develop very late in the, in the, in the womb, which is why preemies have so much trouble surviving, because their lungs aren't quite ready to do their job yet. So it's very critical to get them the oxygen they need.
So in, in all four of these, differentiation, organization, integration, and coordination, those are hard problems.
These are not problems with simplistic or simple solutions.
These take incredible engineering to accomplish.
And interestingly, it so rarely goes wrong. Why does it go right almost all the time?
That's truly amazing.
And parts of the plan, you have to have this plan to do development, you have to have specifications, you have to have build instructions, you have to be able to test and course correct when things aren't going right. And you have to get the timing right. I mean, this is engineering on steroids here. This is really amazing stuff and you don't need to have any technical expertise to be amazed by this.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a very definition of a formidable engineering challenge. And as you say, you know, it's not just a few systems coming together, we're talking systems and subsystems and sub subsystems. I mean, it boggles the mind. Now, in order to keep those trillions of cells operating, our bodies depend on cellular respiration. We've got to bring in enough oxygen for this process, but we also have to prevent the CO2 buildup. Sounds like an engineering challenge in itself. How does the body manage that?
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, well this, this is one that again, once again, everybody gets this. If you hold your breath, the longer you hold your breath, the more you desire to breathe, your body needs oxygen. And it's going to tell you the more needs oxygen, the stronger your urge to breathe will become.
So, so we chose this as an example of what's called homeostasis, the sort of the foundational capabilities you need to be alive.
And because of the cellular structure and the way metabolism works, every single cell needs a hefty supply of oxygen all the time.
And even when you're at rest, all the cells need oxygen to maintain their equilibrium internally.
So this is a huge problem and we talk about it in the book. We have a small graph, there's a larger version of the graph in the video series, but there are dozens of very difficult sub problems and sub, sub problems that need to all be solved at pretty much the same time, pretty much all the time, or your cells are going to die.
When your cells die, you're in deep trouble.
So let's just look at a few of the major problems. So first you have to get oxygen. This is a supply chain problem. You have to get it from the environment, from the air, and you have to deliver it to every single one of those 30 plus trillion cells every minute of your life.
This is a lot of problem solving.
So how do you get the oxygen? How do you get it into your blood?
How does it get delivered via the blood to your cells? And how does the blood get rid of the oxygen so that your cells can grab it and use it?
These are, these are, every one of those is a hard problem and it takes all kinds of sub problems to solve.
So along the way, obviously we have to have all kinds of control systems.
So how much oxygen do I need right now?
Where do I need it to be?
So there's a dynamic element to this. If I'm running, my leg muscles are going to need more oxygen than my stomach or the muscles in my hands.
So how does, how do the dynamics work?
So if I can, if I have oxygen in my blood, how do I, how does my body direct the blood so that enough oxygen gets to exactly where it's needed, exactly when it's needed, and in a way that responds rapidly to changing local needs. So different muscles need different amounts of oxygen at different times.
So, and then the, the other problem you, you mentioned is what I call garbage collection. That's getting rid of the CO2. CO2, if it's allowed to build up in your body, will kill you.
And there's lots of other toxic waste in the body caused by other processes as well. And all those things have to be collected and gotten rid of. They have to be audio out of the body.
So for, for CO2, that's going to be done through your lungs. As you're, as you're intaking oxygen, you're exiting CO2.
But other toxic waste has other ways to go away. But, so these are. Again, homeostasis, this notion of respiration is incredibly complex. There's a lot of parts to it. Everything has to work just right or you won't make it. You will not survive.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: Wow. It's an amazing thing that it's happening all the time too, even when we were unconscious, you know.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's it. That's a really good point because this all happens without you making any conscious decisions. So it's completely subconscious. Your, your body will take care of this problem for you so you can focus on other important tasks. Like writing a book.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: You know, so you have more important things to do. Your body will take care of most of the homeostasis issues for you without your direct involvement. I mean, at least consciously.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And the other part of that idea is that we're not thinking about it, but we should still, you know, appreciate it and not take it for granted.
One thing I, like Michael Behe said in one of his books, is, you know, in order to understand why an evolutionary process cannot account for these things, you've got to be willing to bite the bullet of complexity and really get a taste of that technical detail and the wondrous things that are actually happening in organisms in order to really grasp it.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. If we don't understand what's happening, then we'll accept any causal explanation because we don't really understand what we call causal hurdles. The causal hurdles involved in Making these things work. So hurdle requires a leap. Right? That's why we use the term.
So if it requires a leap, then it can't be done gradually.
So we'll get to that later. But that's, this is an important concept.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, Isaac Newton once asked this question in his writing, was the eye contrived without skill and optics? In other words, he was challenging the idea that an unguided evolutionary process with no foresight or understanding about optics could produce something so exquisitely crafted as the human eye. How does your amazing body discuss the engineering prowess of seeing?
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Yeah, this is also really fascinating. And I have to say, before I started working with Howard, I didn't understand the half of this. In fact, I may still not understand the half of it.
We work with some, some vision people and they, these are incredibly difficult problems. So in my view, vision is probably the most obvious hard engineering problem. You know, hard engineering problem in the body.
You have to convert photons of light from the environment around you into electrical signals that go to the brain, that your mind then converts into a 3D map of the world around you.
So this is really an amazing thing. So the 3D map of the world around us, we know where everything is. We know its position relative to us, we know its distance from us, and we know whether it's moving or standing still.
And we, and we do that in real time. It's instantaneous. How does vision work so fast?
So when something happens in the world around me, I see it and know it instantly. I, I can't detect any time lag in the fact of something happening in my experience of it.
So I like to call this, in fact we use this, this phrase in both books, a chemically fine tuned biomechanical electro optical signal processing image interpretation system.
So you need just right chemistry, you need the chemistry to be fine tuned to an amazing degree. You need biomechanics all over the place. You need electrical optical signal processing and you need to be able to interpret those signals into an image, this 3D map of the world around you. And that's just totally bizarre. So just think about this. So you have several million rod and cone cells in your retina, but what you see makes sense. So it actually all the piece, parts of vision are in the right places. So you, you need a coordinate system to know which rod or cone cell is providing what signal and how that fits with all the others. How do you, how does the body do that?
Does that happen during development? Is it something your brain figures out as you're after you're born and you start learning how to see, I don't think anyone understands that it's, it's ab. Absolutely amazing that this happens and it happens so well.
I mean, I think the title of the book is appropriate. Your Body is Amazing. It's maybe time for more people to understand that and think about what that really implies.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah. Well, the book also has a chapter on hearing, which is a very related system to seeing. And it notes that it's not just one or two clever engineering solutions, but a host of ingenious solutions upon ingenious solutions. Tell us about maybe just one of those engineering solutions that goes into hearing.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So this one's almost as amazing as vision, especially when you get into the details.
Only this time you're converting pressure waves in the air into electrical signals. So it's a similar type of problem, but the solution is completely different.
Somehow your ears know, or at least your brain knows, that the electrical signals it gets from the ear are sound, whereas the electrical signals it gets from the eyes are vision.
How does it do that?
I don't know.
But to convert sound waves into electrical signals, again a very difficult problem. And again, our hearing does that with both position and distance and we can detect movement with our ears. So people who have lost their sight can still determine position, distance and movement. Or I like to say, as, as I said in the book, you know, even when you're young, like 10 or 12 years old, your mother, you hear your mother calling when you're out playing, you can tell from the sound of her voice where she is, you can tell how far away she is, you can tell how angry she is and then you know which direction to run in.
So these are, these are life, life altering skills here. You have to know these things.
But interestingly, when you combine vision with hearing, you get a remarkably Accurate real time 3D map of the world around us. And with a few other capabilities like which we talk about in the video series, proprioception and balance, we know our place within that world and how our body is positioned and how, and how we're featured within the three dimensional world.
That is, not only is it amazing, but it's essential to the human experience.
I don't think all of that is a survival skill. I think that's so that we'll enjoy our world.
Right?
[00:22:10] Speaker B: And you know, we get amazed at this technology that we've created like GPS systems and you know, 3D kind of virtual reality stuff and, and, and even the, the little, you know, monitoring earphones that I'm wearing right now, you know, where I can bring your sound to my ear.
These things amazes. But how much more amazed to use the, the word in your, in the title of the book, should we be when it's happening organically in us and in other organ, organic beings? You know, it's, it just truly is astounding. And, and that requires an answer. You can't just say, oh, yeah, that's great. That's. You know, Dawkins tweeted a few years ago, he said, I'm knocked sideways with wonder. Okay, well, that's just part of it, Richard. You, you also have to answer for that. You, you have to give an explanation that's, that's going to satisfy that amazement, you know?
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Yeah, like I said, these are causal hurdles that these kinds of systems don't.
If you only have 80% of the system, it doesn't work. 80% as well. It doesn't work at all.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: So really needs to be 98, 99 and a half percent there before you get any function at all.
And given that there's so many things that have to be just right.
This, this is, this is really a set of causal hurdles.
So any, anybody who purports to explain how these things could come to be must address these hurdles or they're not answering the questions.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Well. And towards the end of this book, it does address the question of whether, whether all of this working together in the body could have arisen from a stepwise, gradual evolutionary process over time.
I'm quoting here from the book. The body is brimming, brimming with complex interdependencies, you guys say, across its thousands of subsystems and between the layers of its design hierarchy.
So how does the book probe the deep rooted issues and limitations of Darwinism in the book? I know you can't get into too much detail, at least the level of detail from your, your other book, your design body, but you do, you do give a good glimpse right into that.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, we could go into it here, but this would be a really, really long podcast.
So.
But let me make it clear, it's not really our goal to show that Darwinism can't do this.
So our goal is to show that there's a better way to think about these things. And of course, we want to teach our audience how to ask the questions that will enable them to better differentiate between the different kinds of answers that different, different theories will give them.
So, so what we want to do here is to show that the systems of the kind we see in life and in particular in the human body are coherent.
They have interdependencies all over the place and they are dynamic. They change in ways that are not simplistic.
And they do so exactly when they're needed and never when they're not needed. And, and so what we see are chicken or egg problems all over the place. They're everywhere.
The. Our chapter in your amazing body on development in the womb talks about this in some depth, which, and it's really interesting how the fetus and the mother's bodies are communicating with each other.
So you have two completely different individuals with different DNA and their bodies are communicating with each other.
Now there are two different stages in their life cycles.
How do you develop communication between two individuals when neither one of them could exist without that communication?
So I don't know how you could possibly achieve anything like that gradually.
If you have to be alive at every step, you just can't get there.
And if someone wants to argue that you can, I think they have to step up and show how these kinds of things could work.
You know, Darwin did say that anything, any system that couldn't be done gradually and his system would completely fall apart.
And our argument is that we can't find anything that could be done gradually.
I don't think there's anything in all of life that could be done gradually. I mean, you could break things gradually, but I don't know how you can build them gradually.
So even though it's not our goal to criticize Darwin or his theory, what we do want to do is to show the problems that any theory of origins must address and must address with reasonable and compelling answers.
And if any given theory, including ours, doesn't do that, then that's not a great theory. So our goal really is to introduce this new theory and that we, we have a chapter in which we do a high level view of a theory of biological design, which I think will help people see that there's a better way to think about these things than Darwin was providing.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Yes, now at 150 pages, your amazing body is much shorter than your design body. Who's the ideal audience for this new streamlined version?
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Well, I, I told our editor that if we just added about 300 and some pages to your amazing body, it would be a really, really good book.
But he didn't seem to think that was funny. I, I don't understand why.
So this book is explicitly designed for a less technical audience, like students or parents, parents who might be discussing these ideas with with their college students or you know, what I think of as second wave thought leaders like pastors or homeschoolers or public school teachers. These are, these are, these are questions. This is setting up the kinds of questions that people should be asking.
So in this book, you, Amazing Body, we just cover the key points. We touch only the high points.
We don't go into a lot of depth on any topic.
So we just want to set up the kinds of questions and then show what the conclusions, what the possible conclusions are, help people make a better decision.
And then your design body, the longer version, is there for those who may want to go deeper.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to give it a whirl. This fall, my wife and I host a co op at our house involving several local families.
Last year I walked through our textbook, Discovering Intelligent Design with the middle school and high school students. And I thought this year I'd plan to follow up with a study of your amazing body. There are lots of illustrations in the book and the condensed format and the text layout make it very welcoming. You know, it's not too intimidating.
Plus, there's a brand new video series being produced to go along with the book. Right. Tell us briefly about putting that together. Secrets of the Human Body.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Yeah, so that one's, that one's been a labor of love.
It's been coming along for a while now. And the first episode is out. It's about the problem solving required to solve the respiration problem.
The second one is about this idea of spatial awareness that our 3D map of the world around us. And then the third one will be about development and which will also introduce, I believe, the theory of biological design in a very condensed form.
So this, I think the series will go on after that. I believe there are several more episodes planned.
So I, I think this video series is really going to open people's eyes to the kinds of questions that we need to be asking in order to find satisfactory answers.
So like, like you said, episode one became available about a week ago, I think, and it's getting a lot of attention.
I think episodes two and three are due in the next month or two, so look for those to be coming soon.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: So we have this streamlined book that's geared toward the everyday layperson who wants to dip their toe in the ocean of complexity and design.
And then we have this video series which is a great supplement to it. So two great resources. Well, Steve, I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining me to unpack all this and I'm looking forward to applying it myself and spreading the word.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: All right, thanks. It's been great being here.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Well, listeners and viewers, get your copy of your amazing body at Discovery Press.
That's Discovery Press. And be sure to check out episode one of the new accompanying video series, secrets of the Human Body. Where can you find that? Hop onto YouTube and go to Discovery Science. That's the name of the channel for the center for Science and Culture. And you'll find episode one right there, Discovery Signs at YouTube. Well, for Idea the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Hey, thanks for joining us.
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[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
