[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 your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm welcoming back Doctor Eric Hidein to discuss his recent articles at Evolution news on the intelligent design of sleep. Doctor Hideen is professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Ball State University in Indiana. Hes author of the recent book canceled what some atheists dont want you to see. He speaks regularly at universities around the country and writes on the evidence for intelligent design very
[email protected]. dot Doctor Hideen, welcome back to id the future.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: Well, thank you very much, Andrew. I really appreciate the opportunity to be talking with you again. Looking forward to our conversation today about sleep.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you regularly contribute articles to our flagship news and commentary source, evolutionnews.org dot. You've written two recently on the subject of sleep that I wanted to unpack a little bit here on the show. The articles are well written and they stand for themselves, obviously. But it's nice to be able to have a back and forth discussion about some of the points you make in real time and that exactly what we can do on a podcast like this. Now, first, let me start with this. Why do we even sleep in the first place? It's easy to take for granted the significance of those hours we pass and sleep every day. It's the activity we spend the most time doing in our lives that's astounding, really. We're asleep almost 26 years of our life on average. Based on the average lifespan of 79 years, that's 9500 days, or 228,000 hours. Whew. Many of us know that sleep is an essential part of our life and our health, and that the body is engaged in beneficial activities while we sleep. But as to why we sleep exactly, or how this process could have arisen from an undirected evolutionary process, well, much of that is still a mystery to scientists today. Scientists have learned a lot about sleep, but the purpose of sleep has remained elusive. So, Eric, remind us of some of the reasons why we sleep.
[00:02:20] Speaker C: Well, I just first want to take us back to the amount of time that you just mentioned that we spend sleeping, you know, roughly a third of our lives.
And so what I have found in reading the literature that even from an evolutionary perspective, there's a great curiosity about this, scientists believing that there must be a purpose for sleep that is particularly significant. But also I believe that if one holds the design worldview and approaches things from that perspective, that, again, we could understand based on the number of hours 228,000 hours of our lives asleep, that there must be some important purpose, maybe even a trade off. And so a couple of the leading hypotheses that scientists have come up with when they study physiological mechanisms involved in sleep, that one of them is the repair kind of hypothesis, meaning that our cells essentially need this state of sleep to be able to correct and perhaps prevent any, what's called neuronal damage. And so this would speak especially to cells within our brains. And then there's also, especially in younger children, sort of a stage of neural reorganization, which is necessary. It carries on to a certain degree in a modified state in adults as well. They use the word synaptic homeostasis.
And that phrase essentially means that sleep is necessary to prevent the nervous system from essentially collapsing into chaos.
And so there's no, I guess, overstatement of how important sleep is to our lives.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, it's just amazing. And you think, well, there's got to be good reasons for that, good reasons for that system to be in place across all organisms, at least organisms that do that. In your article, you suggest that the evolutionary mindset operates as a major obstacle to the scientific understanding of sleep. Why is that? I mean, from an evolutionary point of view, sleep is pretty risky for fitness.
[00:04:57] Speaker C: Well, yes, in one of my articles that I wrote, I kind of posed the question with a bit of sarcasm. Survival of the unconscious. From an evolutionary perspective, we often are given the suggestion that the attributes that various creatures have, they have because they help them to survive. So for birds, it was flying, and for the lion, it's their strength, and various, the cheetah, it's their speed to be able to catch prey. But then you think, I. All right, but survival of the fittest, the most unconscious person wins. That just doesn't seem to fit at all with an evolutionary survival of the fittest paradigm. Perhaps one of the biggest questions that I've found that researchers have uncovered, and even the secular researchers are saying there has to be some really good reason for sleep, or else it's, as they call it, the biggest mistake that evolution ever made.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting to probe it, for sure. Now, going to sleep seems like a pretty simple, straightforward act, but to enter into this active state of consciousness is actually a pretty complicated process. What can you tell us about the processes involved in falling asleep and waking out of it?
[00:06:20] Speaker C: Well, again, this is what we uncover when we actually look below the surface. I mean, falling asleep seems just as natural as anything that we do. And likewise, returning back to wakefulness seems just natural and obviously, we do it at least once each day, sleeping and then waking. However, when we dig deeper, we find that the number of physiological and neural mechanisms that are involved in promoting sleep and promoting wakefulness are exceedingly complex and interconnected. And there's nothing about the process that seems as if it's easy, as if, oh, yeah, we understand perfectly well how this could have happened or been brought about by some random mutation. There we have it. There's nothing in it. It's a complex process. There are neurotransmitters, many different ones that are involved. There are organ systems in our brains that are involved, the hypothalamus in particular. There's a neurotransmitter called gamma aminobutyric acid, the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. This can be involved in sleep promoting, but only by interacting with a region of the brain, the hypothalamus, and with the brainstem. And then there are, you know, if you think that falling asleep is important from any sort of a perspective, let's say from an evolutionary perspective, falling asleep is important. I think it doesn't take much to see that returning to wakefulness is even more important. To survive, we have to be able to wake up. And yet waking up and returning to wakefulness, you know, just from one article I read, it mentions neurochemicals that are involved in the wakefulness promoting.
Acetylcholine, dopamine, norepinephenaphrine, serotonin, histamine peptide, hypocretin. All of these types of chemicals are involved in maintaining the wakeful state. Again, it's not just, oh, splash some cold water on your face and you're awake. There's so much more that's going on within our bodies that we aren't aware of on a detailed level, but researchers have been uncovering it, and it all points to a deep level of design.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: Yeah, two very crucial systems working together. And we'll talk a little later about how interconnected they really are. And we see this often around the body. It's just amazing. Interconnected systems that, at their root, seem to be irreducibly complex. Well, our bodies have a built in biological clock, and indeed, clocks are universal within biology. From bacteria to birds, from yeast to beasts, from mammals to man, all the circadian rhythms in life are regulated by molecular clocks. To quote a 2020 article on the topic at Evolution news, biology runs on time.
What can you tell us about our circadian rhythm and how that plays a role in our sleep cycle?
[00:09:40] Speaker C: Well, this circadian rhythm which is essentially the sleep wake rhythm of our bodies that follows the so called diurnal cycle, the daily nighttime daytime cycle that we really have no control over. Obviously, that's based on the rotation rate of the earth. These are cycles. The circadian rhythm begins to develop early in a human's life, two to three months of age, and it then follows a 24 hours cycle, again matching the rotation rate of the earth. And it affects several biological functions, including sleeping and waking.
Just again, researchers who study this and try to go deeper into understanding the cellular mechanisms that drive and regulate the circadian rhythm, they have not found, oh, something simple that is easily explainable by some undirected evolutionary process.
The deeper they look, the more complex it seems to be. And one of the articles refers to just a bacteria having still a set of interconnected proteins, very complex proteins that form a biological oscillator. This biological oscillator is essentially a timekeeping mechanism produced biologically with proteins. And they mentioned this one. They give them just abbreviated names, Kaic, sort of a master timekeeper protein. Again, just within a simple organism, bacterial organism. I looked it up a little bit more and found that this is anything but a simple protein. Proteins are composed of strings of different amino acids that are found within living systems. And this particular, just one of the three proteins cited, is composed of 519 amino acids. And so that's a string of smaller molecules that need to be assembled in the correct order. 519 choices out of the 20 some amino acids that are available in living systems. You have to make 519 correct selections from that library of amino acids and put them together in the right order in order to form this protein that is crucial for regulating the circadian kind of rhythm within even a very simple mechanism. Okay, well, what about people? Well, the more advanced organisms, such as ourselves, guess what? The biological clocks are much more sophisticated within more advanced creatures and much less well understood. Again, they can only point to certain, I guess, basic aspects of it, and there's not a detailed understanding, but something called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Again, within the hypothalamus, various intercellular interactions there are required to sustain these circadian rhythms. So this one article said that Darwin would best refrain from trying to explain such highly tuned wonders by unguided processes like natural selection. Yeah, and I think I agree with that. You know, let's not cheapen our understanding or what we're really looking at by just kind of in some ignorant way, ascribing it to, oh, yeah, this just happened in an undirected process because undirected processes in nature do not generate complex, functional, information rich systems, they actually work to destroy them.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Right?
Yeah. Well, what about dreams? They're such an interesting part of sleep. You quote a few lines, actually, from Shakespeare in your article. Let me just share them with readers and with listeners actually. Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed. The deer repose for limbs with travel tired, but then begins a journey in my head to work my mind when body's work expired. What's going on in our brains as we sleep?
[00:14:20] Speaker C: Well, this is an area of active study, and we all have experienced dreams. Some we remember vividly, others are just there. We know we were dreaming, but it's hard to even describe it when we wake up.
In short, it seems that our brains sort through information taken in during the day, during dreams. Perhaps it's a processing. I think that one would be able to say that dreams are perhaps not fully understood, you know, in terms of their purposes. I was just searching through my article here. There's particular stages of sleep. Of course, most of us have heard of these rapid eye movement sleep is a stage during which dreaming takes place. Then there are even deeper stages of sleep, non rem sleep stages in which dreaming is nothing particularly a part of our brain process, but it seems to be a deep stage of sleep in which there's more of the physiological restoration going on. So perhaps the REM sleep is important to just sorting out memories, helping us to maintain.
In one article I was reading a sort of plasticity of the brain. Our brain neuronal structures can become kind of hardwired if they're always sort of thinking and processing inputs along a certain line, and that can actually be detrimental to further learning. So it's thought that the sleep stages, including dreaming, can be helpful for restoring that plasticity of the brain. And I think that's an interesting kind of a proposal.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're certainly an interesting part of sleep and make for some memorable stories and ideas and visions that come. Well, you write that the sleep wake cycles of our body exhibit the type of complex engineering design pattern that authors Steve Laufman and Howard Glixman describe in their recent book, your design body. In the book, they call it the push pull principle, and they show how the principle is at work in multiple systems throughout our body, including muscle movement, blood clotting, heart function, and even our vision. What do Laufman and Glixman mean by the term push pull principle? And what is the push and pull when it comes to sleep?
[00:16:50] Speaker C: Well, I really appreciate this book that these two researchers have written highlighting the intelligent design in the human body. From an engineering perspective, I think they have done well to identify this push pull principle that they see at work within many of the physiological systems, some of which you mentioned just now. But it's also used in engineering. It kind of involves a balance, sort of a tension between two processes or structures that could, in a sense, pull a system one way or the other way. In a sense, strengthening one of these processes pulls the system one way, and strengthening the other pulls it the other way. So the sleep wake balance exhibits this type of a push pull principle. And again, it's quoting from their book, the balances from one, which is kind of the homeostatic process, and the other is the circadian rhythm, which is working to help restore us to wakefulness. So again, I find that in deeper analysis, deeper study and research about the sleep wake cycle, we find evidence of design, in this case, principles that are well known within engineering kind of design of multiple types of systems. So this sleep producing processes, the return to wakefulness, involved coordinated activity of multiple brain structures, numerous neurotransmitters. I would suggest that the terminal irreducibly complex, when applied to sleeping and waking, is not at all an overstatement.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. Two separate control systems working in harmony to manage a single life essential process. So that's the. The push pull principle that they're talking about and very much at play here with our system of sleep. Well, final question for this episode, is it accurate to call the regulatory processes involved in sleep and waking irreducibly complex? I know you've touched on that a little bit, but just kind of summarize that for us.
[00:19:01] Speaker C: Well, I think so, because an irreducibly complex system is a system. You know, it could be as simple as a mousetrap. That's kind of the famous boil it down to something simple. We all understand all the components, the pieces of the mechanism have to be in place in order for it to function properly. We can say the same for the sleep wake process. If you only got to sleep, but the mechanism for waking didn't exist, well, that would not be a survivable situation. Or if you only got the part of the mechanism involved in keeping us awake functioning. But the aspects of our physiological makeup that allow us to sleep, if that wasn't yet evolved, let's say, then researchers have pointed out that going without sleep is not an option.
Humans will die more quickly from lack of sleep than from lack of food.
And so the sleep wake mechanism in its entirety is absolutely essential for our wellbeing, our survival, our flourishing. And the whole process is irreducibly complex because you can't just have part of it working and get along sort of okay, it either works or you're dead.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is definitely a fascinating topic and I think worthy of some more questions here. So we're going to leave it there for now, but we'll continue the discussion about the intelligent design of sleep. In the second half of our conversation, we'll dig a little deeper into the purpose of sleep and why it's so essential to living organisms. Well, also look at why it's unlikely that a gradual, darwinian, unguided process can be credited for it, and why intelligent design is a better explanation. Doctor Hidein, thanks for stopping by.
[00:20:54] Speaker C: Thank you again, Andrew. It's great to be able to talk with you again, and thanks for letting me share a little bit more about this fascinating topic of sleep.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, we'll include links to your articles on the intelligent design of sleep in the episode show notes. Those
[email protected] and for more from Doctor Hidein, you can get a copy of his book cancelled, what some atheists don't want you to see. For id the future, I am Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
