[00:00:00] Speaker A: But if you look at human anatomy, what happens is the limb structure looks like it's the best design possible.
And because it's highly optimized, that means it's fantastically improbable.
Because if you imagine every combination of nerves and muscles and tissues, that's a phenomenally large number of possibilities.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I get to welcome not one, not two, not three, but actually four guests to the podcast, all part of our team of resident scientists at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Today, we have geologist and lawyer Casey Luskin, biochemist and metabolic nutritionist Emily reeves, biologist Jonathan McClatchy, and physicist Brian Miller. Our topics. Well, we're going to review the basics of design detection. Always handy if you're new to this or if you just need a refresher. We'll also dive into examples of extraordinary design in the human body, and we'll look at how design theorists respond to claims of flawed or suboptimal design in nature. If you're not quite sure yet how to present the evidence for intelligent design to your friends, associates at work, your family members, today's episode could be a great help to you.
Well, Casey, Emily, Jonathan, Brian, welcome.
[00:01:29] Speaker D: Great to be here.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:01:30] Speaker E: Thank you.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Well, so this ought to be fun, because I believe this might be the first time we've had this many of our resident scientists together in one podcast.
So this is going to be a great conversation. Now, as we get started, can I ask each of you to briefly explain your role at Discovery Institute and the focus of your current research?
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll go first. My. I'm the research coordinator, so I helped support the research efforts taking place at Discovery.
[00:01:58] Speaker E: I'm Emily Reeves and I am a research scientist. My research is really focused at kind of the intersection of engineering and biology. And as a metabolic nutritionist, I'm also particularly interested in just the extraordinary design of the human body.
[00:02:15] Speaker D: And I'm Jonathan, and I am a fellow and resident biologist here at the Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. And I'm particularly interested in molecular biology. I did my PhD on the eukaryotic cell division cycle, which was also the subject of a paper I published last year. And so I'm also interested in the design of the body and of biology more broadly. In fact, I was a college professor for four years, and I taught taught anatomy and physiology one and two also.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: My name is Casey Luskin, and I think ID future listeners probably know all of us, but my PhD is in geology, but I do a lot of work in the area of human origins. And the folks that are on this podcast with me are my favorite people. This is my sort of my core inner circle of the team that I get to manage and work with at Discovery. And I'm sort of our research director at Discovery Institute looking at managing our ID 3.0 research program.
But I get to work with Emily and Brian and Jonathan because they also helped co manage this research program. And together we are hoping to see ID continue to blossom and grow into a full fledged research program.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: Yeah, and it's always great to talk to you individually, each of you on the podcast, but it's a delight to have all of you together today. Well, a good place to begin the conversation is by asking what prompted us to gather together and what we're talking about today. The extraordinary design of the human body and how to present that evidence effectively. Could one of you just explain how this came to be, that we're talking about it today?
[00:03:45] Speaker D: Sure. So this actually originated with a submission that came through my website, which is talkaboutdoubts.com, where we essentially offer private mentoring over zoom to people who have doubts about faith. And this particular inquirer wanted to ask about anatomy and physiology. He'd actually been taking an anatomy and physiology class in college for the first time, and he was blown away by the engine prowess and complexity and design characteristics of the human body.
And he wanted to know whether that strong intuition of design that he had, that he'd acquired through taking this class actually could be made into a more robust and rigorous argument for design. And so I'd mentioned this in passing to a few of us at the office recently, and Casey thought it would be a great idea to bring us together to have a discussion on ID the future, where we could talk about this more fully.
[00:04:37] Speaker C: That's great. Yeah, because, you know, a lot of people are. They have that built in design intuition as Doug Axe wrote about in his book Undeniable. But not a lot of us know how to. And I'm talking about the general public, how to convert that intuition into a defensible argument that we can then share with others. So what a great idea to come together and share some of the common research that informs that.
But what is the best way to look for and evaluate the presence of design in the natural world? Let's talk about design detection for a few minutes.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Sure. Well, I can go first. I'm sure that Brian also wants to say a few things about this, but design detection is basically how do we recognize when something was designed? And what we're looking at are the general features that we observe in structures that we know were designed and also what we observe intelligent agents doing when they design things. And this allows us to basically construct criteria of what to expect to find when something was designed, which we can then go out and apply those criteria to the natural world. And when we find these known features and properties of design systems, we can detect design. And probably the most general feature that we observe is a core part of design systems. We observe intelligent agents producing this. We observe this in systems that we know were designed is what is called complex and specified information.
We've talked about this numerous times here on ID the Future before, but a very, very brief review. Roughly speaking, something is complex if it is unlikely and it is specified if it matches an independent pattern. So if I were to just, you know, type out a bunch of, you know, put monkeys on a keyboard and, and have them type out random keys on a keyboard, you're going to get a very complex sequence of letters and numbers and symbols, but it's not going to have any pattern, it's not going to mean anything. So it would be complex but not specified. But then you type out, you know, the Declaration of Independence or the first three pages of War and Peace. Now again, it has a very, very unlikely set of symbols, characters, you know, letters and numbers. However, it's going to match a pattern, namely words that conform to the English language, that make sense, and you will immediately recognize that that sequence of symbols is both unlikely and specified and you would detect design. We could give, you know, any number of examples on this. And there are design detection methods that get a lot more sophisticated on this. If folks come to our summer seminar, I give an opening lecture where we talk about complex and specified information. We also talk about making inferences to the best explanation, where you compare the design explanation to other materialistic explanations and see which ones explain the most data. You can use what Michael Behe calls looking for a purposeful arrangement of parts, where you see multiple parts that are arranged in a fashion to work towards some top down design goal.
Or you can use sort of this positive method of detecting design where you use known design, known criteria that reflect design systems and you go out and apply those. So there's lots of ways to detect design. They're all complementary, they all worked together very well. So I don't know, Brian, you probably have a lot to add on this.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Question that's a beautiful explanation. And I just wanted to mention that most recently Bill Demski and Winston Ewart did a second edition of the Design Inference, which is the earliest book, talking about what Casey mentioned. And they had an additional insight which will be very important to our conversation in that objects are specified or special.
And if they can be described with short descriptions. If, for instance, they use the example of in Star wars where Darth Vader says, I am your father, a one word description reflects the fact that that relationship is really important and very special. While if descriptions require very, very long numbers of words, then that's probably not special. Like in the movie Spaceballs, where it's like I'm your cousin's best friend's uncle's barber's neighbor.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: So the length of the descriptor that can be applied to something can be an indicator of design as well. Is that what you're saying?
[00:08:45] Speaker A: That's exactly right.
[00:08:46] Speaker C: Okay, so lots of different ways to detect design.
[00:08:52] Speaker C: And not everything that we find, not every artifact, not every item that we come across, is going to have those hallmarks of design, but we do have specific ways to detect whether it's there or not. Now, Jonathan and Emily, could you apply this to specific biological examples?
[00:09:10] Speaker D: Sure, I can maybe start. There's so many examples that one could talk about here, and I've written extensively on such examples at Science and Culture Today, which is the web, the blog website of the Discovery Institute.
As I said before, I taught anatomy and physiology 1 and 2. And I share the sense of wonder and awe at the engineering prowess and elegance of many systems that we encounter in the study of human anatomy and physiology. I'll just take one example, and that is I've been long fascinated by the design of the human reproductive system.
And there's various aspects of human reproduction that exhibit incredible design and engineering. I'll just mention one of those, which is the design of a sperm cell. And there's actually multiple aspects that one could discuss in regards to a sperm cell's design, but I'll just choose one of those, which is the sperm cell flagellum.
And the sperm cell flagellum is quite different from a bacterial flagellum. A bacterial flagellum rotates and spins like a rotary motor, whereas a eukaryotic flagellum, of which the sperm cell flagellum is one, is more like it beats rather than rotates, and it is able to propel sperm cells towards the egg to facilitate fertilization.
And the sperm cell flagella requires the coordinated action of many dynein Motor proteins. So dynines are a class of motor proteins which have various functions, but they're involved in sperm cell motility.
And regulatory signals lead to the inhibition of dynein motors on one side of the flagellum, while on the other side, the dynamic motor proteins walk along the macrotubules as they hydrolyze ATP, the cell's energy molecule generated from the mitochondria in the sperm's middle piece.
And the flagellum bends in one direction due to molecular linkers that resist that sliding.
And the flagellar bending alternates between repeatedly switching the side of dynamic inhibition.
So that's an incredibly elegant and sophisticated piece of engineering. And it doesn't appear that such a system could have been assembled one small step at a time by numerous excessive slight modifications by an evolutionary stepwise pathway. For example, if you were to add one diene protein at a time.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: That.
[00:11:50] Speaker D: Would not lead to a series of intermediate stages.
[00:11:55] Speaker D: All of which confer a selective advantage.
The sperm flagellum is of little utility until the emergence of the alternating regulatory signals inhibit the dynamic motors on one side of the flagellum and then the other in a coordinated fashion. And so sperm possessing flagella are also significantly costlier to produce in terms of energy and time. And that fitness cost has to be offset by a strong advantage which is only realized after the flagellum is fully operational. And so a proposed intermediate stage is quite unlikely.
[00:12:29] Speaker D: Or is quite likely to be eliminated by purifying selection rather than preserved. And so that seems to me to be a potent challenge to an evolutionary type of explanation to the origins of the sperm cell flagellum. And yet, eridis booking on irreducibly complex systems, I think, are not only a challenge to evolutionary theory, but they're also a strong indicator of design, because only intelligent agents are able to visualize complex higher level objectives and then bring everything together needed to realize those objectives, whereas unguided processes typically can't do that. And so I think that there is a top heavy likelihood ratio, where systems like the sperm cell flagellum, which exhibit irreducibly complex, irresistible complexity, of which there are many throughout human biology.
[00:13:18] Speaker D: These are not particularly surprising, supposing that a mind was involved in their origin, whereas they're wildly surprising on the falsehood of that hypothesis. And so in view of that top heavy likelihood ratio, it favors a design thesis over an evolutionary one.
[00:13:33] Speaker C: Yeah, that's great. And we have unpacked this actual reproductive system in multiple episodes of Eye to the Future. So listeners, viewers can go back to Those Emily, what would you add to that as another example perhaps?
[00:13:47] Speaker E: Yeah, I think one of the examples that is my favorite that I'm familiar with and there as Jonathan already said, there are so many in human physiology.
But I ran across a couple Years ago, this 2020 study in Nature and what this paper is highlighting is how the brain of the human infant is actually prepared for reading. So in case anybody wants to look this study up, it's called the innate connectivity patterns drive the development of the visual word form area.
But what this study showed is that the region of the human brain that is destined to become what Destined to become the part of the brain that's responsible for recognizing written words and it's actually already pre wired to the language area in the brain in, in the brain of a newborn.
So they learned this using mri. So they took these infants who were just born, they had no visual experience yet with letters or words, they couldn't even hardly see clearly. Right.
But they did MRIs and they saw that this circuitry is already hooked up for reading, which I think is a super cool example of what I would call an anticipatory system.
And so this innates to tie this back to design detection, you know, this innate specification, right. It doesn't guarantee the child is going to learn to read. You're still going to have to teach them and expose them. But what it is saying is that you have this biological infrastructure already in place that's pre wired for this.
And so from a design detection standpoint.
[00:15:38] Speaker E: Such forward looking.
[00:15:42] Speaker E: You know, function specific wiring is exactly as like what Jonathan was saying, what we would expect under a top down design paradigm where you have future needs being anticipated and then built in advantage in advance of when they're going to be used. And this is similar to how human agents build things, right? Like when we're building, building a house, you lay all the plumbing and the electrical.
[00:16:08] Speaker E: Conduits before you pour the foundation and then later those things will be hooked up to make the house function properly.
So I think this is a really nice example of a anticipatory system in human physiology which is much better explained on a design hypothesis than on a hypothesis that this is the result of undirected accumulation of small modifications.
[00:16:39] Speaker C: Fascinating. Yeah. And it turns out the more we learn about the human body, the more we find that it's a veritable treasure trove of design and complexity. And as you're mentioning already, you could go over design example after example all day, but that's a fascinating one. I hadn't Heard of that one.
And as a teacher, I love the sound of that. You know, getting the infant ready to read with that anticipatory system kicking in. Now, Brian, could you discuss the work of Stuart Burgess and some of the things that he's pointing to as far as optimality?
You know, we're talking about design. You know, the Darwinist is going to push back and say, well, you know, it came about over time and. And it is what it is. And we've got optimal, we've got suboptimal. It's all just a product of a Darwinian process. But when you really study that optimality, you get a different picture, don't you?
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I just want to refresh. What we've talked about and put in the context of human anatomy and physiology is that, you know, something's designed if it's highly improbable and also specified or somehow very special.
And in both cases, what Emily and Jonathan talked about was you've got. In the case of Jonathan, you've got these muscles and ATP and biological systems in a fantastically improbable arrangement.
So it's clearly improbable, but it's also special or specified because it's geared for a purpose, for fertilization. Same thing with Emily. She talked about how in the brain there is an enormous number of possible ways to interconnect neurons.
So any particular interconnection is highly improbable. But her example is special again or specified because it achieves the goal of reading.
And Stuart Burgess research really highlights this because what he showed is that when you look at the pattern of limbs and vertebrates, and he studies lots of things, he could say the same thing about dragonflies and other animals he studied, but if you look at human anatomy, what happens is the limb structure looks like it's the best design possible.
And because it's highly optimized, that means it's fantastically improbable. Because if you imagine every combination of nerves and muscles and tissues, that's a phenomenally large number of possibilities. And what you find is when engineers try to create robotic arms or robotic limbs is you have.
Typically, you end up in what's called a local fitness peak. In other words, you find some design logic. It might work, but it's probably not the best it could be. But you can't change it, because as soon as you try to change it by a little bit, it breaks down. So you have this hill that you're stuck on. So you'll never be able to find the best design possible because you'll be stuck on these suboptimal designs. But the fact that the limbs of humans and pretty much all vertebrates is highly optimized means it's not only incredibly improbable to happen by chance, but it's also very, very special because it achieves goals in the best way possible. He talked about everything from the hand structure, which is incredibly fine tuned and optimized for dexterity. He talked about the knee joints. He talked about the foot angle complex. And in every example, in both humans and other animals, you see optimality.
You see this issue of improbable designs for purpose.
[00:20:12] Speaker C: So that was Brian Miller touching on the optimality of various vertebrate structures and the research of bioengineer Stuart Burgess, tying in to what all of today's guests are discussing, the improbable design of human beings and other organisms, as well as the inability of a Darwinian evolutionary process to account for it. But the conversation doesn't end there. Another 30 minutes of it awaits you in a separate episode where our team of resident ID scientists will discuss more about their research. The fruitfulness of combining engineering principles into the study of biology, the claim of flawed or bad design in living things and how to respond to that, as well as what the fossil record can teach us about the history of life.
That's all coming up in the second half of this discussion. So join us for that.
Don't forget, you can enjoy many of our interviews in video format now on our new YouTube channel. Hop onto it and subscribe. Help us build a channel. Subscribe and you'll be among the first to see the new content that we put up. So that'
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Well, thank you for joining me. Until next time, I'm Andrew McDermott. Take care.
