[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. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Doctor Eric Hidein about 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. He is author of the recent book canceled what some atheists don't want you to see. He speaks regularly at universities around the country and writes on the evidence for intelligent
[email protected]. dot Doctor Hidein welcome back.
[00:00:46] Speaker C: Thank you very much, Andrew. Great to be here with you again.
[00:00:49] Speaker D: Looking forward to continuing our discussion about sleep.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a fascinating topic. In the first half of this conversation, we talked about the first of your two articles on sleep. We considered why we even sleep in the first place. We looked at why an evolutionary mindset is an obstacle to our scientific understanding of sleep. And we discussed the various complicated processes involved in falling asleep and waking up and how our sleep wake cycles exhibit a type of complex engineering design pattern known as the push pull principle.
Well, today we're going to dive a little deeper into the science of sleep, review some of the hypotheses that researchers offer for the function of sleep, and well, discuss why sleep is so essential to humans and other living things. Well, also explain how sleep demonstrates at least two levels of intelligent design. Lets jump back in. First, researchers have posited several theories or ideas or hypotheses for the function of sleep, one of which focuses on sleep as a process of restoration. Tell us about the restorative theory.
[00:01:56] Speaker D: Well, again, we have ideas about the purpose of sleep, and I think that.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: Again from my research, the word mystery surrounding sleep is used by researchers quite frequently.
[00:02:10] Speaker D: So these are just plausibility theories. We don't have a definite answer yet. But the restorative theory states that sleep allows our bodies to repair and replenish various cellular components necessary for our functions that become depleted throughout an awake day. So evidence for that comes in that.
[00:02:32] Speaker C: Various aspects of muscle repair, tissue growth, release of many of the important hormones.
[00:02:37] Speaker D: For growth, occur primarily during sleep. Now this is really interesting because you'd think that if we're going to say, just need a rest, it would be just as well for us to simply kind of lie down and be still and not be running around or doing work or something. But apparently that's not enough. Our body needs something more, that stage of sleep and not just inactivity.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's not enough to just be still as you're saying, we have to really check out. Our brain has to go into a special, you know, kind of state and allow us to get out of the way so that our body can really focus on what it needs to do.
[00:03:23] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Well, much attention from researchers has focused on the various stages of sleep and brain activity differentiated by their eeg signatures. Can you briefly describe REM sleep? REM sleep, we've all heard of that. But what, what does it mean exactly?
[00:03:40] Speaker C: Well, BReHm, or rapid eye movement sleep.
[00:03:43] Speaker D: It'S known to be associated with dreaming. It's not, as researchers have found, not.
[00:03:49] Speaker C: Considered to be a restful stage of sleep.
[00:03:53] Speaker D: There's actually some elevated brain activity throughout REM sleep.
[00:03:59] Speaker C: One source says that our brain metabolism increases by up to 20% during this stage of sleep.
[00:04:07] Speaker D: So there's something going on, but it's maybe not the, you know, we think, oh, I was in a vivid dream.
[00:04:14] Speaker C: I must have been in a deep sleep.
[00:04:15] Speaker D: Well, there's actually a deeper stage of sleep when you're more unconscious and you're.
[00:04:21] Speaker C: Not aware of dreaming.
[00:04:22] Speaker D: But dreams do occur during this REM phase. An interesting part of it that it's rather curious that during this stage of.
[00:04:33] Speaker C: Our sleep cycle, the body is fully paralyzed, which under normal circumstances anyway.
[00:04:39] Speaker D: And you can think that that's probably.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: A good thing, because if you're dreaming.
[00:04:42] Speaker D: Of running or flying or jumping off a cliff, it's a good thing you're not really doing that. And so, yeah, our bodies are as.
[00:04:54] Speaker C: Paralyzed as if we were under some.
[00:04:57] Speaker D: Sort of an anesthetic.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really interesting. And of the three non rem sleep levels, the deepest is called n three, or slow wave sleep. What is our body doing and not doing during those periods of rest?
[00:05:12] Speaker D: Well, this is, this n three.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: It's a non rem stage of sleep, and it's the deepest stage.
This is really when most of the bodily and tissue repair processes are happening. The body is building as necessary, bone and muscle, even the immune system is being strengthened apparently during this n three or non rem stage of sleep.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Okay, so that's one of the deepest points in our sleep process. Now, again, I like how you quote from Shakespeare, his 27th sonnet, in your articles. Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed. The deer repose for limbs with travel tired. Sometimes we fight sleep, though, or disregard our body's need for it. But a lot of the time, we're grateful to be hitting the hay. As you reviewed the research on sleep, one thing you confirmed is that sleep is definitely not optional. What are the dangers of depriving ourselves of sleep?
[00:06:15] Speaker C: Well, I think that all of us.
[00:06:16] Speaker D: Have just a sense from experience that sleep deprivation doesn't work to our benefit.
But, you know, more careful study of what happens when people are deprived of.
[00:06:33] Speaker C: Sleep for a longer period of time shows that it can lead to significant.
[00:06:38] Speaker D: Neurological dysfunction, even hallucinations, mood swings. Meaning, you know, you don't have as.
[00:06:45] Speaker C: Much control over your emotions.
[00:06:47] Speaker D: If people are not able to get.
[00:06:51] Speaker C: Enough sleep on a regular basis, they're.
[00:06:53] Speaker D: At a higher risk of developing various morbidities, diseases, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, even a.
[00:07:03] Speaker C: Higher risk of developing obesity. I mean, that almost seems counterintuitive.
[00:07:08] Speaker D: You'd think that if you're just lying down sleeping, you're not really expending as.
[00:07:14] Speaker C: Much energy as if you're up and.
[00:07:15] Speaker D: Active, and you'd think you'd be burning more calories, and so you would not.
[00:07:22] Speaker C: Be as overweight, let's say.
[00:07:24] Speaker D: But the research shows that the opposite often happens, that getting regular, sufficient amount of sleep is a preventative for obesity.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, when it comes to figuring out how sleep might have evolved, scientists are basically playing a guessing game. You quote one researcher who even thinks the process of falling asleep came built into organisms, part of the package. We could buy that on a design hypothesis, but that sure doesn't fly from an evolutionary standpoint. What other evolutionary explanations did you come across in your review of the literature?
[00:07:59] Speaker D: Well, again, the one you just mentioned.
[00:08:02] Speaker C: Really highlights the difficulty that researchers have if they're approaching this from an evolutionary perspective.
[00:08:10] Speaker D: They have a great difficulty of trying.
[00:08:13] Speaker C: To understand why we would sleep in the first place.
[00:08:16] Speaker D: And so this one researcher, in a published article, just sort of gave up.
[00:08:22] Speaker C: In a sense, and punted and inverted.
[00:08:24] Speaker D: The paradigm, suggesting that sleep was our native state and that somehow an evolutionary.
[00:08:29] Speaker C: Process took place that caused us to enter wakefulness.
[00:08:34] Speaker D: But honestly, if the coordinated physiological and neurological processes necessary to produce sleep seem daunting from natural processes, to have them.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: Originate without a designer then producing wakefulness, which is associated with consciousness, with its attendant qualities of mind, that seems completely beyond the reach of any darwinian mechanism.
[00:09:00] Speaker D: So I don't think that this kind of a clever, almost counterintuitive idea that.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: We evolved wakefulness and we just started off, everything started off asleep.
[00:09:12] Speaker D: I think that that doesn't solve any problems.
[00:09:15] Speaker C: It actually introduces greater problems from an evolutionary mechanism.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, in the first half of this conversation, you wrote that sleep is irreducibly complex. You also said that our body's sleep wake cycle exhibits a type of complex engineering design known as the push pull principle. Can you touch on what that means again here, the idea of irreducible complexity and the push pull principle.
[00:09:42] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:09:43] Speaker D: Again, just for example, in studying this, you find that transitions between sleep and wakefulness are not just as simple as flipping a switch. You know, we could think, oh, maybe it's just like the room is dark and then the room is light, and it's simple. I just turn the switch on or.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Off, but that's not it at all. The sleep wake states are orchestrated by.
[00:10:16] Speaker D: Multiple brain structures, some of which include the hypothalamus, controls the onset of sleep.
[00:10:23] Speaker C: Hippocampus, which is involved in memory regions active during dreaming.
[00:10:28] Speaker D: The amygdala, the emotion center, is active during dreaming. Thalamus. It prevents sensory signals from reaching the cortex. We have to have that kind of a disconnect of our physical being so.
[00:10:43] Speaker C: That we're, in a sense, in a state of paralysis.
[00:10:46] Speaker D: And there's other brain structures that are in the. And if you think of the number.
[00:10:54] Speaker C: Of structures, and then you begin to list the number of neurotransmitters that are.
[00:10:59] Speaker D: Active in communicating between these different brain structures to promote sleep or wakefulness, it's a monster.
[00:11:08] Speaker C: I mean, it's a machine. Not in a bad way. I just mean to say it's big.
[00:11:13] Speaker D: And it's complicated and it's deep and involved and it's anything but flipping a switch. And so, again, to suggest that, oh, all of this just developed over time by undirected changes to our genetic makeup that somehow were facilitated by a survival of the fittest selection mechanism, this is absurd. For one, it's way too complicated for.
[00:11:46] Speaker C: Random chances to bring it about. And again.
[00:11:51] Speaker D: The obvious idea that sleeping.
[00:11:55] Speaker C: Is beneficial to survival.
[00:11:58] Speaker D: If you're in the wilds and you're.
[00:12:00] Speaker C: In the wilderness and you're an animal.
[00:12:01] Speaker D: And you have to go unconscious for hours at a time, that's not really a.
A state of being that promotes survival. It's like saying, all right, I'll just lie down here.
[00:12:17] Speaker C: You can come and eat me whenever you want to. I'm going to be paralyzed and unconscious.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's not going to work very well. Well, you write in your articles that sleep should be associated with at least two levels of design, and I just want to kind of summarize these for listeners. One is seen in the multiple physiological regulatory networks. The transition is from wakefulness to sleep and then return us to wakefulness.
Talk about the second facet of design real quick. The connection between sleep and human flourishing you've already touched on it. But these are two levels of design we're talking about deep design here. How does that figure in?
[00:12:59] Speaker D: Well, these concepts that I'll be mentioning are maybe not as cut and dry, they're not really chemistry, but I think that we can all appreciate the importance of them. For example, I mentioned in my article, just for fun, in a way, imagine a world without sleep. Okay, so nobody sleeps. Animals don't sleep. We don't sleep. Predatory animals, lions, cheetahs, for example, normally sleep twelve to 13 hours a day, would continually pose a threat. They would never go off duty. Many creatures are not designed to thrive at night. And yet, due to our planet rotating and having darkness about half of the time, that would mean that those animals.
[00:13:45] Speaker C: Half of their existence, while darkness prevails.
[00:13:48] Speaker D: Would be in a state of frustration, confusion, boredom, peril. And then, if we even think about humans, any parent cherishes the hours that their infants are asleep.
Imagine a world where newborn infants never.
[00:14:07] Speaker C: Slept, instead of the usual 16 to.
[00:14:09] Speaker D: 18 hours a day broken up into naps, even toddlers sleeping more than 12 hours a day. And I think that parents of newborns.
[00:14:22] Speaker C: Would run a risk of succumbing to.
[00:14:24] Speaker D: Exhaustion if their children never slept again.
[00:14:27] Speaker C: Sleep gives us an extended period of rest for the weary.
[00:14:30] Speaker D: There's many times when, you know, like in the Shakespeare sonnet, yeah, we're weary.
[00:14:36] Speaker C: Sleep is a respite.
[00:14:39] Speaker D: It gives us relief from emotional pain or physical pain. It saves us from periods of boredom and think that almost all of human history took place in an era before electric lights.
You know, the only light that you.
[00:14:59] Speaker C: Had was maybe a campfire at night, or the light of stars or the.
[00:15:04] Speaker D: Moon if it wasn't cloudy. Without sleep, it would be a difficult time. Again, we're not particularly well adapted to thrive in darkness, and so sleep allows us a timeout. Also a little, again, more subjective.
The fact that all people require sleep, even the bad guys, so to speak, kind of sets a limit to the amount of harm that evil people can perpetrate. So those are just a few of the, I guess, human flourishing related aspects.
[00:15:44] Speaker C: As a benefit of sleep.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah, certainly a more chaotic and dangerous world without this in place. Thank you for helping us imagine that world, though it's interesting, and in this fast paced, always on way of life that we have now, sleep does indeed help us flourish. What are some tips that you might have after going through the literature and pondering this for a while, on making sure we get enough sleep regularly, and making sure that sleep is quality well.
[00:16:15] Speaker D: You know, I'm not a sleep expert or a doctor. You might ask your doctor about that. But I think that one of the key needs that we have for sleep comes from giving our physical being a break from our nervous systems.
I say this, that sleep gives respite.
[00:16:44] Speaker C: To the body against the demands of the ever vigilant mind and brain.
[00:16:50] Speaker D: And it's like our nervous system is continuously, even in an unconscious way, monitoring our surroundings and sorting out signals, some of which we're not perhaps fully consciously aware of, but signals in the environment that are perhaps dangerous signals or not. And so there's kind of a wear and tear upon our being, our physical.
[00:17:23] Speaker C: Being, by the watchfulness and the activity.
[00:17:26] Speaker D: Of our nervous systems. And I believe that promoting sleep, like you asked. What are some tips? Well, the Bible, the scriptures suggest that a tranquil mind is one of the best, I guess, conditions for being able to enjoy sleep.
For me, I find also that the.
[00:17:54] Speaker C: Right amount of physical activity is important.
[00:17:58] Speaker D: Researchers will suggest that it's important to.
[00:18:02] Speaker C: Be outside, to actually let our bodies.
[00:18:05] Speaker D: Get cues from daylight versus night, that, okay, we're, you know, it helps to reset the circadian rhythm when you get.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: Up in the morning and you see.
[00:18:16] Speaker D: The sunlight, that is important. You know, if we close ourselves in an environment that's artificial, I think that perhaps our regular sleep wake cycle will be inhibited.
I think that in general, scientists have.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: Found that everything sleeps.
[00:18:35] Speaker D: If it's alive, it sleeps, and everything that has any sort of a nervous.
[00:18:42] Speaker C: System of a consciousness.
[00:18:45] Speaker D: So again, I believe that there is.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: Sleep could be described as a trade off.
It's a trade off for being conscious and consciousness actually wears out our bodies is kind of my thought.
[00:19:01] Speaker D: It's important for us to not just lie down in repose, but to have our brains disconnected from our bodies for a while so that we can allow.
[00:19:14] Speaker C: Our physical systems to be restored.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: I like that. So we're taking a break not only from our environment and from our toil and the things going on around us, but also from ourselves. We're taking a break from ourselves in order to face everything the next day. That's a really good insight. Well, let me conclude with just a few lines from your second article on sleep. You say this, it's remarkable that we regularly place our consciousness on pause, becoming nearly insensible to external sensory input and eventually entering a state of total bodily paralysis. Still more amazing is our daily recovery from such a state. Our utter dependence upon entering this altered state on a diurnal cycle is also perplexing. From an evolutionary perspective, as much as for any aspect of our existence, sleeping and waking point to the reality of a transcendent intelligent designer.
[00:20:09] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Well, very well put. Doctor Hidein, thank you for taking the time to speak to us today about this fascinating topic. Really appreciate your time.
[00:20:18] Speaker D: Well, thank you again. I appreciate your willingness to explore this with me, and I hope that our conversation has provided further evidence for the.
[00:20:30] Speaker C: Pervasive nature of design, intelligent design in our lives.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. And I was just thinking of that saying that people say, let me sleep on it.
And that kind of figures in. We take in so much stimulation throughout the day, much information, especially these days. It's important to sleep on it. It's important to kind of take your time reflecting and, and siphoning out the things that you will need and things you won't need. We definitely need to sleep on it, as they say. Well, if you didn't catch the first half of this conversation about the intelligent design of sleep, be sure to go back and tune in. We'll link to Doctor Hidein's sleep articles in the show notes for this
[email protected]. and I encourage you to hop on to evolutionnews.org to read more from Doctor Hidein and his colleagues. That's evolutionnews.org dot. And one more thing, listeners. If you enjoy the content you hear on id the future, help us share the podcast with others. Leave a rating and a written review of the podcast on the Apple podcasts platform. That's one of the places you can actually leave a review these days. Take a second to share a recent episode with a friend. That's easy to do with social media these days. And again, thanks in advance for your help. For id the future, I am Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
