Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Hello, I'm Tom Gilson. I'm pleased to introduce today's id, the future conversation on life Viewed from a perspective biologists have rarely studied engineering. Wesley j Smith, chair and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism interviews. The co-authors of the book, your Design Body released Latent 2022. His guests are engineer Steve Laufman and physician Howard Glicksman, originally aired at the Humanized podcast. This is the first of two parts we'll present here at ID the future.
Speaker 3 00:00:50 Welcome to humanize from Discovery Institute Center on Human exceptionalism, where human rights meet human responsibilities. We speak with writers, thinkers, and newsmakers on the controversial issues of human life and human thriving that impact our daily lives. We are exceptional as creatures in the cosmos, as equal members of the human family. And as ethical beings, humanize, explores some of the fundamental questions. How do we thrive? How do we live well and care for what we've inherited? How do we act responsibly with one another and in the wider world? And how do we conserve the good things of this life for the future? We matter. Our actions matter. Let's get into it. I'm Wesley j Smith, and this is humanize.
Speaker 3 00:01:59 In this episode of Humanize, we will explore the human body. Is your body engineered or did it evolve through impersonal and random processes over countless millions of years of natural selection? And what difference does the answer to that question make? My guests are the authors of your design body, a new book that explores the complexity of the human physical form, concluding that such an intricate and complicated system could not have arisen by chance. Steve Lman is a public speaker, author, computer scientist, and engineering consultant in the design of enterprise class systems with expertise in the difficulties of changing complex systems to perform new tasks. He was a founding member of the International Foundation for Cooperative Information Systems, and has published many juried papers and book chapters on information commerce and related topics. Several years ago, he began to apply his expertise to the study of Living Systems. He leads the engineering research Group at the Discovery Institute. Dr. Howard Glickman is a primary care and hospice physician with more than 40 years of practice in clinical and hospital settings. He is the author of the Design Body series for Evolution News and Science Today. Gentlemen, welcome to Humanize.
Speaker 4 00:03:25 Thanks for having us. Good to here. Good
Speaker 3 00:03:27 To be here. Uh, you know, you both come from different fields of science. One dealing with engineering and the other with biology. What convinced you to collaborate in writing your design body? Let's start with, uh, Steve.
Speaker 5 00:03:39 Uh, yeah, this is Steve. I, um, I had, I, I hadn't really thought about this much, but I started reading some of what Howard's was writing, and I realized just how much more interesting it was than he even he realized. So, uh, I started seeing it from an engineering lens, and so I called Howard and, uh, said, Hey, we should, we should do some work together. So eventually that turned into this book.
Speaker 3 00:04:08 And Howard, what did you think when he said that?
Speaker 4 00:04:11 Yeah, this is Howard. Well, um, yeah, I've been, basically the history is that I've been writing about this, uh, for about 20 years. Uh, had various articles on the internet, uh, about how the body works, and that sort of culminated in this 81 part series that I did at Discovery Institute several years ago called The Design Body. And, uh, and that's through that. I think that Steve read what I was writing, and basically he said to me, you've been writing about medicine, but we don't realize is you've been really writing about engineering as well. And that's what prompted him to contact me several years ago and got us talking and working together.
Speaker 3 00:04:44 That must have been a bit of a surprise, huh?
Speaker 4 00:04:47 Well, not, not totally, uh, but, but it was a surprise that, uh, you know, we were trying to figure out how to, how to do this because I pretty well knew what I needed to do. But the question became how were we gonna apply the engineering into the writing
Speaker 3 00:05:00 And how long did it take to, uh, do the research and writing of the book?
Speaker 4 00:05:05 This is Howard. Uh, basically, I, I simply, from my perspective, I just continued, I'd written this same material in several different ways over the, over the many years, trying to get it down to a, a level that the average person could understand. And so we just, I sort of just went through that again. And then with Steve on board, uh, you know, he was editing and we were trying to figure out where to fit in the engineering at the same time.
Speaker 3 00:05:30 Yeah, Steve, I find the engineering aspect interesting. I mean, you, you, uh, don't normally see that kind of application in terms of the biological sciences or even some of the, uh, let's say culture war kinds of agendas.
Speaker 5 00:05:45 Yeah. Uh, yeah, that's, that's, uh, I think that's a problem. Um, these systems, the, the systems that are required to make the human body work are exactly the kinds of things that engineers design and build. We, we know how to build systems. So if you, if you look at living systems as the, as if they are systems, which they are, you can see all kinds of new research avenues. It's, it's, I think it would be, uh, terribly interesting for scientists to go down the engineering path much more deeply than they have yet. So it's, it's sort of new for them. And, uh, we're, we're actually, we have a, a, a group working on, um, building an engineering text for biologists. So we we're, we're, we're talking about doing a textbook at some point for, um, biologists that will teach them what it is they're looking at and, and how to approach it in a, in a more, um, uh, potentially more productive way.
Speaker 3 00:06:48 That's very interesting. You're basically saying that whether something is natural or whether, let's say it's man constructed like a bridge, certain principles apply across the board. Is that right?
Speaker 5 00:06:58 Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4 00:07:00 If, if I could just add something Wesley, uh, Howard here. Um, a question I was asked recently, and then also all I noticed on the internet is that as physicians and biologists, you know, I'm not biologist of a physician, but, but we don't tend to think like engineerings engineers, we're, we're not aware that we're doing engineering without realizing we're sort of doing reverse engineering. So we're trying to figure out something works, but because as physicians we're not really making anything, we're sort of just trying to figure what's going on to, to try to fix it, um, we don't tend to have that perspective. And just as a comment, um, I just noticed, uh, yesterday someone had written a, a comment about our book, and he, he said he had a PhD in physiology, and he pretty well, pretty well, you know, he, he sort of recommended our book saying that, you know, everything went along perfectly, but he was really impressed with the, uh, cascading problems. And he goes right through the cascading problems is, Hey, that's really neat. This is an engineering problem, but here is a PhD in physiology as well, who know? We, we just don't, we didn't realize we we're not thinking like engineers. And this is I think, what's important for everybody to start thinking that way. Uh, and so then they get an understanding of where everything came from. You know,
Speaker 3 00:08:06 Of course, engineering more than implies some, an intentionality or, or a design. So let's get into the controversies, uh, that you address. And, uh, and a lot of your book isn't controversial in terms of how the body works, and we'll, we'll discuss that too. But let's talk about Darwinism, how, you know, there are different definitions of that term. Um, how do you define Darwinism, at least for purposes of the book?
Speaker 5 00:08:33 Uh, this is Steve, I'll, I I'll take a shot at that. Um, so we, we use sort of a class. We start with classical Darwinism, you know, straight out of his origins book from 1859. And, and most of the variations that have, have occurred since then, uh, go by different names, you know, neo Darwinism or things like that. But they all have the same basic, uh, causal factors involved. So there are, there are only four, uh, causal factors in Darwin's theory. And, uh, we, um, there are, um, heritability, uh, random mutation, uh, uh, which is, uh, neo Darwinism, Darwin himself didn't really define, uh, what the mechanism of change was. Uh, and then there's, um, natural selection and time. Those are the four things that cause things to change over time in, in, uh, in all variations of Darwin's theory. There are, there are a couple of, uh, uh, others which we, we discussed briefly in the book.
Speaker 5 00:09:37 But, um, but those are the only things that can really, uh, do any work. And, and they're, they're not very capable. So when you look at those from an engineering perspective, they are not only, uh, inadequate or insufficient or incomplete, they just are flat out incapable. They just can't ever get there. Certainly not gradually. And that's one of the main, uh, ideas in the book is that, uh, that these causal hurdles we talk about, uh, we, and we pre present quite a large number of them. Uh, they cannot be overcome gradually, even if the system is designed, you cannot get there gradually. If you have to be alive at every step, life is very persnickety, <laugh>, <laugh>. If you don't solve all, all get all the time, uh, you're, you're dead. So, you know, it's, it's a problem.
Speaker 3 00:10:34 Uh, Howard, how would you define intelligent design, at least for the purposes of your book?
Speaker 4 00:10:40 Well, you know, I think is the, uh, discovering suit said is sort of a scientific theory, which holds that some features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, uh, rather than an undirected process such as natural selection, you know, acting on genetic mutation. So, you know, that's, you know, very simplistically, uh, you know, that's as simple as you as simple explanation for what intelligent design is. And that's where, where I was coming from originally. Uh, the idea where Steve's coming from with respect to Darwinism, you know, I, I, I wasn't really into the theory too much, but the problem was knowing how life actually works, uh, how, how the body has to control various things like oxygen, carbon dioxide, calcium, et cetera. I knew that there were several parts that needed to be in place, uh, to manage that. So inherently, I knew there was a, uh, a difficulty with Darwinism right from the beginning. And it was really hard for me to understand how, frankly, how people accepted this, uh, knowing how, you know, how the body and how life really actually works.
Speaker 3 00:11:39 So are you saying that something, and now I'm completely, uh, naive on this issue, cuz I, you know, I don't engage it too much. Um, are you, what, what I heard you just say is that there are things that, that life requires to be life that actually have to exist before they can be, before they evolve. In other words, the things that are required, you can't, you can't have it if it comes later, it has to be first. Is that right?
Speaker 4 00:12:13 Yeah, Howard, I'll just answer that a bit. And basically the, with respect to Darwin and evolution itself, we're already get, you know, he never really explained how life the itself comes into being. So you can't have, um, evolution without life already. Alright. Reproduction has to be in existence. So,
Speaker 3 00:12:29 So, and we don't yet know how life began, do we?
Speaker 4 00:12:33 Right? So that's, so already you're talking about the cell cell structure, chemical balance, uh, volume of the cell, all those issues that have, have never really been addressed. So that's, that's, that's already at the first phase. Alright. And then, and then we're talking about life itself. That, uh, you know, you have this interdependency, you know, you need, you need oxygen for the cells, but, but your, your lung, you need lungs to bring in oxygen, but those cells need oxygen themselves. And then of course, it needs the cardiovascular system, which, but the cardiovascular system needs to get oxygen, so it needs the lungs. So you have this interdependency between the systems and actually an auto dependency or cicu, you know, causal circularity for the actual organisms themselves. I'll let, I'll let Steve add to that.
Speaker 5 00:13:16 Yeah, I, i, I might, uh, uh, take a little more engineering perspective on this. I, I view the, so when you look at Darwinism, uh, Darwin requires all hard problems to already be solved before it can do anything. So how do you solve all
Speaker 3 00:13:32 The, and that's very interesting.
Speaker 5 00:13:34 How do you solve all the hard problems in the, in at the beginning? So, so one of my favorite examples is salt. Your body has to control this salt content. How do you, how do you stay alive controlling your salt while you're waiting for a salt control system to evolve?
Speaker 3 00:13:54 Well, you can't,
Speaker 5 00:13:56 Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the point. That's a causal hurdle. If you have to control salt, it has to be controlled by a control system. And control systems are not only irreducibly complex, but they, uh, virtually always have to be coherent. They have to have many parts working in, in a cooperative way to achieve the needed result.
Speaker 3 00:14:20 So is it like saying you can't build the roof until you finish the walls?
Speaker 5 00:14:25 Y yes, exactly. Well, it is even worse than that. So, so the question is, um, you, you, you can't really, uh, it's like how many parts do you have to have in place before your car will drive
Speaker 3 00:14:37 All of them <laugh>, practically?
Speaker 5 00:14:39 Well, you know, you, you may not need the leather on the seats, um, right. But you need all of the main parts, or it's not a car. So,
Speaker 3 00:14:49 Uh, and you need gasoline <laugh>.
Speaker 5 00:14:51 Yeah. Yeah. You, and there's a lot of parts in a car. Uh, I mean, even the simplest cars from the early days had a lot of parts, and they were, they all had to be arranged, organized, and, and constructed in just the right way or it wasn't gonna work.
Speaker 3 00:15:05 And it, that would never happen by just throwing stuff together and waiting for it to kind of create a car, right?
Speaker 5 00:15:11 Yeah. Right. So I mean, how, how many years could you go on three tires? You know?
Speaker 3 00:15:17 Yeah. So your critics of, of intelligent design, um, I often see that they, uh, they try to define what intelligent design is, and the media kind of goes along with it in a way that I find to be frankly false. Uh, they say it's creationism by another name, which of course implies that it's a Christian, uh, theistic kind of, God created the world in seven days kind of thing. Uh, or they, um, they'll say it's a god of the gaps fallacy that is that which science can't yet, um, define or de describe. It's, well, that's where God is. But of course, science is explaining more and more and more how do you respond to those criticisms? Uh,
Speaker 5 00:16:02 So this is Steve again. I, I'll, um, I, I like to say that, that this is a not a quantitative problem. It's a qualitative problem, right? So, uh, they, they're, they're throwing down, uh, uh, challenges, uh, or we're throwing down challenges and they're making face statements. So trust us, we're scientists. We'll figure it out. We don't have any idea how it works, but, uh, but we'll figure it out someday. And that what that is really is an appeal to their worldview as the only reasonable worldview.
Speaker 3 00:16:37 And that's, uh, that's kind of like a desire for there to be nothing but materialism. Is that right? Do you think that's
Speaker 5 00:16:43 Correct? Right, right. But to me, it's what we're really talking about is a qualitative problem. So this is like, uh, I, I want to drive my car from my home in Colorado to, uh, Florida. Um, uh, that's doable. I just need to be able to buy gas, which apparently is very expensive these days, and, uh, you know, and, and give it some time and some effort, and I can do that, but I cannot drive my car to London.
Speaker 3 00:17:15 Right?
Speaker 5 00:17:16 That's
Speaker 3 00:17:17 A, and, and how, how does that, how's that, the analogy there?
Speaker 5 00:17:20 So we, we have these causal hurdles. You, Darwinism requires things to occur in relatively small, um, increments. You know, he, he's into gradualism and, um, gradualism can't do it. You must have discrete relatively large discrete leaps, and that's anathema to Darwin's theory.
Speaker 3 00:17:42 Do do more modernistic, um, evolutionary biologists, uh, still accept that, uh, small incremental approach, uh, to evolution.
Speaker 5 00:17:52 Uh, there are, there are several variations on, on this, well, like horizontal gene transfer and other mechanisms where you can obtain leaps, uh, in, in a given organism. But those leaps had to have come from somewhere, right? They, those, those quantities of capability, uh, discreet jumps in capability had to have come from somewhere else. And they, they don't have an explanation for that. So, uh, it had to have occurred gradually somewhere else, and then it may be accepted by a given organism quickly. So there, that
Speaker 4 00:18:31 Howard, Howard here, I just wanna circle back into some of you commented on earlier on about the God of the gaps. Really what's happened is, and this is really, you know, really what's happening is what we write about is based what, what we really know about science. So actually, like Steve is alluding to, the more we understand how life actually works, um, the more the, you know, neo Darwinian narrative, um, it becomes impossible. And certainly at the time of Darwin, one, one could argue that, you know, they didn't know as much about the cell, et cetera. I think if he would've spoken to a few engineers, he probably wouldn't have brought his, his theory forward. Um, I sort of used to give him some slack on that. But after meeting Steve and talking about engineering, I realized there were some obvious things like, you know, hey, you got a, you got a feeling.
Speaker 4 00:19:15 Something in your body tells you you gotta breathe. Something tells you you gotta drink, something tells you gotta eat. I mean, there's something that's, that's an, those are engineering sort of things. So what we're really talking about, what we've, there's a reason why we've written the book is to explain to the public how life actually works. And, and the, the best example I think is the body we know the most about it. And I think that's where people are most interested. Uh, so really what it comes down to is, is putting, like, like Steve says, these causal hurdles, where did this all come from? Um, and instead of, it's, it's not the god of the gaps, you know, it's, it's like, well, we have all this information. Our problem, if you actually, if you're familiar with Dr, be he Michael be who wrote Darwin's Black box, and, and, and the IAL complexity, the complaint against him is that he doesn't have a good enough imagination, right?
Speaker 4 00:20:04 <laugh>, alright. This is the difficulty we're having. We, we, you know, we live in a real, this is the other thing about engineers and doctors. We live in a real world, okay? One could argue, should we be talking about evolution? Should we be talking about biology? Well, you know, what, if I, if I get something wrong or do something wrong, or Steve gets something wrong, gets, you know, people suffer, people die, people lose money. If an evolutionist evolution biologist gets it wrong, well, one could argue about pretty people's worldview, but on a practical level, on a day-to-day level, it really doesn't matter. <laugh> okay? But, but we're, we live in the real world. So when, if we don't get things right, if what we're talking about isn't right, someone's gonna let us know, you know, with respect to at least what we're talking about, science and engineering, which is, and, and we pretty well got it. Right. So
Speaker 3 00:20:50 It sounds like you're talking about the difference between what is, is and how is came to be.
Speaker 4 00:20:58 Yes.
Speaker 3 00:20:59 So what we're talking about in this, in this quote, controversy quote isn't what thing, how things are today, how the body works, but how it got to be where it is today. Is that right?
Speaker 4 00:21:11 Exactly, yes.
Speaker 3 00:21:12 Do you guys deny that natural selection exists?
Speaker 4 00:21:17 <laugh>?
Speaker 5 00:21:18 Well, let's, uh, let's, I'll take that one on. Um, I don't, what we deny is that nature can select, so if there's something going on that's called natural selection, it is not selecting. So to the extent nature can select anything, it will select everything for death, right? Equilibrium, e equilibrium is, is the end result. Um, the, the forces of physics and, and, and, uh, chemistry are always pushing toward equilibrium. So, um, so natural selection, and, and even Darwin admitted that he, this is probably a misnomer. Before he died, he, he, uh, he regretted choosing this term. Uh, but, uh,
Speaker 3 00:22:03 But the idea of the, the idea of natural selection, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, and again, you know, I'm a lawyer, I'm not a biologist, and I'm not a scientist. But that, um, if you, if if a, a certain mu as we now know it, a certain mutation, let's say in a gene gives you a trait that makes it more likely that you will survive beyond a certain point, and to be able to reproduce that, that will then, over a long period of time, perhaps millions of years, lead to changes in the physical form that are actually more, uh, uh, akin to or more aligned for survival. Is that how natural selection generally would be considered to work?
Speaker 4 00:22:43 Yeah, I think that's an
Speaker 5 00:22:45 Accurate description. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:22:47 If I heard what you said though, I, I, you may have had that wrong cuz it doesn't lead to a change. The change has to occur first. Okay. So this is, this is the error in culture. National selection does not do anything. Okay. So basically, as I think Steve wrote in the book, the Survivors survive Big Deal, okay? I think they pretty well knew this before Darwin, you know, like, uh, Rasmus Darwin, you know, his, his, uh, his, uh, grandfather, you know, talked about this as well. The key thing here is that in, in for life, you have to have genetic mutation or random variation for a change to occur once that occurs, if that, if it gives them an advantage in some way, right? Then, then yes, it makes sense that, you know, they would, they would reproduce and, and and live. And of course, a lot of times, uh, what we've seen in, in certainly human in, in humans is that a lot of times it's a, it's an actual devolution, an actual like for sickle cell, alright?
Speaker 4 00:23:41 So then actually a worsening of the function. But because of the environment, because they're be exposed to malaria and for some reason it gives them an advantage to protect them against malaria, even though the hemoglobin is, is a sickling, uh, causes sickling, it does give them an advantage. So, but the bottom line here is that natural selection does not do anything. It, it only, uh, it only allows, it, it preserves those that have the advantage, but they have to have a genetic mutation or random variation to, to bring on this either new information or a new, you know, a, a new organ system, et cetera. So that's a, that, that's a big distinction because a lot of times you'll, you'll read in the press, even from Darwin, still say, well, natural selection did this, you know, the giraffe needed to be grow a longer neck. So it did, you know what I mean? Like, well, how you have to explain the genetic mutations and the change in the anatomy and the physiology first, and then once it occurs, okay, then, you know, then natural selection will, will kick in.
Speaker 5 00:24:39 Yeah. If I, if I could add to that, there's, there's also, go ahead Steve. Uh, a confusion, uh, natural selection, uh, cannot generate anything. Nature cannot generate, uh, organization or complexity of the kind we're talking about here. So, um, what Darwinism lacks is a theory of degenerative, uh, in other words, a way to overcome these causal hurdles. And, um, and, and that's essential. It, it may, nature may be able to preserve things because if, if you get things wrong, you die. So, um, so, but, but
Speaker 3 00:25:16 That's the, but that's the point of natural selection is that it actually, if the changes Howard said occurs, then, um, it's likely that, and, and that increases the chance of staying alive, right? Then that's likely to pass down the generations. Is that accurate?
Speaker 4 00:25:35 Right? Yes,
Speaker 5 00:25:35 I think that's an accurate description, yes. But the, the, there's a distinction to be made also in, um, what happens to the individual and what happens in a population. So, uh, the, the, the general theory of evolution is essentially a thought experiment. There's not a lot of data that supports any of this. So we don't see things,
Speaker 3 00:25:58 It's theoretical, just like ideas is theoretical, is that right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 5 00:26:02 Well, I, yes, I, yes, we're talking in, in the theoretical realm here about events in the past that we did not observe. So yeah, we have very limited data about what happened in the past.
Speaker 3 00:26:14 I've always thought of a natural selection. And then we'll move on to more of your, uh, what you write about in the book. But I've always thought of it that if it was a, a system that was created, it's really quite brilliant because it allows, it, it prevents life, generally speaking from becoming sclerotic and allows for a dynamic change. Uh, what do you think of that thought?
Speaker 5 00:26:39 Well, we, we, uh, introduce a, a theory of biological design in our book, in which we account for both the generation of, uh, new features and functions in, in biology. And, uh, also stasis the, the fossil record shows us vast stasis. And Darwin cannot account for either of those. So
Speaker 3 00:27:01 What, what is vast stasis?
Speaker 5 00:27:04 Vast stasis. So once you see an, an organism appear in the fossil record, it, it essentially doesn't change.
Speaker 3 00:27:12 I see. So I've, I've read, and again, I might be wrong, but I've read that the horseshoe crab, for example, hasn't changed in millions of years.
Speaker 5 00:27:20 Yeah, there are, there are hundreds of examples of what people call living fossils, in other words, organisms that are currently extant, but which, uh, we see in the fossil record from way, way, way back up to, uh, billion years ago for some bacteria.
Speaker 3 00:27:39 And they haven't changed
Speaker 5 00:27:40 And they haven't changed in, in any detectable way,
Speaker 4 00:27:44 <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:27:45 So, um, is your book religiously or scientifically based Howard?
Speaker 4 00:27:50 Um, it's, it's scientifically based. Everything we're talking about is how physiology, how the body works, and trying to explain, you know, where it came from. So it's, yes, it's, it's totally science
Speaker 3 00:28:01 And the book is primarily about, uh, the human body and its systems. And of course, you can't go into every particular system that exists in the human body cuz it would be, uh, 5,000 words. Um, but is there anything about which you write in terms of biological processes without the, you know, getting into the causes of it that would be controversial? Like how the heart works, how the blood works, this kind of thing?
Speaker 4 00:28:25 No, I, I don't think so. I think that, uh, as I said this PhD in physiology reviewed our book, uh, sir, I said, yeah, everything's right. Um, um, but basically, uh, we re we really did cover the whole body. We, we, we, we went through the every system in the body. Um, uh, we obviously, like, like Steve had said, if we did everything then the, the book would be on wheels. But, uh, we, we do really cover the whole, the whole body cuz because they're all interconnected anyway. So there's really nothing controversial about how everything works. Uh, it's just that we couldn't get into as much detail as we'd like, um, of course from an engineering and a, and a and a medical perspective. But it's, it's all, it's all the truth of how everything works.
Speaker 3 00:29:07 That's what volume twos are for. <laugh>. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:29:10 <laugh>, we,
Speaker 5 00:29:10 We should note that we, we worked very hard to make the, this material accessible to non-technical people.
Speaker 3 00:29:17 Right? That's why I could understand it,
Speaker 5 00:29:20 <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:29:21 Well that's great if you're understanding it. That's, that's, that's great. We're very happy about
Speaker 3 00:29:25 That. No, I could, yeah. And as I said, I'm a lawyer, none of this stuff, you know, I became a lawyer cuz I was lousy at math, so <laugh> <laugh>. Um, uh, and one final question is, and then we'll get into some more specifics. Um, this is about the human body, but it, it really, the human body, let's say, except for perhaps the size of the brain or something, doesn't really differ dramatically from other mammal bodies, does it? Or does it? No, that's a
Speaker 4 00:29:51 Good, uh, I, I I'm not an expert on comparative anatomy, but, but in general, if you're talking about other, uh, uh, mammals, no, and it's very, very similar. And, and I think that's what's so great. If you think about this, um, every, a lot of the lot of the things we talk about are like, there's certain specific, uh, uh, pe people's, like chem chemistry has to say within a certain range, et cetera. The, the size of the, of the organs have to be a certain size. But, but obviously that's gonna change for, for different animals, right? So every critter, uh, you know, everything's designed for each critter to, to get along, you know, to, for everything to work properly. It works fine in humans, and like you said, except for the brain, uh, being much larger than percentage weight, weight to, uh, you know, size to, to weight, uh, ratio. But in general, this, everything we're talking about applies to every animal at different levels. So obviously say the blood pressure of a giraffe because of the longer neck is gonna have to be a little different. Everything has to be designed very closely. And even though the systems may work similarly, the actual numbers, when you actually get down to the actual function and what's really going on, may be slightly different.
Speaker 3 00:31:00 That's interesting. And, and Steve, you guys write about, um, the difference between, um, experimental science and inferential science. Is that right?
Speaker 5 00:31:10 Uh, yeah. We, we don't spend a lot of time on that, but, uh, we do talk about that. So when you're, when you're dealing with events that are not repeatable, which, uh, is, is anytime there's contingency in a process, uh, things are not generally repeatable. And that's true whenever an intelligent agent is involved. So, uh, explain
Speaker 3 00:31:33 That a little, little more so I can get it. Um, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 5 00:31:37 Sure. So in, in physics, you know, you drive your car too fast around a corner and physics tells you what will happen every time, right? It will not vary. It's the same every time. If you go too fast, you're going off the road, um, you know, given the same situation, the same results will happen
Speaker 3 00:31:56 And you can prove that experimentally over repeated attempts.
Speaker 5 00:32:00 Uh, right. And you can repeat the experiments any number of times, you'll always get the same results. So that's, that's, um, experimental science, uh, inferential science is, uh, applied in other, other domains like archeology and forensics. And that's where you determine the best possible, uh, answer to the question based on what you know. But the, the actual events were contingent, you don't know what they were. And so you have to infer what happened. And both our theory and Darwin's theory are inferential in that respect. You, you cannot repeat events in history. We don't know if a, if a stray gamma ray hits a, hits the d n a molecule and changes something, we don't know that that happened. We don't know when it happened. We can't repeat it. So it's, it's very hard to know what happened in the past.
Speaker 3 00:32:59 So in, in other words, so just for example, for the beginning of life, we don't know how that happened, and that's right. And then, um, the theoretically, you know, there have been various, um, uh, hypotheses, uh, uh, that can't be proved. And then supposedly there was one cell, um, organisms in the primordial soup, and somehow they became more complex, even though the general thing would be to go the other direction. Right?
Speaker 5 00:33:28 Right, right. That's our, that's our degradation. Our, one of our causal factors is degradation. Everything will degrade. So it is, it, we have two fundamental questions. Why is anything alive and why isn't everything dead
Speaker 3 00:33:47 <laugh>? Well, we wait long enough, that'll happen. Well, but, uh,
Speaker 5 00:33:52 Why hasn't already
Speaker 3 00:33:53 Fact, you, you say in your book, there are billions of ways to be dead, but only a few ways to be alive. Why is that important? And, and, and gimme an example of that.
Speaker 4 00:34:04 So, so let me, uh, in fact, I think Richard Dawkins said that, right, Steve? Yeah. Yeah. But here's an important distinction. All right? So we're already talking about you already, Wesley, you already alluded to a unicellular your life. Okay? One cell organism. We don't know where life came from, we don't know where the cell came from, and we could get into all the details of how the cell works and how it controls the cell. But, but then the next step is like what you're commenting on. You've got one cell, alright? And in general, a unicellular organism, like an amoeba lives in water. So it can, so the key thing you need to understand is the cells need certain things to live, it needs oxygen. And, and, and, and basically sugar, let's talk about that with respect to, um, uh, for energy. And, and it gets, it, it gets what it needs from its environment, and then it, it, it siphons off what it, you know, it's byproducts are, you know, the, uh, from its metabolism into the, into the, into the water.
Speaker 4 00:34:58 Okay? So a unicellular organism, one you got, once you got that, you know, you're going on, you move on with that, the next question becomes, okay, well we're multicellular organisms, we have 30 plus trillion cells. And now this becomes, as Steve would tell you, an engineering problem because the cells are no longer, uh, in contact with the environment, right? You need to have all these systems to, to get what your cells need. So for an example, very quickly, a thought experiment here, which we go through in the book, in the first three chapters, is the first problem. We all know that we need oxygen. Every cell in your body needs oxygen. We know that if we don't have new supply of oxygen within three or four minutes, we die. And that's because the body cannot store oxygen. A lot of people may not realize that the body can store water, it can shift water back and forth from cell to cell into the blood, blood vessels, and it can store sugar and fat, obviously, but it can't store oxygen <laugh>. So,
Speaker 4 00:35:51 So, so the first engineering problem, okay, when you, when you have a multicellular organism, right? No one asks this question is, okay, the very first problem that has to be solved is every cell in the body has to have enough oxygen, right? So for us, we know we've got a set of lungs, we've got a respiratory system, we can get into all that, you know, the structure of the lungs, the chest wall, the diaphragm, the muscle below the chest wall, it's be below the lungs, it contracts to bring in oxygen. Um, and so you got that system, right? But then of course you have to control that system. How does the body know that you need oxygen? So you actually have sensors in the main arteries going to your brain that detect oxygen and carbon dioxide, and also, uh, carbon dioxide sensors in your brain.
Speaker 4 00:36:34 So when they're, when they're sensing these changes, if you hold your breath, your, all your cells are using up oxygen. So your oxygen level starts to drop and your carbon dioxide level starts to rise because, because the equation ends up with water and carbon dioxide on the other side, and too much carbon dioxide is toxic to the body, toxic to your cells. So the respiratory center tells you, oh, you gotta take a breath and you hold your breath, and eventually you do breathe, right? So when you breathe and you're, you're, this is all that's needed just to get oxygen to all the cells so that your, your diaphragm moves, brings in air, goes through all the structures of the lungs and put, puts oxygen into your bloodstream, right? But you haven't solved the problem because now you gotta get that oxygen from the lungs to every cell in your body.
Speaker 4 00:37:16 And the problem is that watered oxygen doesn't dissolve well in water. Okay? So in other words, the serum or pla yes, exactly right. <laugh>, the serum rep plasma in your blood does not dissolve oxygen doesn't dissolve very well there, okay? So that's why you need hemoglobin. Okay? So you need red cells in your bone marrow to make red blood cells that make hemoglobin. So the hemoglobin has iron, and that grabs the oxygen from the L V L I when it comes in from the, from the lungs, and it carries that to the cells. But of course, now we got another problem because hemoglobin requires iron, and you need to get iron into your body. <laugh>. Yeah. See this, this is what Steve and I've
Speaker 3 00:37:54 Been laughing for. Last goes on and on three or four years. So Steve, Steve, now we've just had a very quick description of the respiratory system and the problems that are associated with making sure that all of our trillions of cells are, are nourished with oxygen. Now you're saying that in order to make that happen, that's a tremendous engineering problem, right?
Speaker 5 00:38:16 Absolutely. We have a, we actually have a diagram in the book, uh, which, uh, we call the problem of cascading problems. This is what engineers do. I, so I start with the problem. I gotta get oxygen to every cell in my body. And we, we've kind of follow that problem. To get to, to solve that problem, I have to solve three or four other problems. And for each of those problems, I have to solve three or four other problems. And for each of those, I have to solve three or four other problems. And only when I solve all the problems can I solve. The problem I started out with, this is why engineers design things in higher hierarchical layers and the
Speaker 3 00:38:52 Body. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 5 00:38:54 So, so, uh, if you, if you look at your, you take your car apart, you'll see that there's a carburetor, right? Right. The carburetor's part of making the engine work. But if you take the carburetor part, you can see it's solving its own, it has its own problems that its solves internally. And so to be
Speaker 3 00:39:11 A carburetor
Speaker 5 00:39:12 Yeah, that's right. To be a carburetor. It needs a lot of different parts on the inside, and they have to be shaped just right and organized just right. And they have to be assembled in a, in a precise, uh, order.
Speaker 3 00:39:24 So, and if they're not pre assembled in that precise order, it won't be a carburetor.
Speaker 5 00:39:28 That's right. And it won't work, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So, um, so this is, this is what we talk about. So in this, just this one respiration example, it's a two page diagram, by the way. Takes a, takes a cover, a a page, a two page spread, and it, uh, and it highlights about 30 problems you have to solve just at a high level. And it touches on virtually every system in the body. Your gastrointestinal tract, it touches on your pulmonary, pulmonary system, and your lungs, uh, talks about how you have to have a diaphragm to create suction to draw, um, air into your lungs. So it, it, it touches on almost all the systems in the body, and it's just done at a high level.
Speaker 3 00:40:11 So all of these body systems, and we won't have time to get into all of them. I mean, you even got into the reproductive system and the, and the engineering, uh, required for the male and female reproductive systems. But, but they all involve, what, what was the term you used where you have to hierarchal or there was a term you used for engineering,
Speaker 5 00:40:32 A design hierarchy. That's
Speaker 3 00:40:33 Right. Design hierarchy. They all require that.
Speaker 5 00:40:36 Yes.
Speaker 4 00:40:36 Yes. Wesley can
Speaker 3 00:40:37 Connect. And, and basically you're saying that just can't happen by random chance, particularly since you have to have certain things first in order to get things that come along later. But we, but we're being told that the things that came later are actually first.
Speaker 5 00:40:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, uh, the, the problem here is degrees of freedom, so
Speaker 3 00:41:00 Degrees of freedom.
Speaker 5 00:41:01 Yeah. When you're, when you're designing a system, there are a lot of different ways you can design it. Yeah. And, uh, and there are essentially, in a complex system, there are almost infinite degrees of freedom. And so you can never randomly find a solution to a really complex problem, uh, because there's just not enough time.
Speaker 4 00:41:23 I just, I just wanna bring up one point here, right? What we just described to you, right? Yeah. That's Darwin of the gaps. Okay. It's not God of the gaps, right? <laugh>. That, that is the reality of what is actually happening. Okay? So it requires an incredible imagination from somebody to figure out how all those parts came together to work. While, as Steve says, the organism is alive during the entire time, right? So, so this is, we throw it back at them. This is their idea is Darwin of the gas, because we, we are presenting the science. This is how everything works right now. It's up to them to show where did this come from? And we're using engineers to who, who do this work to say, yeah, based on our experience, there's only one way that this come could come about. And then you have someone like Steve explaining how engineers think and their whole, the engineering principles that most of us are not aware of.
Speaker 3 00:42:17 And that begs the question, what is life? Your whole f you discussed that in the first chapter. Give us a sampling of, of your thesis in that regard. What is life?
Speaker 5 00:42:26 Uh, life is, uh, an unknown. We can, we can observe life, we can describe it, but we can't explain it. And this is, um, this, this is a kind of a problem for people who are materialists because life certainly appears to be an immaterial quantity. So you can, you can kill a cell, leave all of its parts intact. There's no physical damage to the cell, but you cannot start it again. Life always comes from life. It never comes from non-life.
Speaker 3 00:43:02 Is that the spark of life that we sometimes hear of?
Speaker 5 00:43:06 Yeah. Yeah. We just, we just don't know. The spark of life may come from Dr. Frankenstein's experiments, um, but you know, his notes were lost in the fire. So we don't really, now that he's gone, we just don't know how to do this. And, uh, so we, we just don't know. Is, is life, um, a force, a property? Uh, uh, is it material? Is it immaterial? We just don't know very much about it. We certainly are pleased to have it, but we, we just don't know. A science can't tell us where it came from. It seems to not, uh, adhere to our principles quite the way we would like.
Speaker 2 00:43:47 That was Wesley j Smith, host of the Humanized podcast from the Discovery Institute Center on Human exceptionalism, talking with Steve Laufman and Howard Glicksman on their book, your Designed Body. Thanks to the humanized podcast for permission to re-broadcast here. There's more to come soon, so be sure to stay with us here at ID the Future. I'm Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1 00:44:15 Visit
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