[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm Eric Anderson, and today I'm pleased to be joined by Steve Laufman, who spearheads our engineering research group at the center for Science and Culture and has written on the engineering principles applicable to life. Mister Laufman is a consultant in the field of enterprise architecture, dealing with the design of very large, complex composite information systems. Welcome, Steve.
[00:00:33] Speaker C: Hey, good to be here. Thanks.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: So it's great to have you on the show. I want to dive in and ask you how all this got started, but let me first begin on a personal note. It was three years ago, in fact, almost exactly three years ago, that I had the honor of meeting you for the first time through an introduction from Brian Miller and Ann Gager, and also got to meet some other key people involved in this area. It's been a real privilege to work with you, Steve, to get the engineering research group up and running and to organize our first conference on Engineering and Living systems, which took place this past June. Been a ton of work, but wonderful to collaborate together and also to get to meet so many other engineers and scholars and scientists who are interested in this area. So appreciate that, and it's been a pleasure to be involved with that.
[00:01:19] Speaker C: Well, it's been a real pleasure working with you. I'm pretty sure that the conference would not have happened without your help, so thank you.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Definitely happy to, happy to help out. So you've been working on this even before that, though. Can you share with us just a little bit about your background and how you became interested in this intersection of engineering and biology?
[00:01:39] Speaker C: Yeah, so it's a long story that I can trace back to fifth grade, but we'll leave out most of the parts. There we go.
Otherwise, we'll be here all month. So my background is computer science. A lot of our engineers are software related or computing related people, and it's, it's, the parallels to living systems are pretty strong, but my profession has been, for the last 20 some years, enterprise architecture. And this is the design of complex systems, you know, thousands of independently developed information systems. And it's been my job to modify those systems in ways that are necessary to achieve coherent and consistent outcomes. So, you know, if you ask a question of two different systems, you don't want to get five different answers. So it turns out that's a really hard thing to do. And it's also extremely difficult and generally very expensive to change a system that's already in place.
In fact, I even wrote a book on this subject. But about seven years ago, while I was just finishing up that book, I slowly began to realize that my skills seemed to apply to living systems.
Although it was not my plan, it seemed like I could use my background to help understand life and how living systems work. And that, frankly, seems a lot more interesting than thousands of information systems. So I kind of have been chasing down this path ever since.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's great. And it reminds, I wasn't going to ask you this, but since you brought it up, let's talk about it for just a moment. So this issue of lots of different systems that have to be able to talk together and communicate together and work together toward a coherent result, how does that apply to what we're seeing in biology? I mean, it seems like there's a really strong application there.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: Well, yeah. If you look at any living system, from the simplest bacterium to the human body, there are thousands of systems working together to achieve life. Life is a hard problem. It's an engineering problem or a set of problems that have to be solved before life can happen. You don't achieve coherence as a result of gradual change in living systems. You must have coherence to be alive.
Biologists don't seem to have the background to understand that. They don't have the training in engineering to understand how difficult these problems are. I think they tend to underestimate the level of effort required, hence why engineers are probably pretty important to the equation.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And as you add another system, the problem actually scales in a nonlinear fashion, right?
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Oh, that's correct. Yeah. So the more parts, the harder it is. I'm not sure, I haven't done the math, but it seems like an exponential growth problem.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:50] Speaker C: So if you have 50 systems that have to be coordinated, it's not merely 50 times harder, it's more like hundreds of thousands of times harder. Yeah.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: And one of the things I've mentioned in the past is that if you want to have a system that's going to operate in real time, in the real world, in three dimensional space, that's an engineering problem. You know, no offense to any other area of research, but it's an engineering problem, and we obviously need the best and the brightest biologists and biochemists to help us to understand this. But at the end of the day, we need to understand the engineering that's involved in helping this happen. So that's really great. I appreciate that background. So, you know, maybe building off of that a little bit, how can engineers help contribute to our understanding of biologists, to play devil's advocate, somebody might say, well, this should be left to the biologists.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: Well, biologists say that all the time, so, yeah, it's not really a hypothetical question. So the thing is that engineers have a deep understanding of what is needed to make a system that works. That's what engineers do day in and day out. They also have a deep understanding of what it takes to change one working system into another different working system. Now, they don't tend to understand life very well, but biologists are not generally trained in systems. It's something we'd like to fix in the future and bring biologists better engineering training so they know what questions to ask. But I believe that when we mix these two skill sets together is when we can really start understanding what's going on. So engineers and biologists working together, and.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: That was what was so great about the recent conference on engineering living systems is we had so many engineers and biologists who were together, who were excited about this area, interested in it, biologists who were appreciative of the engineering perspective that was required, and engineers who understood that they needed to learn more about the biology. So it was a really great mix. Share with us just a little bit, Steve. What were the goals of the recent conference that we held?
[00:06:59] Speaker C: So we had three explicit goals. One was to apply engineering principles to understand living systems. So that's, you know, what we've talked about here. The second was to begin to craft a theoretical framework for life that's based on design that allows us to predict the behaviors of living systems. And the third explicit goal was to develop research programs that demonstrate these engineering principles in living systems. And, of course, the implicit goals were to have fun. We had a lot of fun at the conference, and I'm sure you did as well. It was great to learn. It was very stimulating. Everybody had their horizons expanded in places they didn't expect. And so it was just a really great time to come together and learn.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it was really a pleasure and a lot of fun to be there at the conference and meet so many wonderful scientists and engineers and biologists and people even, who are delving into systems biology, which is a wonderful new area that is really down the lines of what we're talking about here and a lot of synergy there.
[00:08:06] Speaker C: Yes. So systems biology is probably the wave of the future in biology. This is, in effect, the combination of engineering principles in biological study. So it's already begun. It's still early times for systems biology, but there's a lot of work that's being done mainly in the very small, at the molecular level, gene regulatory networks, that kind of thing. But there are layers upon layers in the design hierarchy of living systems where systems biology can be applied. So I think this is the beginning of a new wave of research in living systems. In life.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Excellent. So, Steve, one question I had for you relating to this engineering approach in particular. So for many years, particularly in the intelligent design movement, we focused on what we call the inference to the best explanation. We look at a complex system, like the bacterial flagellum or the blood clotting cascade, and say, because of x, y and z, we can infer design. Or we look at the information bearing properties in DNA and say, because of x, y and z, we can infer design. So is approaching life from an engineering perspective simply another way of arguing for design, or does it add an additional dimension? What's your view on that?
[00:09:26] Speaker C: That's a really good question. In my opinion, inference to the best explanation is done, that war is mainly won. Even the Darwinists are realizing that their theory can't compete on merits. So I just think that it's time for us to turn a corner here. So instead of inferring that life was designed, let's start inferring what the design principles of life are, so essentially backward engineering the design principles. And if I could add, because I'm an architect, the architecture of life, that sounds like a worthy goal. Maybe that will help us understand things in a different and better way. So I think. I think we're opening a new wave in research here that's going to be very productive over time.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really exciting. I really love that. And to be sure, there's lots of great arguments still to be made and people who still need to understand about the inference, the best explanation, and the inference to design. So those arguments continue to be made. But I absolutely agree with you. There's so much now that we can do. Once we say, let's start by assuming that this system was designed, how does engineering help us understand it? How can we make predictions and move forward? So that's really fantastic. So there were a lot of presentations and research topics discussed at the conference, and some things that people are working on. Can you share just one or two areas of particular note, or maybe potential research projects coming out of the conference?
[00:10:57] Speaker C: Well, you know, I might not do that. We are crafting a new research program based on the outcomes from the conference. We had some really fruitful discussions, and we talked a lot about strategic objectives and where we should focus our energy and resources. But it's early times for these research projects, so I don't think we should make any announcements just yet, but I'd like your listeners to stay tuned. There are very exciting things coming. It will be probably another year or so before we'll start seeing the fruits of this. But one of our research associates, Dean Schultz, recently published his first paper in this area, which is an engineering analysis of the bacterial flagellum. So that work is underway. Dean has two more papers that should be coming out before long on this work, and we're very excited about that. And that's it for those who are interested in exploring it, that's an area where there will be results available very soon.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Talk to us just a little bit about that, Steve, since we've got a moment in terms of what's to be done there. I mean, some people would say, geez, the bacterial flagellum that's been talked about for decades, surely there can't be anything more to do on that front.
[00:12:16] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So it is a very well researched, fairly well understood biological mechanism, but again, it's the application of engineering principles and disciplines to understanding the system. So Dean did a specification based on the research literature for the flagellum in different bacteria, and he put together a series of models and made a couple of discoveries along the way that I think are pretty exciting and that I had not seen before. So what his work does is, essentially he has 70 pages of specifications for the parts manufacturer, assembly and operation of a bacterial flagellum, including signaling control sequences, operational constraints, which parts have to be rigid, which parts have to be flexible, which parts have to have zero friction. It's really quite an amazing piece of work. So hats off to Dean. He's done some exciting and very forward looking work. We hope this will be the beginning of a lot more similar work to come.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Yeah, and if you delve into what Dean's doing, I think it really gives. Maybe I could have Dean on the show at some point to talk about it, but it really gives the perspective of what is involved in actually building something and kind of wipes away the simplicity and the naivete that, hey, we can just take, you know, a type three secretory system and make a few copying errors, or we can just take this and co opt a few things here and there, and it's all going to work out. I mean, this really delves into the details of what has to be in place in order for this to function, and I think that's a real eye opener.
[00:14:03] Speaker C: Yes, I agree. We had a couple of world famous biologists at the conference. I think we should probably not mention names, but who were blown away by Dean's work when he presented it at the conference, so had no idea how complex this really is. And again, that's an example of how engineers can bring a new perspective to living systems.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Yeah, excellent.
[00:14:26] Speaker C: Good.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Well, thanks so much, Steve, for being with us. It sounds like there's some really great things going on in this critical intersection of engineering and biology, and we appreciate you being with us today to help us understand more about this area.
[00:14:38] Speaker C: Thanks for having me, Eric. It's been really good to be here with you today.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this episode of ID the Future. For more about the engineering of life, check out other episodes of ID the future, as well as our YouTube channel, Discovery Science. Consider sharing a link with a friend to help others learn more about the evidence for design and purpose in nature. For id the future, Im Eric Anderson. Thanks for listening.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
