Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Can biology inspire human technology? I'm Casey Luskin with ID The Future. And today we have on the show with us Dr. Brian Miller, who is research coordinator at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics with a minor in engineering from M I t and a PhD in physics from Duke University. He's a very widely traveled speaker on the topic of intelligence design and he helps to manage our ID 3.0 research program here at Discovery. In particular our engineering research group. So Brian, it's great to have you on the show with us today.
Speaker 3 00:00:46 Thank you. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 2 00:00:47 So the occasion for our conversation is a story that recently came out in Science Daily about an article that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. And this is about how engineers are trying to mimic the feathers on an African bird to find a better way to hold water. So this article detailed the ability of this amazing bird called the Namaka Sand Gras. It lives in Namibia of southern Africa to use its feathers to hold water so it can carry water back to its young. So could you please provide some background about what this research was all about?
Speaker 3 00:01:22 Uh, sure. It was a research was conducted out of John Hopkins University in com, partnership with M I T and the main researchers were yo and Mueller from Hopkins and then Lorna Gibson from M mit. They were part of engineering departments and what they did is they looked at this particular bird which had an amazing ability because it lives in African deserts and it typically will nest about 20 miles from watering holes. So what it does is it'll actually fly to the watering holes and it'll go in the water and it's feathers on its belly have very unusual properties. They're very different from other feathers and they form almost a cup like structure that allows it to carry the water back to the nests. And that's really quite a feat because it's carrying about 15% of the bird's body weight and it's flying about 40 miles per hour for about a half an hour. These researchers looked at the mechanics and the chemical properties of these feathers and they understood the extraordinary ability of what it did and why it did it and they wanna mimic that for human products.
Speaker 2 00:02:25 So this is of course a process known as biomimicry or s where engineers will try to mimic biology in order to improve human technology. So in this case, what did the researchers discover about the feathers that allowed them to carry so much water?
Speaker 3 00:02:41 Well what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna read one section right from their paper because they say it as well as it can possibly said. So I'm gonna quote from directly, it says along most of the length of the feather, there are two distinct zones in the inner zone in the dry state, the Barb Bules coil heli at their base. And I need to define some of these terms before I go on because in a feather what you have is a central vein. That's what we're used to when we see a feather. Barbs are sort of the, the side filaments that come off the vein and then even smaller filaments come off the barbs, which are called barb bules. So that's what they're referring to. So the barb bules coil heli at their base, uh, adjacent to the barb shaft and then straightening out the intertwining of the adjacent helical coils, provides cohesion to the inner zone of the vein.
Speaker 3 00:03:28 In the outer zone, the barb bules are straight and much longer forming fringes and both the inner and outer zone, the Barb Bules lack the usual hook lits and grooves seen in contour feathers in other species of birds un wetting the helical coils of barbells and the inner zone unwind, rotating the barbells perpendicular to the plain of the vein, producing a dense forest of fibers that hold water through capillary action. At the same time, the longer barbells of the outer zone curl in towards the feather shaft 80 in water retention under drying these structural changes in both the inner and outer zone irreversible. In other words, what happens is when these feathers get wet, they reconfigure themselves in very specific ways to create this net that can carry the water. It's really quite remarkable.
Speaker 2 00:04:15 Yeah, and we'll try to post a link to the paper. It's actually an open access paper in the Journal of Royal Society interface. And if you look at figure one, you can actually see how these birds use this reconfiguration of their feathers to carry water. It's kind of like these little cups that form on the bottom of their belly and as they're flying along there's water that's sort of trapped between the feathers and their body and it's, it's really quite amazing. So Dr. Miller, do you think that engineers could copy this design for a similar purpose to carry water?
Speaker 3 00:04:46 Yes, in fact the authors of the paper presented several ideas of how they could mimic this design in human products. One is obviously netting for collecting and retaining water from fog in dew in desert regions. And that makes a lot of sense since these birds live in the desert. So you create a netting that is just as efficient or at least as is almost as efficient at at collecting water. And that could be used to have a, a larger water resource in these African countries or other desert countries. Um, they also talked about creating water bottles that have this, this mesh that's designed to prevent sort of the the annoying swinging and sloshing of water. So if you're a jogger, the water kind of splashes around so this netting could trap it, which would create a more even flow. Also they're talking about next level medical swabs that could more efficiently soak up liquid and more easily release them. So these are just a few of the applications they're thinking of borrowing from nature.
Speaker 2 00:05:41 So Brian, just as an aside, do you find a little bit suspicious that engineers are able to use biology to improve human technology or is this just an anomaly? Is this a very rare case where they're actually finding something useful in biology that could be used in human technology or are there many examples where biologists have identified, you know, sort of extraordinary design in life that they have copied to Im improve our technology?
Speaker 3 00:06:07 Oh, oh actually this is extremely common. That's why there's a whole field of biomimicry and there's many iconic examples. And so engineers are very carefully studying life to try to steal nature's secrets. Um, one of the classic examples is a spider's web because the spider using chemistry inside of its body at room temperature can produce these fibers that have 10 times the strength of steel and they're tougher than Kevlar and they are non-toxic and they're biodegradable. So these are incredible examples of material science. So another example would be the efficiency and accuracy of bat in dolphin and sonar. They're amazing abilities we're trying to learn from. Um, you could talk about molecular machines. So for instance things like attp Synthes and and the bacterial motor, the phum, which acts like an outward motor, they operate with efficiencies that are close to a hundred percent. It's like the upper 90 some percent. So people are regularly wanting to copy these molecular machines for our own nanotechnology. And of course people are looking at things like D N a replication translation processes in embryology sensory processes because they actually operated efficiencies that are close to the limits of what is physically possible. And when practical application is people are trying to see if we could also store information and chemical molecules like D N A, which would greatly increase the capacities of our computers. Those are just a few of the examples.
Speaker 2 00:07:34 So that's really quite extraordinary. Brian, and I wanna ask you, I mean what does this tell you about nature? Does this point to design and nature if it's actually doing technological functions that we need better than our own technology?
Speaker 3 00:07:48 Oh yeah, this absolutely is screaming out design in a very clear way and it's very profound because if you look at the way scientists, biologists in particular look at life, if they assume that life is not designed, it was just produced by some blind undirected process, then their intuitions have consistently led them in the wrong direction. They've consistently assumed that life should be poorly designed, suboptimal, we could do it better, inefficient. And what's happened is as people have looked at the designs more carefully and particularly as engineers have become part of that conversation, they're realized that life shows extraordinary design that often uses the same design logic that we use except it does it many times more efficiently and with much greater genius.
Speaker 2 00:08:34 That is really extraordinary. So here's sort of an objection. Sometimes we're told that there's actually poor design in living systems and that we don't wanna copy it. That actually if it was intelligently designed, it would look different and we can use our intelligence to approve, improve on what we see in biology. How accurate are these sorts of claims?
Speaker 3 00:08:54 Yeah, and I often will call that the sort of imperfection of the gaps type type argument or the materialism of the gaps type argument. And this is a mistake that's made over and over ti in many, many ways. Cuz what happens is biologists, when they will look at some biological system, if they don't immediately understand why some feature is the way it is, they'll assume it's poor design because it's not the way they would do it. Now there's several problems with that and the main problem is that the people making these assessments are not engineers. So they don't really know what good engineering looks like When engineers come to the table or when just biologists that have a little bit better understanding of the biology come to the table, they consistently realized that what was originally assumed to be poor design is later recognized to be very, very good design.
Speaker 3 00:09:40 And there's several examples of that. Like one of the classics is the backwards wiring of the eye that people would look at the fact that if you look inside of a vertebrae eye like humans, the photoreceptors do not face forward, but they face backwards. Biologists said at first that this looks like a really bad design, that the only reason it it faces backwards is because of the constraints of the evolutionary process. It's just kind of an accident of of history. Well, what's happened is our understanding of eyes have improved or realize that that is completely false. The photoreceptors have to face backwards or they wouldn't work. What happens is you have in photoreceptors these discs, which is where the photoreceptor takes place and they're constantly burning out. So if the photoreceptors face forward, they would burn out pretty quickly, but they face backwards, embed themselves into other tissue and there's very special and complex mechanisms in that interaction that essentially remove the burnt out discs to allow room for new discs to be created.
Speaker 3 00:10:41 In addition, the attachment to these tissues is essential because it allows the replenishment of nutrients and the recharge of different molecules. So the fact that the photoreceptors pace backwards is not a port design, it's essential and there's lots of other ingenious mechanisms in eyes to allow light to reach the photoreceptors most efficiently. Like for instance, you have specialized cells that will help the light directly access photoreceptors, almost like wave guides or photo optic cables. Even in photoreceptors, the mitochondria have a lensing effect, which again bring the light directly to the photoreceptor areas that detect the light. So again, this is just one of countless examples of where biologists originally assumed something looked like there was poor design, but on closer inspection they realized it was optimally designed. Other examples are like the laryngeal nerve, the a c l joint to knees, the appendix and the list could go on very for a very long time.
Speaker 2 00:11:39 Yeah, this really is an interesting situation I think where evolutionary mechanisms lead you to one sort of expectation about living systems, that they'll be sort of poorly cobbled together clues that are not actually gonna function in a very efficient manner. Whereas intelligent design says, well yeah, things can decay from their original design, things can break sometimes in our imperfect world things aren't assembled properly, but generally things have a good design that's actually gonna work well. And it's, I think this is a very fascinating field that you're interested in here, Brian, to help us to discriminate actually between what are we finding? Is it what we would expect from evolution or is it what we would expect from design?
Speaker 3 00:12:17 You're absolutely right.
Speaker 2 00:12:19 So you are actually part of one of our ID 3.0 research projects Dr. Miller called the engineering research group, which is studying how engineering principles ha can help us bring a better understanding to living systems. Essentially if we assume that living systems are designed, then we can make more progress in understanding how they work through sort of an engineering lens. So how is their approach different from what biologists have traditionally done to understand how life works?
Speaker 3 00:12:47 That's an excellent question and I need to preface it by saying that we're operating in a way that more and more biologists are seen biology, because the evidence is forced biologists to change their assumptions and their approach to studying biology. Because historically biologists have been very reductionistic. They would apply a principle called reductionism where they assume the way you understand life is you break it into its smaller pieces all the way down to single cells and eventually down to cynical chemical re simple chemical reactions. And then as you understand the lowest level processes, everything else is sort of emergent properties of these lower level processes. So a complex system is essentially no more than the sum of its parts, it's simply the different parts doing what they're doing in a more unified way. They also assumed as, as we mentioned, that they assume suboptimality, that it, that things are generally port designed.
Speaker 3 00:13:43 They assume that things really don't look like human engineering because human engineering is really the sort of top-down design where a mind plans everything in advance and puts everything together for a purpose. While biologists typically assume that life would represent what's called a Rube Goldberg design. And that's like those famous cartoons where you have some crazy inventor that uses like a parrot and a toast oven and a TV and all sorts of objects that aren't designed to work together to perform some simple tasks like wiping their chin with a napkin. That's a Rube Goldberg machine. But what's happened is the evidence has forced biologist again, again exchange these sort of materialistic evolutionary assumptions with design-based assumptions. So now biologists are, are looking at biology at a systems level. The term they're using is holism. In fact they're even describing in mainstream circles this revolution is taking place.
Speaker 3 00:14:34 They're now assuming that things are optimally designed. They're assuming that you can apply the same engineering principles or you can look for the same engineering principles that we use in life. And this is a burgeoning field, uh, within what's also often called systems biology. So what's happening with the engineering research group is we're just walking in pace with this revolution taking place. So we have systems engineers and other engineers that are asking the question, what is the higher level design of these systems? Like whether it be hearing or bacterial motor or something like the muni system and how can we see the same engineering principles that we use in human engineering? How can we map those onto life to give us better understanding? So for instance, in in systems engineering, we know that different systems can only work together if they have carefully designed interfaces. If you have communication protocols that use the same dictionary and the same protocols, we, we know that you have to have a meticulously organized assembly processes, operational processes, maintenance processes, you have to have risk management, uh, you have to have adaptive responses with feedback control. So we have several projects where our engineers and biologists are working together to look for these same mechanisms in life. And we're actually in the process of publishing several papers. Along those lines,
Speaker 2 00:16:00 Can you give some specific examples of how an engineering framework bring brings us to a better understanding of living systems?
Speaker 3 00:16:07 Oh yes, a very good question. Um, let me just start off by mentioning Stuart Burgess because he is considered one of the top engineers in the United Kingdom. What he has done is he has looked at living systems for inspiration to improve human design mechanical systems. A great example is you have several research papers that look at the human knee and show how the principles used in the human knee can be used to design better prosthetic limbs. And that a research article that actually came out not too long ago in the Journal of Bio Complexity is studied the ankle foot complex and showed that it was actually a master of engineering. And what inspired him partly to do this article was a book by Nathan Lenz, who's a biologist. And in that book he argued that that human body has filled a very, very poor design.
Speaker 3 00:16:57 And he talked about this ankle foot complex in very disparaging terms. He said, there's just too many bones, it's inefficient, it it breaks all the time. And what Stuart Burgess did is he applied a systems engineering perspective to this ankle bone complex and he started from the top down design. He asked the question, what does this thing need to do? What are its, what are its goals? And he mentioned several goals like flexibility, strength, he talked about walking, running, jumping. Um, he talked about joint movement from inward to outward imbalance. And what he showed is based on all these sub-functions, every aspect of the ankle is optimally designed to achieve multiple goals. And that's a major difference between how engineers see biology and how someone like Nathan LSD does. Because Nathan Lentz, what he did is he looked at one feature, one goal of the foot and said, you know, all these bones in the foot don't achieve this one goal very effectively.
Speaker 3 00:17:56 What he failed to realize is engineers are to have, uh, always look at multiple competing constraints. There's always multiple things a design object needs to do. So you have to balance different features for an optimum performance for all of these different goals. So Stuart Burgess did a wonderful job of showing how the ankle was optimally designed and why it was so efficient at all these different goals. That's just one example. Another great example is Waling Schultz who wrote, um, a three-part series in the same journal on the bacterial flagella, the outboard motor. What he did was he said, as an engineer, how would I go about designing a propulsion system and a bacteria? He thought about the subsystems, the interrelationships, the constraints. And what he did then is with the help of biologist look at the details of the actual motors in cells. And what he was able to do is he found that he anticipated many, many features of the system because if you wanna have a propulsion system, there's very, very few ways you can make that happen.
Speaker 3 00:18:58 And he was able to use engineering knowledge to figure out why all the different subsystems interacted and operated in that particular way. He was able to figure out a lot of the constraints. And of course a recently published book called Your Design Body by Systems Engineer Steve Lman and Medical Practitioner Howard Glickman, showed how the systems level engineering approach helps us to understand systems in the human body in a much deeper and more profound level. So for instance, one of my favorite examples is they looked at hearing and what do you find in hearing is you have multiple subsystems working together to achieve the goal of hearing. And I'll just mention one feature. So one of the big ch one of the big challenges is what's called impedance matching because sound in the air travels with a certain impedance and that's just sort of the resistance that sound has moving through air.
Speaker 3 00:19:50 But what happens in your ear is you have this organ called the cochlea, and what it has inside of it is a membrane and the, it's really quite brilliant because this membrane, different parts of the membrane vibrated different frequencies. So it essentially will deconstruct sound into the different frequencies. And then specific hair cells are triggered for each separate frequency which send parallel signals to the brain, which again reconstructs it. Well the challenge is the cochlear is filled with liquid. So the impedance in a liquid is different for the impedance in air. So if the sound from the air directly interacted with the cochlear, very little of the sound would penetrate because most of the energy would bounce back because of the different impedances. But the ears solve that by a brilliant design. They have these three bones called ossicles and they create a double hinge structure and you have these three bones of the perfect shape, the perfect size, they're perfectly mounted, the surrounding tissue and the the relative lever arms are just perfect and the areas in which they touch the timan membrane in which they touch the cochlear are perfectly designed so that the impedances are matched.
Speaker 3 00:21:03 So nearly all the energy, the sound goes into the cochlear and then is transmitted into neuro signals. Now again, lemme just mention one other feature, which is risk management. The challenge is these bones are much, much smaller than what you would find in their supposed ancestor, which are these mammal like reptiles called rhs. So these little bones resonate with different frequencies than their supposed ancestors. Did mammals hear a different frequency range than non mammals like therapsids, the mammal like reptiles? So what happens is the basal membrane was re-engineered to resonate with the right frequencies to match hearing that takes place in the air and the natural frequencies of these bones. This genius design allows you to distinguish very, very faint noises and to distinguish slight differences in frequency, but it's also very vulnerable, the damage. So what happens is the, the bones have special muscles attached to them which are triggered when you hear loud noises. So there's a neural feedback loop that goes with these muscles. So they stop the bones from moving as much in loud sounds and that protects your ear from damage. So again, this very systems level analysis of hearing gives incredibly deep insights into how the entire system is designed for that purpose of hearing.
Speaker 2 00:22:25 Okay. Well I asked for examples of how an engineering framework brings us a better understanding of living systems and we got examples. So for those of you who are interested in, in learning more about how engineering helps us to better underst understand biology, there's a couple sources we can point you to. We can point you to Brian Miller's chapter in the book Science and Faith and Dialogue, which you can find on our Discovery Institute website. Another great resource is the book, your Designed Body by Steve Laufman and Howard Glickman, which is a fantastic foray into understanding the human body through an engineering mindset. So Dr. Brian Miller, thank you so much for talking to us today about bio medics and how engineering helps us to understand biology.
Speaker 3 00:23:05 Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2 00:23:07 I'm Casey Luskin with ID The Future. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 00:23:11 Visit
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