Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: What? In each case, what we're finding is that biological systems have the same sorts of properties, the same kind of logic, information, coordination of parts that we recognize and expect to find in known design systems. So we're taking this sort of expectation of what we should find based upon what we understand design systems to look like, applying that to biology. We're finding that, and we're using those predictions and expectations to make better sense of how biology works.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: A podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: When engineering meets biology, the result is a deeper, richer understanding of life.
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott, and today enjoy the second half of my discussion with four of our resident scientists at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. We've got geologist and lawyer Casey Luskin, biochemist and metabolic nutritionist Emily reeves, biologist Jonathan McClatchy, and physicist Brian Miller.
Now, in part one, we talked about design detection, a review of how to empirically identify the hallmarks of intelligent design in living things.
We also discussed examples of studying living things using principles from engineering.
Today, we'll continue discussing the fruitfulness of combining engineering and biology. And we'll also respond to claims of flawed or bad design in living things.
And we'll also take a peek at the fossil record to reveal what it can tell us about the history of life.
Now let's turn back to Casey, Emily, Jonathan, and Brian as we continue our conversation.
Now, all of you are part of a group here at Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture, the Engineering Research Group. Can we review what the goals of this group are and how. How the work of that group is relevant to what we're talking about today?
[00:02:00] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, certainly what happens is the Engineering Research Group is brought together, engineers, biologists, many other scholars for the purpose of showing how the principles of engineering can be applied to life, to give a much deeper and fuller understanding of how biological systems work. So there's several projects that many of us are involved with to achieve that goal.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Okay.
Now, Jonathan, you've looked at design patterns in lots of your writing recently.
How do you see that figuring into an engineering perspective?
[00:02:34] Speaker D: Yeah, that's a great question. And I've been particularly interested recently in what I call recurring engineering logic, where you see the similar or the recurring themes that crop up over and over again in different systems, even across different organisms. Where these systems are not genetically related, they don't share genetic descent.
And so this seems to suggest that they actually.
[00:03:02] Speaker D: They're actually.
That what they share is actually they come from the same mind. Right.
So we See in architecture, for example, that we might recognize particular features associated with the work of a particular architect.
[00:03:16] Speaker E: Right.
[00:03:16] Speaker D: And the same thing I would argue is true in life. For example, our colleague Stuart Burgess has discussed the ubiquity of four bar linkage systems in anatomy, right. Which is an example of recurring engineering logic. And we actually see 4 bar language systems in human engineering as well.
There's also.
[00:03:41] Speaker D: I've studied it most particularly in prokaryotic organisms like bacteria, where there is an incredible amount of recurring engineering logic. One example that comes to mind immediately is our two component systems. Two component system is where you have sensor kinase, which is an enzyme, class of enzymes called a kinase, that is transmembrane protein and it receives signals from the environment. And this triggers the kinase to undergo atophosphorylation where a phosphate is transferred from ADP and that phosphate subsequently gets transferred to what's called a response regulator, which results in a conformational change in that response regulator such that it drives an output or a response.
And so it's called a two component system because there's two components. You have the kinase and you have the response regulator.
And we find these sorts of systems, these two component systems across bacteria and applied in different ways in different contexts. And that I think suggests that since they don't actually show genetic descent, that it reflects the idea of the same mind that lies behind those different systems. Another example would be attenuation mechanisms, which is a form of regulation of amino acid synthesis. It's most famously associated with the tryptophan operon, but you can find it associated with other amino acid.
[00:05:11] Speaker D: Regulation of other amino acids as well.
And it's. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating study and I think it points quite powerfully to a design conclusion.
[00:05:22] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Now, Emily, you've worked on a few papers recently where you're almost training other scientists and of course interested parties to use engineering principles and apply them to biology. Can you tell us a bit more about that and also about glycolysis as an example of using engineering design patterns?
[00:05:46] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, if we, if we stick to the example of, of design patterns. So one of the things I looked at in my 2024 paper was glycolysis and more.
I'll talk about just a particular aspect of that. So how the body, how the human body regulates blood sugar is an interest of mine and it's an interest of lots of people, right. That we, if it works well, we are, our bodies are functioning and our brains can think clearly. And if it doesn't work well, well, we end up with diabetes or different metabolic problems.
So in, so one of the ways that blood sugar regulation is managed in the body is by.
[00:06:40] Speaker E: Glucose transporters. So glucose transporters, they allow glucose to move from the bloodstream into a tissue.
And these actually have a lot of similarity to like a throttle valve in an engine. So my collaborator on this paper was an engineer, Jerry Fudge, and he recognized this right away, right, that glucose transporters, they, they let glucose into the tissue in a similar way that a throttle valve lets fuel into an engine.
Now throttle valves, what they do technically is they convert high pressure fluids into low pressure fluids without changing enthalpy or performing mechanical work. And Jerry recognized that these glucose transporters seem to be working in a really similar way. And, and that they are an extremely energy efficient way of facilitating movement of glucose in the body. So for instance, they don't require ATP. The glucose just passively can move through them because of the way the system works.
But we also, you know, going back to design patterns, when do we. One of my things that I think is important for us to think about when we're comparing human engineering to biological design is what, when do we expect to see similarities versus when do we expect to see differences?
And where you expect to see similarities is where you have like the same design purpose and constraints. And where you expect to see differences is when those things are not lining up.
So for instance, comparing these glucose transporters to throttle valves, unlike the human designed throttle valves, the, the glucose transporters are not adjustable over a continuous range of values. For instance, the way they work is they don't have like a little hole that when you, when you need more glucose into the tissue, it's not like the hole becomes bigger. Right? That's kind of how a throttle valve works, is that when you need more fuel in the engine, the throttle valve opens up and more fuel flows in.
But glucose transporters don't work that way. Why?
Well, it's because it's the constraint that what the glucose transporters like the bloodstream contains a lot more things than just glucose. And so they need to selectively filter what goes into tissues. Right? So if they just opened up bigger, you'd get more glucose, but you'd also get more of other things, which is, wouldn't be a good design because the body needs to control what's going into the tissue.
So the way that these transporters work is in order to increase flow of glucose into a tissue, you put more, the cells put more of them into the membrane so they, instead of having two, you have like 20.
And that increases glucose flow into the tissue.
And that's actually a good design for that context, because again, as I said earlier, it wouldn't be a good design if they just widen their opening like a throttle valve, because that would just result in indiscriminate flow of molecules into the cell.
So when we're looking at design patterns in both human engineering and biological design, we're kind of looking to see how the requirements and constraints match up, and that helps us make sense of the similarities and differences.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Okay, and when we see these patterns, Brian, maybe you can speak to this.
Why should we consider that noteworthy? You know, what makes these patterns improbable but also specified in the way you were mentioning earlier?
[00:10:30] Speaker C: Yeah, and.
[00:10:33] Speaker C: This is a really powerful concept because we talked about how design detection is. You see something that's improbable, but it's also special.
And the reason that points to design is only a mind can pick something that's extremely improbable, yet has been designated by a mind to be special. That's the logic.
So the fact that we see engineering patterns in life means that we know it's special, we know it's specified because we use the same design patterns in human designs. Because if you look at counter arguments people have made in the past, like, they'll say, okay, fine, maybe a protein is extremely rare, but maybe it's not that special. Maybe there's lots and lots and lots of proteins that could solve this problem, or there's lots and lots of arrangements of tissues that could do the same thing.
But the fact that there's only very few engineering patterns that we found to solve certain problems says that there's not lots of ways to solve these problems. And the fact that you see the same engineering patterns in life means that it has to be special, not just improbable, which points to design.
Also, what happens is the fact that we see these engineering problems helps to overcome false assumptions.
Like in the past, when people would look at the very common pendactyl pattern of vertebrate limbs, they'd say, aha.
That similarity suggests common ancestry. That's the best explanation. So we won't think too much about the details.
But what Stuart Burgess found is that that pattern, what he calls a four hinge system, is actually the best design possible for limbs. In fact, we use the same sort of three hinge systems for lams for robotic arms, which shows you the similarities are better explained by design.
And also because the last point is that I mentioned that short Specifications point to design, because what is special, you only need a few words to describe it. So three hinge system is a very short specification that applies to both human designs and life, which shows you that it's specified and special.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Okay.
And some of the work in the engineering research group is designed to help others.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Latch onto this method of studying biology. Is that one of the goals, would you say?
[00:13:01] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:04] Speaker C: In fact, this is the point we're making is that, and this is true with all the research, not just ERG, but this is the whole ID 3.0 research program is showing not only is design detection reliable and applies to life, but when you start with a design framework, it allows you to make better predictions and it also allows you to have very much, much deeper insights and greater understanding of what you see in life. And that's true with ERG and with many of the other research projects we've done also.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Yeah, Andrew, if I could chime in off what Brian just said, I fully agree with that. The really interesting thing about the Engineering Research Group, or the ERG as we call it, is that it's biologists and engineers working together under the conviction that you can make better sense of biology. When you begin with a starting assumption that life was engineered, that it was designed exactly like Brian said, when you apply this design perspective, this design paradigm, you can make more progress than when you assume that life is just this cobbled together Rube Goldberg cluje of parts that were not designed for one another. But when you actually start with the idea that there's a top down design, a hierarchical sort of overarching set of goals that then dictate from the top to lower and lower, lower levels, what each part does contributing to these higher order goals. You can make a lot more sense of biology when you look at it that way. And in all the examples that my colleagues are giving here, these are great examples. What in each case, what we're finding is that biological systems have the same sorts of properties, the same kind of logic, information, coordination of parts that we recognize and expect to find in known design systems. So we're taking this sort of expectation of what we should find based upon what we understand design systems to look like, applying that to biology, we're finding that and we're using those predictions and expectations to make better sense of how biology works. And I know that was not the most eloquent way of putting it, but that in a nutshell is how intelligent design can be used as a, as a paradigm to guide research.
[00:15:10] Speaker C: Right.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: And I was Just thinking as you were talking that on the face of it, you don't have this, this doesn't have to have any religious implication. You don't have to believe in God to look at biology this way, do you? Whether you're an atheist or a theist or something else, it's widely accepted that there is an appearance of design in nature. Even Richard Dawkins, you know, loves to mention on social media that he was knocked sideways with wonder at the intricacy and detail of some such system, you know, that he was talking about. I mean, we all recognize this design, but the question is where does it come from and what mechanism is capable of producing it? But you don't have to believe in God to use a systems engineering approach to biology, do you?
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Well, like we've always said from the beginning, early days of Intelligent Design, there are no theological presuppositions that are necessary to do ID research. You don't have to have a particular, you know, religious paradigm or non religious paradigm or whatever. Anybody can do ID research. Anybody can use Intelligent Design theory to do scientific work. It might have implications for religion, for theism. You know, we can talk about that. But as far as just doing the science goes, no, you don't have to be religious or non religious. In fact, as many folks know, my wife is a teacher with Discovery Institute Online Academy and right now she's teaching this course, basically a high school chemistry course that integrates intelligent design into it. And on Saturday night we were getting ready to go to bed and, and she reads me a student comment on an assignment that she had given them and this student had discovered this paper from the journal Bio Essays. The title of the paper is Design Patterns of Biological Cells. I know that Emily and Brian are both familiar with this paper. We cited it in a manuscript that we actually wrote recently for a journal article. But this is a fantastic paper. It's a paper that's basically about systems biology and using systems biology and design assumptions to understand how biological cells work. Now, we don't know anything about the authors of this paper. To our knowledge, these, these authors are not even necessarily pro intelligent design. We have no idea if they're, you know, religious theists or agnostic or atheists. They're just basically run of the mill biologists. But they recognize that there are design patterns that we see in biological cells. The first sentence of the abstract says the design patterns are generalized solutions to frequently recurring problems. And you can go through the paper and they talk about how we see these repeated solutions, kind of like what Jonathan McClatchy talked about, we see these repeated design solutions throughout biological systems and they're very elegant, logical solutions that point to a design being present in biological systems. So again, there's no religious presuppositions to doing research like this, but it certainly has implications. But you don't have to have a particular religious paradigm to do ID research.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Okay, well now, now and then we hear examples or claims of flawed designs identified in life that supposedly challenge a design hypothesis.
Now this is the way, this is the way that people that offer these claims are thinking. Under an evolutionary framework, one is going to expect to find systems cobbled together by a blind, undirected process over time. So mediocre design or even poor design is going to be par for the course. But that's not actually what we see in life. Can we discuss a few examples of flawed design claims and how design theorists respond to that?
[00:18:46] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely. I will share one of my favorite examples, which is of poor design that's been cited, a cited example of poor design and that is the human appendix. So this is a small, like finger shaped pouch that sits at the junction between your small intestine and your large intestine.
And for most of the 20th century, the standard textbook story about this human, about the human appendix is that it's this vestigial organ. It's, you know, it's shrunken, it's, it's a functionless, you know, leftover from the large cecum that our plant eating ancestors used to like, ferment hay.
So it's been said, you know, it has no purpose in modern humans.
And I was looking this up yesterday in preparation for the podcast and I learned something which I didn't know, and that is that this idea actually came directly from Charles Darwin himself. So I'm going to read this quote here. This is from the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Chapter one. So he says, with respect to the alimentary canal, that's another word for that's the GI tract. I have met with an account of only, of only a single rudiment that means like a vestigial aspect, namely the veriform appendage of the cecum, and he's talking about the appendix here, that this appendage is a rudiment. We may infer from its small size and from the evidence which some professor has collected of its variability in man. He says it is occasionally absent or again, it's largely developed in man. It arises from the end of the short cecum and it is commonly 4 to 5 inches in length, being only about the third of an inch in diameter.
Not only is it useless, but it is sometimes the cause of death, of which fact I have lately heard two instances. This is due to small hard bodies such as seeds, entering the passage and causing inflammation.
Okay, so this is the story we've all heard and that medical culture has really been influenced by and has been practicing for way too many years now.
But what I want to say to the audience is that there's a lot of new research that has shown that this little appendix is so far from useless. Rather, it really is a built in probiotic. It's designed to be this little pouch at the junction, you know, between your small and large intestine that houses.
[00:21:28] Speaker E: Gut microbiome, gut, gut bacteria that you can't even culture outside of your microbiome, outside of your gut.
[00:21:36] Speaker C: And.
[00:21:37] Speaker E: And when you, like, have a flu or some other bout of intestinal purging, this little pouch can reseed your gut with helpful bacteria.
And so that's one major role. And then the other is that the appendix also is now known to play a key role in basically developing the immune system of children, which is of course, no surprise given its role in the microbiome.
And, and can you live without it? You know, of course. Right.
Can it get inflamed? Of course.
But recent studies have linked the loss of it to gut dysbiosis and a number of other subtle but adverse health outcomes. So I tell everybody, keep your appendix if at all possible.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great example of what's not just evolutionary detritus. Now, Brian, you have another example, the acl. Can you mention something about that?
[00:22:34] Speaker C: Yeah. And what you find is a lot of people have claimed that different traits in humans are badly designed, and ACL is one of the common ones. And that's because there are common examples of where people tear it, like in sports and soccer. But Stuart Burgess has again done some beautiful research where he points out the reason many people believe there's bad design in the human body and in life in general, is because they lack the training as engineers to understand how to identify optimal design. Because a lot of times people will look at maybe one goal like you want your ACL to be strong enough so it doesn't break, so just make it bigger. Isn't that a great idea? But engineers recognize often there are multiple goals you have to meet at the same time. There's multiple competing constraints.
So with the acl, it needs to be strong, but it also has to be small. Because that's a very compact area inside your, inside your knee. So what Stuart Burgess has done is done a very complex multivariable analysis and showed that it is optimally sized for all the goals it has to meet. Because if you made it bigger, yeah, you might get a few less ACL tears, but then you'd have much less mobility. You could potentially break other things. There'd be a lot of different problems. Also, one thing that, that Stuart Burgess talked about is if you go back to like the 17, 1800s, you don't see ACL tears that much. It's because of our modern lifestyles where a person may not exercise for two years and they play some extreme sport on a weekend and then it breaks. Or we do sports that are a little bit beyond what our design constraints are. So if you do that, you take extra risk. So if you look at a person who's living exactly the way we're designed to live, then you'll find those tears are no more common than other ailments.
So here again is an example of how denying design led people to false conclusions. Where when people look at the data with the right design framework and with engineering expertise, they can understand exactly why it's designed the way it is.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Yeah, another good example there. Now, Casey, this is all reminding me of the paradigm of junk DNA.
Can you very briefly just tell us how that fits into something that was considered poor design or useless until it wasn't sure?
[00:24:56] Speaker A: So we've all heard this idea that 98, 97% of our genome or somewhere in there, you know, it doesn't code for proteins. And the idea is that the vast bulk of that non coding DNA has no purpose, has no function. It's junk DNA and it's the result of millions of years of evolutionary detritus filling up our genomes. You know, random evolutionary mutations just bulking up the genome with things that don't do anything.
This idea came straight out of the evolutionary paradigm. And we've been hearing this as an argument against intelligent design since I remember back when I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego, people would beat us over the head with this argument that how can you claim the genome is designed when the vast majority of it isn't doing anything? It's just junk DNA. So it's sort of a poor design argument.
Obviously, there's sort of a different flavor here. It's not just poor design. They would argue that it's actually doing absolutely nothing. You know, it's just literally blind mutations filling your genome with useless stuff that is just completely, you know, just inert DNA, that's just junk.
Now, from an ID perspective, we have predicted since, you know, going back to the 1990s that in fact, the junk DNA would turn out to have function. And again, this comes from how do we apply intelligent design? We observe that when intelligent agents do things, they make things for a purpose or for a function. And so our observations of intelligent agents naturally lead us to expect and predict that this junk DNA will not be useless, that it will in fact have a purpose and a function. And in fact, over the last 15 years, we've had numerous scientific papers and discoveries that have come out finding function for junk DNA, finding exactly. That prediction that ID made was in fact true, that the junk DNA in fact has function. So this is a great success story for an ID prediction that came true. And that sort of a poor design or no design argument turning out to be false.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely one of the largest 180s that I've been privy to, as I've been in this, this realm here of intelligent design and science.
Now, as we wrap up today, I just want to touch on one other challenge to the design hypothesis, and that comes from the claim that transitional fossils, such as the whale series eyes humans, you know, early mammal hearing, point to an evolutionary explanation for the development of life.
And again, we've got adequate responses to push back on those claims. And can we talk about the fossil record and what it's actually telling us about the history of life?
[00:27:35] Speaker A: So, yeah, I mean, the argument is that when we look at the fossil record, there are fossils that document a transition from terrestrial land mammals evolving into whales. If you think about the evolutionary sort of story of how vertebrates evolved initially, fish were swimming in the sea, swimming in water. They eventually evolved the ability to walk on land, and they evolved into amphibians and then reptiles. Reptiles evolved into mammals, or certain reptiles at least, evolved into mammals. And then some of those mammals then evolved back into sea and became whales. And so they're supposed to be fossils documenting this evolutionary transition. Well, I remember learning about this when I was an undergraduate, and my actually a professor I took for a geobiology course looking at the fossil record actually said that the evolution of whales was. Was astonishingly rapid. I remember him talking about this in class. We actually read papers that said that this evolutionary transition from terrestrial land mammals to whales took place in less than 10 million years. So for a long time, ID proponents have been interested in asking the question, could you actually, is that enough time to evolve from a fully terrestrial land mammal? To a fully aquatic whale in less than 10 million years.
And there's a project that we've been funding here through our ID 3.0 research program for quite a while, a discovery called the Waiting Times Project.
So far, that project has published a couple of papers, basically developing mathematical models to ask the question, how long does it take for, you know, x number of mutations to evolve to arise and become fixed in a population if those mutations are necessary for some trait to arise? And some of the variables you look at would be population size, mutation rate, generation time, and, of course, the number of mutations that are necessary for a given trait to give you some kind of a selective advantage. And so right now, this Waiting Times team is working on applying their mathematical model to the origin of whales and asking whether or not there's enough time.
My view, and I think that the team is right, is that there's dramatically not enough time.
Whales actually tend to have very long generation times by the standards of most mammals. They tend to have very small population sizes compared to most mammals. They have low mutation rates. And we're talking about probably numerous mutations. I don't want to put an exact number on it, but it could easily be on the order of hundreds, if not many thousands of mutations that would be necessary for some of these traits to arise during this supposed evolutionary story from land mammals to whales. So what we're looking at here is, you know, whatever fossils that evolutionary scientists think they have that, you know, they're interpreting as if they are transitional intermediates between land mammals and whales, whatever they think they have, if they want to claim that blind evolutionary mechanisms could accomplish and affect that evolutionary transition from land mammals to whales, there's just not enough time to do it. This is a direct mathematical refutation of. Of unguided standard evolutionary mechanisms accomplishing this evolutionary transition. And I think it's a really powerful argument for intelligent design. Basically, you need too much information arising in too short a period of time. And that right there is a telltale sign that an intelligent agent was at work.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And, Brian, I know you've had conversations with me where you say it's actually. It actually makes more sense to see these transitions and as distinct, optimized designs. Can you speak to that?
[00:31:06] Speaker C: Certainly. And what happens is a lot of these transitional sequences seem really, really impressive until you look at the details, Then a very different picture emerges. And to understand why, I want to use an analogy, imagine you look at, let's say, a bicycle, and you look at a car.
What happens is a bicycle is useful, more useful Than a car. In many situations, you don't need gas, it's highly maneuverable, you can park it easier. But a car is also very useful in other situations. You can go faster, you're safer. But now, often people want to use goals that are mixed between these two different design logics. So imagine you want something that uses very little gasoline. It's very maneuverable, and it allows you to go a lot faster than a bicycle. We have a moped. A moped looks like a beautiful transition between a bicycle and a car.
It has a basic bicycle frame, but it has a thicker chain. It has a little motor, but that's not because if you were to change a bicycle into a car in a step by step process and stop halfway, you wouldn't have a moped, you'd have a mess.
A moped was designed deliberately to take the best features of a bicycle for the goal of maneuverability, the best features of a car for the goal of speed, namely the motor, and you put them together in a unique, specific, and highly optimized way to achieve your balanced goals as quickly and effectively as possible.
When you look at what are called transitions, you, see the exact same thing in the fossil record. You see the same thing today. So one of the classic transitions that people would talk about is the eyes. You've got different types of eyes. You've got simply photoreceptors.
You have sort of a crevice that has shadows. You've got some eyes with lenses, but they don't have high resolution vision. Then you have eyes with lenses like the camera eye of a vertebrae that has high resolution. These are not steps in a progression. They are independent designs optimized for specific goals. So for instance, you have, like the box jellyfish, it has a lens, a remarkably effective lens. It's far more remarkable than it needs.
But the lens doesn't focus on a spot, it focuses behind your photoreceptor. So it's kind of a blurry image, because that's exactly what it wants, because box jellyfish deal with shadows with superficial shapes. So if you were to give the box jellyfish a lens with a high resolution image, it would be detrimental to the jellyfish, because the neural wiring is specifically designed and optimized for shadows, for bulk features. So to go from, let's say, the box jellyfish to a high resolution vision, you have to change multiple things at once in a highly coordinated way to get a new design logic. And that's what you see in pretty much every example of a transitional form is it's truly an optimized form with its specific features for balanced goals.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Okay. And unless you have a top down design approach to living things, you're not going to see that, are you? You're not going to make that connection.
[00:34:28] Speaker C: Exactly right. So if you want to go from one design logic with one set of goals to another logic with a different set of goals, any small steps you take away from the first design logic, you're going to make it work less well. It's going to be suboptimal.
To get to a different design with different goals, you've got to make multiple coordinated changes at once.
And that's exactly what you see in the fossil record. What you find, whether it's the different examples of what are called whale transitions or mammal transitions or eye transitions, is every single example is highly optimized. And you consistently see jumps where coordinated changes are made at once, often in multiple examples independently, they believe to achieve the new goal set.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: Fascinating.
Well, you know, these are all examples of the utility of the design framework. You know, how to apply intelligent design principles as you're studying living things. And it's quite amazing to get these examples. Now, if those listening and watching want to learn more about your work individually or corporately as the Engineering Research Group, where's a good place to turn? I know science and culture.com is going to report on new papers, new research.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Are there other places that our audience can learn more about this?
[00:35:56] Speaker C: Well, one of the obvious places is to go to the ID 3.0 research page which is at the Discovery Institute website. And there you'll see a list of the various projects taking place.
And then as you mentioned, we will report on our findings, report on our research papers as they're published. Although we have to be very conscientious not to endanger the careers of some of our early career biologists and other academics. So a lot of, unfortunately a lot of the best stuff we're doing we can't talk about too publicly, but we can talk about some of what we're doing, which should be very encouraging to our listeners.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: And when it comes to evidence of design in the human body, we actually have a couple of books that have been put out recently that lay that out in extraordinary detail, don't we Kaisi, can you mention what those are?
[00:36:44] Speaker A: Yeah, we have youe Design Body, which is by Howard Glicksman, a medical doctor, and Steve Laughman, an engineer who are both very involved with the Engineering Research Group. And then you, Amazing Body, also by Steve Laughman and Howard Glicksman. Which is fantastic book. You Amazing Body is not about me. It's about the human body in general and how amazingly it's designed. That it is.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:06] Speaker D: And the, your, your Amazing Body is the. A popular, a more condensed version of the your Design Body, which is a longer read. I'd also recommend that viewers or listeners go over to our YouTube channel, Discovery Signs, and there's a brilliant new ongoing series of videos there called Secrets of the Human Body, which is kind of a sequel franchise to Michael Behe's earlier series called Secrets of the Cell. And Secrets of the Human Body is hosted by.
[00:37:39] Speaker D: Howard Blixman and Steve Laughman, who are the authors of these books that we just mentioned, so highly recommend that as well.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And while your Design body is about 500 pages long, includes lots of details, the new concise adaptation of that, your Amazing Body is quite phenomenal and very thin. It's only about 149 pages and I'm actually walking through it, teaching it with a group of high schoolers and middle schoolers. And it's very accessible to them. Short enough chapters, not too much detail, but just enough to whet the appetite. And of course, as you're saying, Jonathan, the video series that they're producing to go with it is a great compliment. So lots of resources and lots of places to learn more about this. Well, this has been an enjoyable deep dive into design detection. You know, the reminder of how we detect design in living things and in artifacts in the world, the design of the human body and also how fruitful an engineering approach to biology can be. I want to thank all of you for joining me today. And if you're listening or watching and you want to learn more than again, you can go to science and culture.com that's where we're going to have daily coverage of this team's new research papers, articles, books, new videos that come out. Scienceandculture.com a great resource to return to on a regular basis. Well, thanks again everyone for joining me for ID the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening and watching.
[00:39:11] Speaker D: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: This program is copyright Discovery Institute and.
[00:39:19] Speaker D: Recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
