[00:00:00] Speaker A: So in human joints we have these multiple physical effects producing incredibly low friction levels. I remember asking my researchers to look up what was the coefficient of friction in human joints and we could not believe what it was. We were just completely blown away because the friction in our olympic joints was 50 times higher than than in a healthy human.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Designing an Olympic bike requires the best materials, the best lubricants and the best components. And the smallest of engineering choices can make the difference between winning and losing the race.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm speaking again with award winning British engineer and designer Stuart Burgess. This time our topic is his engineering work as lead transmission designer on the Olympic bikes used by Team GB Team Great Britain in the last three Summer Olympic Games.
Dr. Burgess, in case you don't know about him yet, is professor of Engineering Design at the University of Bristol. He has published over 200 scientific publications on the science of design and engineering and biology. For the last two decades, his gearboxes have been used successfully for on all the large Earth observation satellites of the European Space Agency. He has received many national international awards for his design, including from the Minister of State for Trade and industry in the UK.
In 2019, he was given the top Mechanical Engineer award in the UK out of 120,000 professional mechanical engineers. And he's also been an invited speaker in over 30 countries.
Welcome to the podcast, Stuart.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's good to be here, thank you.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Well, in February 2026, many of us enjoyed the Winter Olympic Games held in Milan and Cortina. A stunning display, as always, of human prowess and skill. 2,800 athletes, over 90 nations competing. And that same month your new book, Ultimate Engineering was published by Discovery Institute Press. Now, you've already given talks on the book in California Tech, Texas and the uk. How is the book doing so far and what positive feedback have you received?
[00:02:26] Speaker A: I've been very encouraged with the feedback, including from senior academics and not all of whom have have a religious interest. So it's been very encouraging. People have been, have pointed out how there's very strong scientific evidence supporting intelligence design. They're also interested in how I've been exposing some of the false claims of Nathan Lentz and Richard Dawkins. And I think people are also interested in my academic experience and some of the opposition I've had whilst advocating intelligent design.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, so you've, you've gotten some great positive feedback so far and of course we would expect the volume to ruffle some materialist feathers along the way. As you unveil stunning engineering prowess on display in the human body. Have you received any significant objections thus far?
[00:03:23] Speaker A: I think one of the objections I was expecting was the issue of health problems, health issues like diseases or genetic faults.
But I think the people making those objections haven't really read through the book, because in my book I deal with this in detail and I explained that diseases are an external attack on the body, so you mustn't confuse design with disease.
And I actually give quite a few scientific references in the book explaining that a lot of the problems we have are not to do with design of the body, but to do with how we look after ourselves or don't look after ourselves, and also diseases. So it's so important not to confuse design with things like disease.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Yeah, what a crucial point. And of course you can understand why people will bring in that element of suffering and question things when books like yours come along. It's totally understandable. But like you said, they've got to get that crucial point that the design is separate from the disease or the degradation that can occur on that design for various reasons. So I'm glad you take time and pains to bring that point out.
Now, you've worked for the British Olympic cycling team for the last three Summer Olympics and there's more to come, as we'll mention near the end here. How did you get involved with Team GB?
[00:04:54] Speaker A: Well, in 2013, the British Olympic cycling team came to my lab. They knew that I was the lead designer in the UK on industrial chains, and they wondered whether I could help them with the bicycle chain. They actually told me that they'd noticed that the American cycling team had put the chain drive from the normal side to the opposite side of their bicycle and they couldn't work it out. And they asked me, why would they do this? And I immediately knew the answer, because on the velodrome, bicycles go round in the anti clockwise direction.
And what the Americans had done clearly was to put the chain drive on the inside of the track, which meant the chain drive was going a slightly shorter distance and that would save a fraction of a watt each lap because of the shorter distance.
And I explained to Team GB what kind of energy that would save the American team. So they asked me would I recommend copying the Americans or doing something different. And I went away and did some calculations and I recommended that they didn't do that change because it's a really difficult change, very expensive change.
And also I realized there were some other things that they could do. So I outlined various other changes that they could make which I predicted would be more significant than the American change.
And so they told me. I was on their design team.
I didn't really have an option. I was put on the design team. And so we had two years before Rio, and we went through a really intense research program developing a more efficient chain drive for the Rio Olympics.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Okay.
Wow. Well, in your book, you compare friction in Olympic bikes with synovial fluid in human joints. Why is friction important when it comes to these Olympic bikes?
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Well, if you look at the velodrome races in the Olympics, the winning margins can be tiny, like one thousandth of a second.
And so tiny amounts of friction in a chain drive can make a huge difference. Difference.
The efficiency of a chain drive is typically 98, 98 and a half percent.
So if you can just make a little bit of an improvement, it could have a huge effect.
So a lot of effort goes into not just choosing a lubricant, but looking at the geometry of the chain, how it's manufactured, how it's run in, and a huge amount of testing takes place.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Wow.
So tell us a bit more. How do you reduce friction in a bicycle chain drive? What are some methods that you use to attempt that?
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it might sound an easy kind of thing, but it's surprising how much you can do. One of the main things we did was to design some new testing equipment, because when I entered the projects, there wasn't really a test rig in the world that could measure these very fine margins. And I developed this very special, unique pendulum testing machine, which is now being copied around the world.
And the pendulum concept is a very accurate concept.
If you put a chain on a pendulum, if it swings for a long time, it shows there's little friction in the chain. But if it swings for a short time, it shows friction is higher. It's a very accurate way of measuring friction in a. In a chain. And we had a whole range of test rigs which were very novel. And that gave us great insight into selecting materials and lubricants. But we also did a lot of research into the lubricants themselves and coatings.
So we were really busy with the whole team for two years preparing for the Rio Olympics.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And when it came time to send the bikes out there, did you actually go, or did you watch it all on telly?
[00:09:09] Speaker A: I was invited to go to Rio, but I wasn't very keen on the health issues at that time. In the Rio Olympics, there were some diseases at the Time, so I wanted to watch it. I was actually very nervous, so I. I actually got my wife to text me what was going on on the first. I was actually terrified on the first race because I realized that millions of people would be watching this live. And I had seen Olympic riders snap a chain. They're so strong.
And we had only really assembled everything two weeks before the Rio Olympics. And so, as a designer, I knew things could break, so I was really quite terrified.
But.
But. So I asked my wife to. To text me what happened after the first race, and I wanted her to text me that the chain had not broken. And when she texted me, I saw in the text the word break.
But actually, what she was telling me was that in the first qualification race, they had broken the world record. So we had designed the fastest bike in the world. And it was a very emotional, ecstatic experience, I bet.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: And so how did the races go? I mean, you. You broke a record there. Did that lead to medals?
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Yeah, we were really stunned. Just for cycling alone, we won six gold medals that had never been done in cycling before, that many medals.
And we won a total of 11 medals. I think we were far and away ahead in the medals table. And when I'm presenting in the United States, I actually present some of the medal table showing that the Americans kept coming second.
So their chain was very good, but not quite as good as ours. But it does show that in the Rio Olympics, it did prove that. That those teams working on the chain drive did particularly well in those Olympics.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Okay, well, did you get recognition for your work on that, on the Rio Olympics, and did that help keep you on the design team, as it were?
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Yeah, there was a lot of publicity in the UK from the national press.
In fact, some of the foreign countries in Germany, Australia, France, some of the headlines in their newspapers was they thought something dodgy was going on because the team GV weren't doing so well before. It was obvious the bike was a very good design. But I did get invited to present at the Royal Academy in London.
In fact, the Royal Society and government ministers came. I had photographs with them. It was on national television. So there was a lot of publicity, and we were immediately invited to refine the design for the next Tokyo Olympics.
[00:12:19] Speaker B: Wow, that's awesome. Well, let's pivot to the human body just for a moment, because that is what you highlight in your book, Ultimate Engineering. How does synovial lubrication work in human joints?
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Yeah, Because I'd worked so long on one of the best lubrication systems in the world. I was very keen to look at synovial fluid, and I also do research on human joints as well. So I was particularly interested the synovial fluid in our joints, like our knee joint, our elbow joint, it uses some really remarkable processes, very complex processes. It's like a system.
And we have in our joints what's called weeping lubrication. Because our cartilage is porous, it has holes in it. When you load your joints, for example, when you stand up, your bones are pushed together and it squeezes the cartilage and it squeezes the synovial fluid out and it forms a thin film, so it separates the bones.
Engineers have tried to copy this with sweeping lubrication, but they can't actually copy the way it works. In human bones. Engineers can produce thin film lubrication at high speed, but somehow in human joints, it's able to do it at very slow speeds. And really engineers are just in awe of how this can work in human joints. But it's not just that. In our joints, we also have a molecular layer of lubricant with the lubricin protein and also phospholipids. So in human joints, we have these multiple physical effects producing incredibly low friction levels. I remember asking my researchers to look up what was the coefficient of friction in human joints, and we could not believe what it was. We were just completely blown away because the friction in our olympic joints was 50 times higher than in human. In a healthy human joint, we can't even do that with ball bearing. So we just could not believe what we were seeing. We would love to copy that for the next Olympics, but it's too complicated to copy these molecular mechanisms.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Wow. And have you or your team or others taken a closer look at the lubrication systems in our human joints and what they're made of and, and try to emulate it in some way?
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yeah, there are teams, researchers around the world, trying to emulate it, but we cannot get down to the resolution of these molecular layers. And these molecular layers are self assembling.
So you're using those micro machines to self assemble.
It's like science fiction. We just cannot copy those systems. And of course, in our joints, we have a living system where the synovial fluid is replenished. It's self repairing, self maintaining, and we just cannot copy these sophisticated design features.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Try as we may, and as you say, teams, teams all over the place trying to do so. But you can only get so far when you're trying to copy what's already been done without taking that leap and being able to do something even better.
But what you're saying is what we find in the human body is so much stronger, better, more adequately engineered than even the best things that we can produce.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: That's right. And in my book, one of my main arguments is that intelligent design predicts this kind of ultimate engineering because if God's created the world, he has perfect knowledge of design laws, so it makes sense he could design with perfection. And in my book, I then explained that according to evolution, we should have bad design in the human body, just as Nathan Lentz predicts, Justice Richard Dawkins predicts. But again and again, the actual science supports intelligent design and not evolution.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: Right. Because that's what. What we see, that's what we observe. It's not the. It's not bad design. It's not just barely works design. It's actually, as you were saying, optimal design. And that demands an explanation. Well, what about wear? You know, we've talked about lubrication and the importance of that.
Tell us what repetitive use wear does to both Olympic bikes and our own human joints.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: Yeah, in the case of Olympic bikes, we have to re lubricate virtually every race. The same with other teams.
And in the whole field of mechanical engineering, wear is one of the biggest problems.
We would love to design motorcars, bicycles that don't wear out, but they certainly do.
But engineers are just in awe or of human joints.
In my book, I reference some papers from Imperial College in London where they have done wear tests on human joints. And the researchers say that after millions of loading cycles, they cannot detect any wear in a human joint. In a healthy human joint. Well, and yet prosthetic joints wear out really quite quickly.
And once again, it's one of these areas where engineers are just in awe of this synovial fluid that just doesn't have any measurable wear. Which is why if you're a healthy person, you don't have arthritis, your joints can be going right up to the age of 100.
And there are instances of pianists being able to play brilliant music, let's say, on a piano in their 90s, that their joints having moved millions of times, they're still working flawlessly into their 90s. It's really quite remarkable.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow.
Well, another interesting dimension of your work is that you work with robotics teams. You get to consult with them and teach them to improve their robotic designs based on what you're learning about design in the human body. How do human limb joints compare with what they're putting out with robots and their limb joints. Yeah.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: It's very well known in the robotics community that robots are far behind animals in term in terms of agility.
If you have a very repetitive task, a robot can be very accurate, very strong.
But as soon as you have what's called an unstructured environment, like running or playing football, robots really, really struggle.
I would encourage people who are interested in this to look at the Chinese Robot Football League, where three robots play a team, another team of three robots, and when you see them playing football, they are incredibly clumsy, incredibly slow.
They find it hard to track the ball, to know what to do with the ball.
They find it hard to kick the ball in a certain direction. And then you realize just how far behind robots are compared to humans.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll need to check that out. I do enjoy soccer, so I'd like to see how clumsy they are. And, you know, we poke fun at it, and I know that, you know, things will get better. But as I said, you can only get so good at copying something without taking that leap yourself.
And that requires immense skill and the ability to produce those things.
And I've seen some fancy robot dancing and robots that seem to move a bit better, but it all still pales in comparison to the agility we have as humans. What makes the human body so agile in those unstructured environments?
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Yeah, one of the things is multifunctioning joints. I've actually written a paper entitled Multifunctioning Joint in Animals how it Produces Agility, that's published in the Journal of Biomimetics.
And I say that robot designers need to be copying.
For example, if you take the human wrist joint, engineers cannot copy the human wrist joint for its compactness and functionality. It's just too difficult.
And often it's because in the human body, we see this amazing multifunctionality, the same parts doing different functions, but not only multifunctioning joints, but also our nervous system, the human brain, our actuators, our muscles. Our muscles are multifunctioning, and they are so adaptable, if one muscle stops working, other muscles can take over. We have this incredible adaptability.
So when you add all of that together, the performance is just so different between robots and humans, right?
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And as we can see, things are improving to some extent.
Do you think robots will ever catch up to human agility?
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Robots will certainly improve. I mean, I'm working on projects myself, and it's exciting to see how much better robots can get, but the gap is so huge, it's never going to be closed completely. If you just think about how skillful BMX riders are in the Olympics, or ice skaters or skateboarders, a robot will never, ever qualify for the Olympics in one of those sports because the agility, the incredible levels of agility are just way beyond what is physically possible with robotics.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: Right, so no robot Olympic Games coming up in the near future.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Well, that's for sure. Now, biologist Nathan Lentz has claimed that joints are just bad design.
And so why does he claim this? And how do you answer him? I know you've, you've engaged with some of his arguments.
Yeah.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: The reason Nathan Lentz claims joints are badly designed is because that's what evolution predicts.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: It's.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: His claims are not based on scientific evidence. It's based on the predictions of evolution.
And in one sense, I agree with him that evolution does predict bad design because there's not been enough time to evolve from a quadruped to a biped.
But Nathan Lentz, he's talking about something for which he's not actually qualified.
He works in genetics, not in biomechanics.
Had he have checked the actual scientific evidence, he would find that what he's proposing does not align with the scientific evidence.
He's following his commitment to a naturalistic worldview. He's not actually following the scientific evidence. And I show that very clearly in my book. For example, he claims that our feet would be better if we fused the bones of the ankle joint just to fuse it into one structure. But he's unaware of the many scientific papers that state that you should definitely not fuse, fuse your ankle bones together unless you've got a very serious problem like very advanced arthritis or some problem like that. So he's just unaware of what the scientific evidence is showing, right?
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And I wonder, you know, if Mr. Lance and others were to take an engineering class, obviously that would open their minds up to, you know, the principles of engineering, which you got to get close to if you're going to start critiquing, you know, the way things work, even in nature.
But even that's not enough to escape the materialist viewpoint. You've got to make a choice, right, to reject scientific materialism and be open to other ideas.
So it's, it's unfortunate, but it does come with the territory. Now, you teach engineering design at Bristol University and you've also taught at Cambridge University, Liberty University in the us.
What do your academic colleagues think of intelligent design?
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Well, I'm surprised how many academics are really quite sympathetic to the idea of intelligent design. Including biologists. I've spoken with, really senior biologists, some of them not Christians, not religious, and they've told me they're not at all confident in the materialistic worldview, evolution, especially in areas like abiogenesis, the idea that life could come from a chemical soup. They've been really open with me that they acknowledge there's no evidence whatsoever for abiogenesis and they have no confidence in it, but they don't want to go public on that because there's this unwritten rule in academia that you must not support Intelligent design despite what the evidence shows.
You're just not allowed to support it publicly.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: And do you think that again comes down to this commitment to methodological naturalism or materialism?
What is it that or is it just simply fear of losing grant funding and position and prestige?
[00:26:24] Speaker A: Well, my experience is that most academics are agnostic. There's a minority of atheists who are really very vocal.
And so there is academic fear.
Most agnostics want a quiet life. They realize that if they have any support of Intelligent Design, it could affect their career, they could be ridiculed.
So sadly, whereas science should be open, it's not open. People are quite fearful about saying certain things.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and you know, so, so you've got that state in academia and then you've, you've got the media world and how they portray Intelligent Design and the debate over evolution.
Now that our modern world has some, you know, more choices when it comes to media, we've got alternatives that are, are blossoming these days there, it seems to be getting better in some ways. But on the whole, traditional media still don't fairly acknowledge the success of the Intelligent Design research paradigm despite clear growing support for Intelligent Design in the public square. So why do you think that is and how might it get better?
[00:27:38] Speaker A: I think it also comes down to fear. There have been examples where a newspaper has put some kind of support for Intelligent Design and then there have been atheist academics condemning that newspaper in the same way that they would condemn an academic who supports intellig Intelligent Design.
So newspapers, like other people, they can be tempted by their reputation and can be fearful. So again, there's that fear. But I think you're correct. I think there's an opportunity now with more dispersed media for the message to get through to the public.
And also I've been allowed on one or two occasions to put forward the case for Intelligent Design, for example, in the Independent newspaper, a national newspaper in the uk.
So it's not all a one way process.
I actually have A couple of chapters in my book where I give personal examples of where I've been supported by universities or supported by newspapers. And I have lots of stories about conversations with academics. So what we're discussing, I actually have some interesting anecdotes in my book.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, that's ultimate engineering. And we'll tell our audience how to get that in a moment.
So you do have hope, then. You have confidence, you have hope, and you are seeing signs that efforts can be fruitful to change some of these things?
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I am seeing signs, definitely. I think the Discovery Institute have done an excellent job bringing together academics who support intelligent design and showing the case for including intelligent design in education.
I've been personally encouraged that in the last couple of years, I've actually had some statements in some of my secular scientific publications actually supporting intelligent design.
One has been my paper on
[00:29:42] Speaker B: the
[00:29:43] Speaker A: homology of the vertebrate limb, how I argue that supports intelligent design, not Darwin's homology argument. And I've had some other papers where I've been allowed to make some statements supporting intelligent design.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's. That's really great to be making those inroads.
And I think you. You do get some favor have. You know, being that engineer who's had lots of success, maybe people are not as afraid of what you might say. If you were just, say, a biologist or a chemist, you've got some leverage there, which is great. Well, will you continue to work on Olympic bikes for future Olympic Games?
[00:30:26] Speaker A: Yes. At the moment, we're testing for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. This is our fourth round, but I must say that because this is our fourth cycle, it's getting much harder to make improvements each time. The improvements are getting smaller and smaller and other teams are catching up and copying.
So I think this one is going to be hard. But there's still. It's amazing how you can go on and on making chipping away at improvements.
And so we will have a better chain drive for Los Angeles.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: Okay. And that's 2028. Right.
Okay, well, something to look forward to.
So let's talk about how people can get a hold of your book.
We've got the usual outlets, you know, Amazon, Barnes and Noble's website, and people can probably order it at their local bookstore, too, you know, thanks to different distribution agreements.
Another place is Discovery Press. That's the website of the Discovery Institute Press. And you'll find the book prominently displayed there, and you can order it there as well.
Anything else you'd like to say about the book in terms of what people will look forward to in it.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: It's got lots and lots of diagrams so it's really quite easy to read. And throughout the book I give personal examples of the fun of doing research, talking about the excitement of research. So it's a very personable book and I think people will enjoy it.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Stuart, thanks so much for stopping by today.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: Thank you. It's good to be with you.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: Now I recently did a two part interview with Dr. Burgess about his new book Ultimate Engineering. So if you've missed that, be sure to go back and enjoy it. That's two separate episodes where we unpack some of the goodies that he has put into ultimate engineering. Well, for ID the Future, I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Thanks again. Thanks again for joining us.
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