The Universal Optimal Design of Vertebrate Limbs

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

When we look at feats of human engineering, like vehicles, skyscrapers, and computers, we don't doubt our intuition that they're intelligently designed. But when it comes to marvels of the natural world, like bird wings, whale flippers, and our own arms and legs, we're expected to suspend our design intuition and credit a gradual, undirected evolutionary process. Bio-engineer Dr. Stuart Burgess has been studying vertebrate limbs for over thirty years. On this episode of ID The Future, Burgess shares his cutting-edge insights on the universal optimal design of vertebrate limb patterns and the implications for fields like robotics. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	ID, The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:11.9	So, Stuart, great to see you again.
0:14.1	It was fun to see you a few weeks ago in England for the Insiders briefing.
0:19.5	Really enjoyed your presentation that you gave there.
0:22.0	Yeah, it was a great conference, I think.
0:24.2	Yeah, excellent. And we had a lot of great speakers, and certainly I know people appreciated your
0:28.8	expertise and the experience you were able to bring on the engineering side, because we hear
0:33.5	so many of these arguments about bad design and poor optimality of living systems
0:38.4	that it's great to get a real engineer who knows what they're talking about.
0:42.0	So you have published, if I'm remembering right, two recent papers.
0:47.2	And you talked with our colleague Brian Miller pretty recently about one of the papers,
0:52.6	which was about multifunctioning joints and lessons for
0:56.3	robotics. Is that right?
0:57.8	Yeah, that's correct. Yeah.
0:59.3	Okay. Yeah, I listened to that. That was great.
1:01.5	And I also appreciated the fact that you guys spent a little bit of time pushing back against some of the
1:07.2	nonsense from the Darwinists like Nathan Lentz, who evidently don't have any knowledge
1:14.3	about biomechanics or engineering. So it's great to see some pushback on that and showing that
1:20.3	some of these claims are just ridiculous, frankly. Yeah, I think engineering has a really important
1:26.2	role to play in understanding biology.
1:30.7	And often you find biologists don't understand, especially things like biomechanics.
1:37.9	You know, there's a lot of technical expertise needed to understand how joints work.
	...

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