Back in October 2020, I participated in a Webinar organised by the Christian Scientific Society, which also included Stuart Burgess from the UK, and Fuz Rana, Scott Minnich and David Snoke from the US.
The event was about whether the “design” in nature is good or bad, though my own contribution was to present the thesis of my book God’s Good Earth, that neither Scripture, early church tradition nor science teaches that the natural creation is corrupted by sin, which is somewhat of a tangential subject to design. It went OK, though.
The speaker who most impressed me was Stuart Burgess (because he’s a Brit, of course!). He is a design engineer with incredible credentials, including his role in the design of the bike that helped Britain’s cyclists to win gold medals in more than one Olympics, and crucial input in designing systems for many NASA spacecraft, including the wiring for the ISS.
He has also spent many years studying design, as an engineer, in living systems. He has come to the conclusion from his own, and others’, research that pretty well any system or structure one studies in living things is demonstrably close to optimal, once one takes into account the design constraints inherent in engineering within physical systems, and the “decay” of mechanisms in the ubiquitous presence of entropy.
In fact, the one disagreement I sensed in the Webinar discussion was that he appeared to be a Young Earther, attributing the attrition of systems over time to the Fall, whereas on both theological and empirical grounds I prefer to distinguish the first, perishable (ie entropic) material creation with the imperishable, spiritual, new creation yet to be fulfilled. With reference to design, of course, there is no difference between these views.
Though I’m still not convinced that young earth creationism has a sufficient evidential base, and that Genesis 1 is intended as a literal account rather than a phenomenological temple-inauguration text, I hope I’m not being too arrogant to attribute our difference to his being an engineer rather than a Bible scholar like wot i am.
This makes no difference to the design question, though, which in terms of physical structures is certainly an engineering matter, and neither biblical scholars nor, more significantly, evolutionary biologists are qualified to dispute it, without gaining specialised knowledge.
A recent interview with Stuart is here. Apart from some vivid examples of the excellence of design in the human body, treated in more depth in his book Ultimate Engineering, he engages directly with Neodarwinians by showing their “design” predictions to be false, greatly weakening the plausibility of the whole proposed evolutionary mechanism.
I was amused that one of his targets is Nathan Lents, with whom I dialogued in my days at Peaceful Science and who, to me, seemed to lack breadth in his approach, though maybe that was a snobbish prejudice on my part when he was gobsmacked by a photo of my library, having only one small bookshelf and a computer himself. Lents’s book on poor design in nature, apparently, trots out all the old favourites like the over-complexity of the vertebrate limb because it is shackled by homology, the loop in the recurrent laryngeal nerve, the “reverse-wiring” of the human retina, and so on.
The trouble is that these classics, like others such as “vestigial organs,” have never been studied exhaustively by such writers, because they lack sufficient background and are, in fact, not doing science but polemics for a popular audience, also without sufficient background. Should we talk about the reverse-wired leading the reverse-wired? Not surprisingly, Burgess’s detailed analyses of these cases demonstrate not only reasonable design, but near-optimal function.
I’ve written on the evolutionary problem of examples of optimization before, but Burgess shows it to be the norm, not the exception, which is a massive problem for the naturalist.
The intractable dilemma for the Neodarwinian is this. We now know enough about the processes and limitations of random mutation and natural selection to have debunked Charles Darwin’s optimistic idea of natural selection hovering over the species like a careful mother, leading each generation ever closer towards perfection. We are now even in the age when near-neutral theory has prevailed over adaptationism, meaning that most characteristics of living beings are not selected at all, but simply not deleterious enough to kill you.
Inevitably this results in the view of evolution as a tinkerer and a bodger, whether at the molecular level of junk DNA, or the macro-evolutionary level of the giant panda’s makeshift thumb. This “sub-optimal” conclusion is so well-established that it is the very basis of the “poor design” claims made by people like Nathan Lents or Richard Dawkins. “Evolution is a bodger – nature is bodged – ergo evolution is true.”
As Burgess points out in his interview, when Lents gives an example of “poor” design, and says that evolution just didn’t have enough time to perfect it, Burgess absolutely agrees. But by showing that, in every case, the system in question is perfect, as near as engineering constraints permit in our world, then the conclusion is simply obvious: the syllogism collapses, Neodarwinian evolution did not produce the result, and neither can any other undirected process that (in an undefined future) materialist biologist might come up with.
But even if one were to invoke some new teleological process behind evolution, such as James Shapiro’s natural genetic engineering, the increasingly popular pan-psychism, or even a return to Lamarck’s use-and-retention ideas, optimal design won’t sit down and shut up.
As Burgess knows from his own, and every single engineer on earth’s, experience, good designs don’t emerge from a vague wish to walk on land or fly to the moon. Instead, engineers have to consider every factor of the design, including interactions with other designs in neighbouring systems, before they put the thing together. When they get it wrong, the machine crashes – or in the case of living things, they go extinct.
Flukes (though not whale flukes, which are very sophisticated engineering) may rarely happen fortuitously. I once tried to work out how to play Bakithi Kumalo’s iconic bass solo on Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al, for a band backing track. Having recorded the rest of the bass part – and avoided the solo, which I’d not yet been able to play even slowly – I had five minutes left before lunch. Time for just one run at the first of 500 takes and multiple edits of the solo. And I nailed it first time. I’ve never been able to play it since.
Do that once, and it’s luck, or alternatively special providence. But do it every time you try something new, and it’s genius. And remember that living things are so complicated and interdependent that even one novel function means you got it right in thousands of respects.
In conclusion, Darwinian theory is nothing if it is not a design-substitute. By its proven nature since 1859, any design it could produce would necessarily be make-do-and-mend. Design engineering demonstrates that design in nature is not make-do-and-mend, but even more perfected that the old, long-refuted, adaptationists claimed.
Accepting that conclusion seems to me to be a rational no-brainer, but as in most things, I suspect the real arbiter of the choice is your metaphysics.
