Science and Culture Today Discovering Design in Nature

ID the Future

with Andrew McDiarmid

Is the Human Body Poorly Designed? An Award-Winning Engineer Answers

2285
Stuart Burgess
November 2, 2026
Is the natural world full of flawed, makeshift designs, as some critics of intelligent design have argued? Or are living things far more ingeniously engineered than we’ve been led to believe? On this episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid is pleased to bring you a conversation with award-winning British engineer and designer Dr. Stuart Burgess, a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and author of the book Ultimate Engineering. Dr. Burgess has spent decades studying engineering design, both in human technology and in humans themselves. And his work has led him to challenge the popular claim that biology is full of poor design. In this conversation, originally recorded for the Truthful Hope podcast, host Jacob Vasquez talks with Burgess about the so called bad design argument and what engineering principles can tell us about the evidence for intelligent design in nature.

“Into the Jungle of Fanciful Assumption”: Samuel Wilberforce Critiques Darwin

2284
Andrew McDiarmid
October 30, 2026
In June 1860, just seven months after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, three men hotly debated the merits of Darwin’s argument at a meeting of the British Association. Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and botanist Joseph Hooker defended Darwin’s theory. English bishop, speaker, and writer Samuel Wilberforce critiqued it. And though he was a man of the cloth, Wilberforce did not build a theological case against Darwin. Rather, he evaluated the argument for natural selection on scientific grounds, exposing its “loose statements and unfounded speculations” by weighing it “in the simple scales of logical examination.” On this classic ID The Future out of the vault, host Andrew McDiarmid treats you to excerpts from Wilberforce’s powerful critique, published as a review a month after the debate in Quarterly Review.

Co-Opting Purpose: How Materialists Redefine Biological Agency

2283
Stephen Iacoboni
October 28, 2026
Purpose has been a fundamental part of our understanding of nature for millennia. But the rise of scientific materialism and Darwinism saw purpose get left out of the scientific pursuit. In recent years, materialists have found it necessary to bring purpose back into the equation, and they’re looking for a way to explain it without recourse to intelligent design. On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his conversation with Dr. Stephen Iacoboni, an award-winning cancer researcher and practitioner of medical oncology for forty years. 20th-century materialism treated living organisms as reducible machines governed strictly by Newtonian physics and simple genetic mechanics. But modern research shows organisms are not passive objects: “Organisms don’t act like inert objects responding to external forces impinged on them,” says Dr. Iacoboni. They are “active agents that figure out what’s going on in their conditions of existence and they figure out what to do about it in real time.” This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation.

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Can the Mind Be Explained by the Brain?

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Intelligent Design

Postcard from Kraków

Even physicists who were more familiar with black holes than dance steps got pulled into the fun.

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The Joy of (Neanderthal) Cooking

The Darwinian account of the human race would be much easier to believe in good faith if scientists could point to a clearly inferior and clearly human being.

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Postcard from Kraków

Even physicists who were more familiar with black holes than dance steps got pulled into the fun.

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What Is a Person, and How Do We Know?

The characteristics invoked in the abortion debate — consciousness, rationality, and intrinsic human dignity — function as recalcitrant facts for naturalism.

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