It may seem like a morbid thought, pondering the billions of ways something in your body could “go wrong,” fatally, and then “you’re dead.” This is a refrain in the powerful and handsomely produced new series, Secrets of the Human Body, that, it must be admitted, deliberately confronts us with our own mortality.
Not for no reason, though, but to convey the overall “secret”: that the body is a finely, exquisitely tuned entity that demands a verdict that it was purposefully designed that way. That you are alive right now and reading this, despite all those billions of ways, bears eloquent testimony to that fact.
Secrets of Oxygenation
The series, with engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman, launches today with an episode on “How the Human Body Is Engineered for Oxygen.” The episode examines six tightly coordinated systems needed for oxygenation. How did they all come together?
Says Laufmann,
We can’t oxygenate ourselves unless these six systems are in full operation. But each of these systems are made of cells and those cells require oxygen which none of them can get unless all the systems are in place. So, this is a chicken-or-egg problem. Which of these systems could possibly have come first while the body remained alive?
The narrator explains:
Coherence and interdependence present causal hurdles. Problems that can only be solved when many concurrent problems and sub-problems and sub-sub-problems must be solved all at pretty much the same time. How is it possible for these systems to exist in the human body? When we see these kinds of engineering approaches used in daily life, they point to a human engineer as the ultimate cause. Do similar engineering approaches in our bodies point to a cosmic engineer?
“A Masterful Synthesis”
Watch now, and pick up your copy of the companion book to the series, also by Laufmann and Glicksman, new from Discovery Institute Press: Your Amazing Body.
Says Stephen Meyer about the new book, it is “A masterful synthesis of modern medicine and engineering, revealing a human body brimming not only with biological information and ingenious molecular machines, but also with exquisitely engineered systems and subsystems that resemble but exceed the most advanced engineering techniques of our best engineers…. a most fantastic voyage of discovery.”