Dr. Stuart Burgess is a mechanical engineer and inventor. He has held academic posts at full professor level at Bristol University (UK), Cambridge University (UK), and Liberty University (USA). He served as the lead transmission designer for three British gold-medal-winning Olympic track cycling teams, and gearboxes he designed have been used successfully on the European Space Agency’s four largest earth-observation satellites. He has received many design awards, including the UK’s top mechanical engineer award in 2019. He is the author of seven books and more than 200 research papers on the science of design in engineering and biology, and he has been an invited speaker in more than 30 countries. He is also a father of five and a marathoner, even into his sixties.
His most recent book, Ultimate Engineering: An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body (2026), takes issue with a common evolutionary trope which says that biology often exhibits poor design. Contrary to the kneejerk assertions of such Darwinian evolutionists as Nathan Lents, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne, Ultimate Engineering demonstrates how a panoply of features in the body, including the human eye, fingers, wrist, spine, knee, and foot and ankle, as well as whole systems, such as blood circulation, digestion, and the nervous system, not only exhibit ingenious design but frequently appear to represent “ultimate engineering” — design that reaches the limit of what is possible. Dr. Burgess gave a talk explaining how the human body shows ultimate engineering at Discovery Institute’s 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith.
This is Part One of a series in which he responds to an academic colleague who asserts, contrary to the Ultimate Engineering thesis, that “The human body isn’t a masterpiece of design — it’s a patchwork of evolutionary compromise.” My questions are followed by his answers.
Questions and Answers
Q. You became an open supporter of intelligent design in 2000 with the publication of your book Hallmarks of Design, which received an interesting public accolade from Prince Charles (now King Charles III). What led you to advocate for design and to go public with it?
A. A key motivation was reading books by evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and realizing they didn’t understand how difficult design is. Engineers have a phrase: Scientists describe what is, engineers create what has never been.
It’s easy to underestimate the challenge of design. But evolutionists like Richard Dawkins reveal a major lack of understanding of the basic principles of design. He has no qualifications in design. He’s never designed anything. Dawkins basically says the world could just appear by chance, that design could just evolve by chance accident with no planning. Reading such claims was my biggest motivation for writing on this subject.
Q. It’s ironic how Dawkins has caused many people to push back against his brand of atheism. Nonetheless, as we all know, the Darwinian story lumbers on. One of your Bristol colleagues, Lucy Hyde, an anatomy lecturer with 14 years’ experience teaching at Bristol’s School of Anatomy, has written, “Our bodies are not perfectly designed, but are a living archive of evolution.” She asserts: “Far from being a flawless machine, the body reads more like a patchwork of compromises shaped by millions of years of evolutionary tinkering.” She goes on to cite examples of such “patchwork compromises.” Let’s start with the human spine. She says it has “evolved little from our four-legged quadrupedal tree-dwelling ancestors” and “predisposes us to lower back pain, herniated discs, and degenerative changes” because “it’s doing a job it was never originally designed to do.”
Your book contains an entire chapter on the optimized design of the spinal column, which you describe as “a striking example of brilliant design and irreducible complexity.” Why is she wrong about the human spine?
A. First of all, with each of her examples, she is describing what evolution predicts. She’s not describing what scientists have found. If evolution had repurposed a quadrupedal skeleton into a bipedal skeleton with the constraint of quadruped design concepts, then you would expect areas of poor design to result. So she’s describing what evolution predicts. And I agree with her about what evolution predicts. Evolution predicts bad design. Whilst she includes some references in her article, none of them give any evidence for bad design features in the human body.
The problem is that whether it’s Lucy Hyde or Richard Dawkins or Nathan Lents, they never clarify that what they’re talking about is a prediction. They assume evolution is true, and then they base their predictions on this assumption without explicitly saying so.
Common Ancestor or Common Designer?
With the spine, Lucy Hyde makes two particular claims. Her first claim is that because we observe the human spinal column to have the same design concept an ape has — a series of vertebrae with intervertebral discs — that shows that we came from an ape.
But what she hasn’t done is consider the possibility that the same concept is optimal for both a vertical column and a horizontal beam. Now, engineers know that vertical columns often have the same optimal concept as horizontal beams. If she had spoken to an engineer, they would have said that what we see in the human spine is exactly what an engineer would expect. So, for example, if you were to look inside a building, a cross-section of most of the vertical columns would show the shape of an “I” — what’s called a universal column. But it so happens that most horizontal beams — called “I-beams” — show a nearly identical cross-sectional shape.
It’s no surprise at all, therefore, that humans and apes have the same series of vertebrae that we see. Lucy Hyde is unaware of this and makes the unjustifiable assumption that evolutionary repurposing has taken place. She’s wrong to look at similarity and say, “Oh, that shows evolutionary development.” From an engineering perspective, it’s common optimal design by a common designer.
At Bristol University, engineering researchers have been studying the human vertebral column in order to copy design details and transfer them to bridge design.1 It is expected that bridges can be made more robust and efficient by copying details of the human spinal column. So at the same university we have the anatomy department claiming the human spine is a bad design, whilst the engineering department is improving bridge design by copying the optimal engineering of the human back! One department is basing claims on the philosophical predictions of macroevolution, whilst the other department is basing claims on physical reality and scientific testing.
Back Pain: Poor Design or Misuse?
Her second claim is that back problems such as lower back pain are all down to bad design in the spinal column. She links to a research paper, but that paper does not identify any weakness in the design of the human back. The paper simply argues that walking on two legs creates more stress on a spine than walking on four legs.
Given that humans are designed to walk on two legs, with all the benefits that result from that, the extra loading on the spine is an unavoidable consequence of bipedalism and not a reflection of bad design. To argue that bipedalism is inherently a bad design is like saying that motorbikes are a bad design because they don’t have the same stability as a car with four wheels. The reduced stability of motorbikes compared to cars is an unavoidable consequence of a two-wheeled vehicle!
There are many reasons why we get lower back pain that have nothing to do with the way the back is designed. Three have to do with the way people use their back. If you lift a heavy child off the ground, you may strain your back. That is not because the back is poorly designed. It’s because you tried to pick up a child that was too heavy for you. Strain can also happen if your muscles are not warmed up when you pick up a heavy load, or if you have poor lifting technique. So there are three reasons having to do with lifting a heavy load. Human nature is such that we all take risks. We overestimate our ability to lift a load, and so lower back pain is a common ailment.
Then there are several reasons relating to fitness, especially in western society. Two thirds of Americans are overweight, and three-quarters do not do the recommended exercise. So you only have one quarter of Americans who are fit enough not to be prone to back pain. Now, the statistics show that chronic back pain is not that common in people under age 45, with one study showing around one in 30 people having chronic pain.2 Considering how many are unfit in western society, it’s really remarkable how few people have persistent lower back pain! If you go back 150 years, when people weren’t overweight and living sedentary lives, lower back pain was far less common.
There are also the issues of poor posture and that people sit too much. There are scientific studies showing that if you have good posture, if you walk a lot each day, if you’re not overweight and you exercise, you can often eliminate back pain.3 And finally, there is back pain due to genetic disorders, aging, or injury.
Poor Academic Rigor and False Evidence
Lucy Hyde’s failure to mention a single one of these non-design reasons for back pain represents poor academic rigor, but more importantly, it means that people are being misled with false evidence for evolution.
Just to give you an analogy, if you were to get one of the best-designed cars in the world, say a Corvette or an Aston Martin, if you overload it, the suspension springs will break. That breakage is not a result of bad design but a result of misuse. In exactly the same way, lower back pain is not a sign of bad design but of other factors such as misuse. Lucy Hyde makes the fundamental mistake of conflating design, misuse, and other factors in her arguments.
Her article regurgitates the mantra of evolution: we assume evolution is true, and therefore there must be bad design in the human body. But true science tells another story; the human body is a masterpiece of design.
Notes
- M. Kashani et al, “Experimental Investigation of a Novel Class of Self-Centring Spinal Rocking Column, Journal of Sound and Vibration, Vol 437 (2018).
- James Campbell and Lesley A. Colvin, “Management of Low Back Pain,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 347 (2013).
- D. Steffens et al, “Prevention of Low Back Pain: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” JAMA Intern Med., 176(2):199-208 (Feb. 2016).