Author’s note: This is Part Eight, and the concluding post, in a series of conversations with Stuart Burgess, author of Ultimate Engineering: An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body.
Terrell: We’ve been looking at an essay written by your colleague Lucy Hyde, where she claims that the human body is “far from perfect” because “millions of years of evolutionary tinkering” has left us susceptible to medical ailments.
A catchy video, “The Human Back Is A Design Disaster,” which has thus far logged 1.6 million views, makes the same claims, all based on the same evolutionary assumption — that the horizontal quadrupedal spine was repurposed into a vertical bipedal spine, and that that’s why we have back pain.
Ironically though, the video shows clips of humans and their “design disaster” spines accomplishing remarkable feats, including walking upright, dancing, jumping, twisting, flexing, lifting heavy loads, carrying a full-term pregnancy, swimming the butterfly stroke, and performing advanced gymnastics moves. The narrator notes that the spine absorbs and distributes load forces millions of times over a human lifespan, and she describes humans as the “number one most successful primates.”
It seems to me that if our back is structured such that humans can do all those things, it’s far from a “design disaster.” You contend the exact opposite of that trope, and I think the video clips (minus the verbiage) offer support for it. You say the body represents “a masterpiece of design,” and more importantly for the science-minded, you present evidence to support your case.
Your book is titled Ultimate Engineering. What do you mean by that?
Stuart: By ultimate engineering, I mean the human body has engineering solutions that cannot be improved upon. You cannot improve the synovial fluid lubrication systems; you cannot design a better system of joints in the foot, and so on. Of course, genetic faults and diseases do degrade the design of the human body, but as mentioned previously, these are separate issues to its original design.
To bring in a little theology, Psalm 18:30 says “God’s way is perfect.” God is not capable of producing an imperfect design. He can’t do it. He’s never done anything with imperfection. So there’s a bit of theology.
In my book, I give some interesting examples such as DNA. There was an article in Scientific American which said DNA is the “ultimate data storage” device because of its incredible data storage capacity, which is several orders of magnitude better than the best human technology. Notice how they chose to call DNA the “ultimate” device for data storage. You cannot improve on it. So DNA is an example of that principle.
The (Correct) ID Prediction
I preferred the term “ultimate engineering” to “perfect engineering,” even though some biologists have used the word “perfect,” when describing the design of living organisms. But I think “perfect” clashes too much with the reality of disease and devolution.
Terrell: Is there anything else you’d like people to know about you or your work”
Stuart: One thing I like to mention in my talks is that I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best designers in the world — at NASA, at ESA, at Panasonic. I’m very aware of what human designers can do, and that has made it even more clear to me that the human body represents ultimate engineering. I’m very aware of what brilliant engineering is, and I can see clearly that the design of the human body is a level above anything human designers can do.
And that is exactly what ID predicts. That’s what ID expects biology to be — a level above human technology. According to evolution, biology should be a level below human technology because evolution is constrained. It’s constrained to step-by-step change. It’s also constrained to vestigial parts and to just-good-enough design. And the constraints go on.
And so this point about comparing human design with biology, I think, is important. Not only have I researched design, but I’ve loved and enjoyed designing things myself. Only if you’ve designed things do you really appreciate how difficult it is. This is what is so missing from people like Richard Dawkins and Lucy Hyde. They’ve not designed things themselves. They haven’t studied design, and they haven’t discussed these issues with engineers.
People used to say biology equals chemistry plus physics. What we now know is that biology equals chemistry plus physics plus engineering. And that’s a really crucial point.