I. D. the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Welcome back to I.D ID the Future. This is Jeff Simmons. I'm one of the

fellows with Discovery Institute and I've been talking to Dr David Galloway from

Scotland. He has a book called Design, Dissected. I find it very interesting for as a physician

I think his examples of the book are great. He also talks a lot about the arguments

against Darwin and at least explaining Darwin's

fallacies. So we'll proceed from where we left off. Welcome back, Dr. Galloway.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I was telling him, Dr. Galloway, in the beginning when we were off tape that I used childbirth

as an example of intelligent design and irreducible complexity.

And so I think it'd be good to start off with that again.

Would you tell us about why that can't happen in any other way?

Sure.

Well, I mean the whole idea of course of irreducible complexity is something that was popularized by Mike Behe back in the 90s.

And the notion typically he uses molecular machinery and the complex configuration of multiple proteins involved in a system,

indicating that unless there was some particular selective benefit to each step in the process, which there clearly isn't,

then there is no way that a gradualistic approach to building a system like that could work.

So I began to think about physiological examples and anatomical examples and I think if you look at the circulation in a human fetus as it develops, that's a great example of what amounts to an irreducibly complex system.

Just think about it for a second, because the baby has no means other than via the mother to obtain its life-giving oxygen and so the

placenta is the source of that oxygen and what I've described in the book is

just utterly fascinating because that blood returning from the placenta which is rich in

oxygen has to get back into the baby's circulation and it does it through a series of vessels and in particular a series of shunts and there are perhaps three

at least three important shunts that allow that oxygen-rich blood to get to the target organs, you know, the brain, the kidneys, the heart, and so on.

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