Engineered Complexity in the Microbial World

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

On this ID the Future from the archive, host Jonathan Witt speaks to molecular biologist and professor Dustin Van Hofwegen about his research into the engineered complexity in microbial life. Hofwegen shares his research on the famous decades-long E. coli evolution experiment conducted by Richard Lenski, which showed the sudden appearance of an ability to utilize citrate after many generations. However, Van Hofwegen's own experiments demonstrated that this "evolutionary innovation" actually points to the intelligent design built into living systems instead of an undirected process like natural selection. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	ID, The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:12.0	Hi, I'm Jonathan Witt.
0:13.4	I'm a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
0:17.4	I actually oversee intelligent design the future, usually from behind the scenes.
0:22.4	But today, I'm here at a conference in Texas. I'm a Texan. I live in Denton, Texas, and it just so
0:28.4	happens that there is an intelligent design conference here in Denton, Texas, by the shores of Lake
0:34.7	Louisville. It's been beautiful weather all the time we've been here.
0:39.1	And this conference is a little unusual. It's not kind of broadly open to the public conference.
0:44.3	It's a conference that brings together biologists and engineers and looks at living systems.
0:50.8	And I've got one of our participants here today who gave an excellent lecture, Dustin Van Hofwigan.
0:57.2	Welcome, Dustin.
0:58.2	Yeah, that sounds great.
0:59.0	Thank you.
0:59.6	I'm glad to be here.
1:00.6	I've been enjoying the conference so far this weekend, and I thought it was a great concept,
1:05.1	seeing engineers and biologists in the same room, and I just thought I had to participate in that.
1:11.5	Yeah, the basic idea of the conference is there's all kinds of amazing engineering in living
1:16.8	systems, and so let's bring together engineers and biologists and see what kind of synergies
1:21.9	created.
1:22.8	Exactly, yeah, that was the draw for me as well, because when I look at microbial systems, I'm looking at what it is that they are doing to engineer responses to their environment.
1:33.8	And so I wanted to help develop that language with the engineers and try to figure out, can we come to a common language when we look at these biological systems, which appear to be engineering their responses?
1:47.2	One of the things driving the conference is this conviction that if you come to biology, you come to cells,
	...

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