Engineering and Evolution 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

🗓️ 2 June 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This year's Conference On Engineering in Living Systems (CELS) happens this month and explores design principles at work in living things. To whet your appetite for the topic, we pulled this ID the Future from the archive. Host Jonathan Witt gives us a behind-the-scenes interview with Dustin Van Hofwegen, a biology professor at Azusa Pacific University in California. The occasion was a previous Conference on Engineering in Living Systems. The two discuss the private event, which brought together biologists and engineers to study how engineering principles and a design perspective can and are being applied to biology — to plants and animals but also to Van Hofwegen’s area of focus, the realm of microbial biology. The two quickly move into a conversation about Van Hofwegen’s article in the Journal of Bacteriology, co-authored with Carolyn Hovde and Scott Minnich, based on research they did at the University of Idaho. As Van Hofwegen explains, the research focused on one of the most ballyhooed evolutionary changes to come out of Richard Lenski’s long-term evolution experiment, a decades-long study of many thousands of generations of E. coli bacteria. Perhaps the biggest evolutionary development in the course of the experiment involved some bacteria beginning to feed in citric acid. Interesting, to be sure, but as Van Hofwegen explains, E. coli already has this capacity; it’s just a matter of switching it on. Van Hofwegen, Hovde, and Minnich demonstrated this through do-or-die experiments with E. coli, which led to the bacteria developing the capacity not in years or decades, as in the Lenski experiment, but in fourteen days, in as little as 100 generations. Van Hofwegen unpacks why this is an embarrassing result for Neo-Darwinism. The pair conclude with discussion of another study on antibiotic resistance with a similar result, that the resistance observed came not by evolving anything new but by tweaking something already present.

Source

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I d the future a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:10.0	Hi I'm Jonathan Witt I'm a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
0:17.0	I actually oversee Intelligence Design in the future, usually from behind the scenes scenes but today I'm here at a
0:24.7	conference in Texas I'm a Texan I live in Denton Texas and it just so happens
0:28.8	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 and that this
0:39.5	conference is a little unusual. It's not kind of broadly open to the public conference, it's a conference
0:44.9	that brings together biologists and engineers and looks at living systems.
0:51.0	And I've got one of our participants here today who gave an excellent lecture, Dustin Van Hoffwiggin.
0:57.0	Welcome to Dustin.
0:58.0	Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I've been enjoying the conference so far this weekend and I thought it was a great concept seeing engineers and biologists in the same room and I just thought I had to participate in that.
1:11.0	Yeah, the basic idea of the conference is there's all kinds of amazing engineering
1:16.4	in living systems and so let's bring together engineers and biologists and see what kind of synergy
1:21.9	is created.
1:23.0	Exactly, yeah, that was the draw for me as well, because when I look at microbial systems,
1:28.6	I'm looking at what it is that they are doing to engineer responses to their environment and so I wanted to help develop that
1:36.0	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?
1:47.0	You know, one of the things driving the conference is this conviction that if you come to biology, you come to cells, you come to
1:55.8	all the amazing things going on there with a design perspective, it's going to fuel
1:59.9	innovation in terms of understanding what's going on because you're going to be
2:04.7	you know hitting in there thinking okay there's a master engineer at work let me think in
2:08.9	terms of engineering let me think in terms of reverse engineering has that do you see that that paradigm as fruitful? Yes I do. A
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.