Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm Shane Morris.

Darwinian materialists love insisting that living things are poorly designed.

Junk DNA, so-called vestigial parts like wisdom teeth, the tailbone, or the appendix,

and supposedly bad adaptations like the

panda's thumb, have all been touted as features no engineer would tolerate.

These we are told are evidence that life has no purpose or design.

It's just a happy accident with clear signs of evolution's many mistakes.

Yet time and again it turns out that these allegedly

useless features do have a purpose, even a critical one, and that the problem was

scientists' ignorance of that purpose, not the design of living things. So-called junk DNA,

maybe the most dramatic example. Mainstream scientific opinion once held that upwards of 90% of our DNA

was composed of useless bases, leftover rubbish from the evolutionary process that we no longer

need. Yet after a series of dramatic discoveries in the 2000s and 2010s, a total reversal took

place. And scientists now understand that junk DNA performs vital regulatory

functions in organisms, almost like the operating system in a computer. More and more,

it appears that life is well designed, perhaps even optimally designed. And this is strong support

for the idea that living things are the work of a designer.

But what is optimal design? And how can we tell? Writing at Evolution News, Emily Reeves summarized

a new paper by a Princeton physicist who argues that we can mathematically quantify optimal

design in living things. William Bileik looked at what he called optimization of information

flow in the development of organisms and used fruit flies, a common scientific test subject,

...