Scientist Roundtable: Examples of Intelligent Design in the Human Body

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

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

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's easy to be blown away by the examples of engineering prowess in the human body. But it can be challenging to turn that evidence into a robust argument for intelligent design you can share with skeptical friends and colleagues. To help you learn to do that, host Andrew McDiarmid begins a roundtable discussion with not one, not two, not three, but four guests to the podcast, all part of our team of resident scientists at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture: geologist and lawyer Casey Luskin, biochemist and metabolic nutritionist Emily Reeves, biologist Jonathan McLatchie, and physicist Brian Miller. The first half of the discussion kicks off with a review of the basics of design detection, including various methods for empirically detecting the hallmarks of design in nature. After that, these four experts take turns diving into examples of extraordinary design in the human body. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	But if you look at human anatomy, what happens is the limb structure looks like it's the best design possible.
0:07.7	And because it's highly optimized, that means it's fantastically improbable
0:13.2	because if you imagine every combination of nerves and muscles and tissues, that's a phenomenally
0:19.7	large number of possibilities.
0:22.2	ID, The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:28.9	Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott.
0:32.6	Today, I get to welcome not one, not two, not three, but actually four guests to the podcast, all part
0:39.1	of our team of resident scientists at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
0:44.7	Today we have geologist and lawyer Casey Luskin, biochemist and metabolic nutritionist Emily
0:50.1	Reeves, biologist Jonathan McClatchie, and physicist Brian Miller. Our topics? Well, we're
0:56.6	going to review the basics of design detection, always handy if you're new to this, or if you
1:01.8	just need a refresher. We'll also dive into examples of extraordinary design in the human
1:06.7	body, and we'll look at how design theorists respond to claims of flawed or suboptimal design in
1:13.6	nature. If you're not quite sure yet how to present the evidence for intelligent design to your
1:19.3	friends, associates at work, your family members, today's episode could be a great help to you.
1:25.7	Well, Casey, Emily, Jonathan, Brian, welcome.
1:29.1	Great to be here.
1:29.6	Thank you.
1:30.4	Thank you.
1:32.0	Well, so this ought to be fun because I believe this might be the first time we've had
1:36.2	this many of our resident scientists together in one podcast.
1:40.6	So this is going to be a great conversation.
	...

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