The Innovative Cellular Engineering That Keeps Us Alive

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

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

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

When left to their own devices, the laws of nature tend toward death, not life. So what does it take for life to exist? On this ID The Future, host Eric Anderson talks with physician Howard Glicksman about some of the remarkable engineering challenges that have to be solved to produce and maintain living organisms such as ourselves. Glicksman is co-author with systems engineer Steve Laufmann of the recent book Your Designed Body, an exploration of the extraordinary system of systems that encompasses thousands of ingenious and interdependent engineering solutions to keep us alive and ticking. In the "just so" stories of the Darwinian narrative, these engineering solutions simply evolved. They emerged and got conserved. Voila! But in this chat, Anderson and Glicksman explain that it takes more than the laws of nature to keep us from dying. "Chemicals on their own don't have any desire or tendency to turn into living organisms," says Anderson. "They tend to degrade, they tend to break down, they tend to go back to their basic constituents." Glicksman and Anderson discuss examples, including how the human body handles friction, heat transfer, and the crucial task of maintaining chemical balance at the cellular level. And where does all this essential innovation come from? Glicksman points to an intelligent cause that transcends matter and energy.

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0:00.0	I D the future a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:12.4	What does it take for life to exist? To hear some tell the story, once a place in the
0:16.9	universe has the right conditions, the right physics and chemistry, life can readily
0:21.2	arise, and those same favorable conditions of physics and chemistry
0:25.2	will then more or less inevitably lead to a great diversity
0:28.2	at a variety of living organisms.
0:30.2	Indeed, in our earthly environment, life is so ubiquitous ubiquitous we can easily take it for granted and we might even be tempted to think it's easy to generate and maintain life.
0:38.0	But what's really required for life to exist beyond the physics and the chemistry.
0:43.0	Hello, I'm Eric Anderson, and joining us on the show today is Dr. Howard Glixman to discuss
0:47.7	what's actually required for life and some of the remarkable engineering challenges that have
0:52.3	to be solved in order to maintain a living
0:54.0	organisms such as ourselves.
0:55.7	Dr. Glixman practices palliative medicine and has been a long time contributed to the debate
1:00.3	over evolution and intelligent design. He's also co-author of the wonderful recent book,
1:05.0	Your Design Body. In addition to being just an all-around great guy, I should add. So, welcome, Howard.
1:10.0	Thanks, Eric, it's great to be here with you today.
1:13.8	So Howard, we often talk about the fine-tuning of the Cosmos to enable life as evidence for
1:18.7	design.
1:19.7	We talk about the fine-tuning of our local environment, having a habitable planet in the habitable zone, and the myriad
1:25.1	other conditions required to have a life for me in the environment.
1:28.8	And so some people even design proponents might be tempted to think that once you've got all these carefully
1:33.8	coordinated conditions in place then the hard part done that life can inevitably
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