Brian Miller Answers Questions about the Relevance of Engineering to Biology

What you find is, you hear this language all the time: 'Does the adaptation in bacteria or fishes result from the environment?' You see that works. The environment is the star of the show. The environment informs the truth. The opposite is what happens. The more you look at bacteria or yeast or whatever, what you find is pre-programmed responses. For instance, what you'll find is when certain microorganisms create variation that's actually useful. So what you see more and more is these adaptive mechanisms are not just random mutations, but they're pre-programmed responses. In fact, Robert James Shapiro talks a lot about this. He has a paper called 'Bacteria Are Not Stupid.' He talks about how so much of what happened in bacteria is engineered for that to happen. Are there random mutations that could help? Yeah, sure, that's possible, but that's not the star of the show. So much of the adaptation is because of the engineering inside of these organisms.

What you find is, again, you have group activities in bacteria such that you're not just dealing with one organism working independently, but they almost work as a macro organism. They're engineered to cooperate with each other for sometimes the benefit of the ecosystem. So what you find is a lot of this group activity in bacteria and other organisms is an engineered principle. Also, you look at how different species interact with each other. You'll have roots that send out signals to attract other organisms to work in a cooperative fashion. So so much of what we're seeing, not just at the individual level but with populations and with even ecosystems, represents engineering principles.

It's much, much harder to fully get your mind around these systems, to identify all the pieces, but we have people that are looking at it from a systems level. So what you see is not just irreducible complexity at the level of, let's say, a bacterial flagellum, but you have irreducibly complex systems working together, where each system is a compilation of irreducibly complex systems, which each subsystem is irreducibly complex with multiple components. So we are looking at how engineering principles operate at these higher levels, but it's just more challenging because there are so many more variables. Yet that being said, it looks like life was deliberately designed such that our engineering principles operate at every level, from the interactions of individual proteins to the whole ecosystem. So we're looking at every level.

Well, so the question is, isn't it possible that the similarities are because humans copied from nature? And yeah, there's probably a little bit of that. I'm sure the early developers of flight were looking at bird wings. But a lot of this was discovered independently. Like people that work on control systems, for instance, didn't know that life contains control systems. In fact, a lot of our understanding of this complexity is only in the last several decades, where the research tools allowed us to see the overlap. So what's happening now is engineers are learning from biology to do engineering better. That's what we're seeing.

Great question. In fact, I didn't have a chance to show a quote by, I think it was Pearson, I think it might have been a 2013 paper, but what he talks about is how people who study variation and adaptation in cichlids are realizing that most of the variation is not from genetic variation but pre-programmed phenotypic plasticity. And some of the genetic variation is not random but from natural genetic engineering. If I recall correctly, the genetic diversity is not purely random but more from what it looks like natural genetic engineering. This is cutting edge. We're talking the last few years, so we're right at the edge of this transformation. So I think that's going to become even more clear as time goes on.

Great question. So what happens is, if you look at, let's say, the fossil record and you see the sudden appearance of new organisms or radical transformations, what's the mechanism? Well, the thing about design: if it's designed, we won't necessarily know exactly how it happened. Let me use an analogy. Imagine people find a spaceship that crashes. They may never know how they created that spaceship. That won't happen, right? We may never know how they created it, but we do see evidence of design that helps us to understand it. In the same way, if life was created by a mind, a God, a creator beyond our imagination, exactly what that looked like we may not ever really know. But that's okay, because when you know it's designed, that leads to very fruitful research questions that lead in the right direction.

Biology is advancing because engineers are working with biology. This is not theoretical. What's happened is the more engineers come in, they know to look at how engineers will optimize around multiple variables, so they're able to understand why it was designed the way it was designed. They're able to understand, 'Oh, this is a control feedback loop. We expect to see A, B, and C.' So they may find B and C, so they then look for A and they find it, because the engineering insights help them to know what to look for and to understand its meaning.

What you find is you'll see radical new organisms appear suddenly in mass. Not just one type of mammal, but in the same fossil level, what you find is multiple orders of mammals that appear very suddenly with no precursors. And that's the typical pattern. So again, people will say, 'Well, isn't that uncomfortable? Why would God need to fiddle with his design?' Well, people say, 'Couldn't God have designed the universe in such a way that life just appeared and evolved without intervention?' He could have, but we couldn't do science if he did. Because if you create laws of physics to generate cells and to evolve things, those laws would be so complicated, so numerous, so convoluted that you could not do science. It's like trying to work with a musician who blows wind into the flute to produce music. Our universe is designed to sustain life, but it's designed in such a way that the creator intervenes in life. He works in life to produce new organisms. That's just how it's designed.

Well, again, what you're dealing with is evolution is an optimization problem. It's a logic, right? And the problem is optimization processes will only optimize what is already there. If you try to turn a car into a helicopter through a gradual process, you can make little tweaks, but as soon as you change the basic architecture of the car, it stops functioning long before it becomes a helicopter. So the idea of survival, natural selection, so forth, makes a little bit of sense when you talk about optimization. It makes no sense when you talk about creating some new engineering model that's irreducibly complex based on a completely separate design logic. Engineers know this. In fact, engineers can predict where there'll be gaps in the fossil record, because an engineer can look at the design logic of an organism, they can anticipate what is fixed and where are the flexible parameters. So then if you look in the fossil record, you know where to look. Natural selection and random mutation do not create new structures. They optimize. They do not create anything novel. And a lot of that optimization is not random, it's pre-programmed.

Yeah, yeah, that's always the case, because you can follow the chain of causes backwards. Like, why did my car crash? Because I was driving it poorly. Well, why did that happen? Well, maybe it was because of the engineering. If you go all the way back, at some point you have to ask, well, where'd the universe come from? So if you go far enough back, you always get to a prime cause. And you cannot understand the organization of a car based on the physics and chemistry of aluminum and metal and steel and rubber. You see a mind that shaped matter according to a blueprint. So what you see in life is a mind who creates blueprints and then shapes matter according to those blueprints in ways that transcend the physics and chemistry of the materials. So there's both design in the laws of nature and there's design in creation, with a creator that imposed design logic on matter that we see. They're both types of design which are important.

So I haven't thought deeply about how angels may have assisted with the evolutionary process. I don't go there, I'm sorry. But from an engineering perspective, I'll just say this: when you look at nature, the origin of life, everything about the origin of the cell violates every known law of chemistry and physics. The only way a cell can exist is for an engineering mind to put the matter together for that purpose. You look at nature, you see in the fossil record new things appear suddenly. From a scientific perspective, I see design, and that conclusion leads to research programs that advance science. You can postulate if that design was from angels or from whatever, but those are questions I can't answer.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. If you look at Genesis, and again I'm not a theologian or a Bible scholar, but this is so blatantly obvious I'll say anyway. The commission is for people to advance in the world. The language is 'subdue nature.' It's not subdued in a violent, exploitive way, but more to understand it. And again, as Steve Meyer talked about, modern science was largely born from a Christian narrative, because the Christian framework gives you the philosophical and theological framework to do science, which we're called to do. But here's the key, here's the difference. When you look at this idea of knowledge, knowledge is a tool that can be used for good and evil. Knowledge without wisdom leads to exploitation, it leads to environmental destruction, it leads to the destruction of species. Knowledge with wisdom leads to human flourishing, it leads to an interaction of the humans with the environment that protects the environment while still using it to help people. So again, that's the idea of biblical wisdom, which is knowledge applied in a way that helps people and not in a way that's arrogant and self-serving that hurts people.