Ultimate Engineering

Who first invented fiber optic cables? Or camera shutters? Or truss structures? Or double wishbone suspensions? Or block-style Roman arches? What about laser beams? As award-winning British engineer and designer Stuart Burgess reveals, the original inventor of these and countless other ingenious devices was no human inventor. Instead, the “first to market” was the designing force behind the living world.

Evolutionary theory predicts a living world crowded with substandard designs. But as Burgess shows in Ultimate Engineering, the latest science has discovered just the opposite — designs so advanced they are at the limit of the possible, precisely as proponents of the theory of intelligent design anticipated. As Burgess also details, he and other researchers are taking the discovery of these advanced designs and using them to inspire fresh technological breakthroughs — a revolution known as biomimetics.

Praise

I am very pleased that Stuart Burgess has produced this excellent new book, Ultimate Engineering. From his extensive experience in various aspects of engineering design, including biomimetics, Dr. Burgess is well qualified to write about design in nature. As I have said before, the evidence for intelligent design invalidates any theory of evolution. Burgess’s many examples of “ultimate engineering” in these pages powerfully reinforce that conclusion.

From my lifetime of researching bacteriology, I know that complex structures in the plant and animal kingdom cannot be produced by thousands of minute evolutionary steps of ever increasing complexity over millions of years. Darwinism is a man-made theory to explain the origin and continuance of life on this planet without reference to a designer. But why rule out intelligent design? As I have also said before, any properly complete theory of man’s origins must embrace the whole man, including feelings, emotions, pleasure, beauty, morals, motives, final causes, and purpose.

It is my hope that this book will lead its readers to see that there is evidence in nature not just of intelligent design, but of a great and deeply purposive intelligent design, especially in the design of humankind.

Alan Linton, PhD, DSc, Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology, formerly Head of the Department of Microbiology, Bristol University, UK, Honorary Associate of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists

It is a privilege to commend this superb book. Any rational response to Stuart Burgess’s case for intelligent design, laid out in these pages, should include wonder and an acknowledgment that there is an awesome designer responsible for our universe. My professor of physiology at medical school in 1966, in his first lecture, told us that we should never describe what some part or process in the human body was for because that implied there was a designer. That same battle of worldviews exists today.

In the first fifteen chapters, Burgess shows that “biological systems are engineering systems.” The final seven chapters draw attention to the realities that stack up against evolutionary theory. Burgess shows that Darwinian natural selection and mutations cannot produce the wonders seen in the human body. The arguments and confessions of evolutionists are also well documented. One senior professor, a non-religious microbiologist, suggested that evolutionary theory was “black magic.” Another such professor, a leading biology researcher at a top university, said in an equally frank moment, “You wave a magic wand and say, ‘Evolution did it.’”

Throughout the book, Burgess answers all the claims for bad design one by one. Time spent reading Ultimate Engineering could lead to a new appreciation of where you came from, why you are here, and where you are going.

Nigel Jones, MS, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England

Ultimate Engineering sets out a fascinating array of brilliantly engineered features in the human body at the visible anatomical level. Along the way, the book faces head on the claim that the body bears the hallmarks of poor design, the result of unguided evolution by natural selection. The supposed “backward wiring” of the human eye, far from being a design weakness, as evolutionists claim, is actually a design strength. The purportedly unnecessary bones of the foot-ankle complex instead contain “an ingenious triple-arched structure that has astounded engineers.” The knee joint, ostensibly the substandard result of evolutionary tinkering, is actually a textbook example of a “four-bar linkage mechanism.” These are just a few of the examples included in this masterclass on the extraordinary engineering feats in the human body, designs that have professional design engineers in awe. Professor Stuart Burgess, an award-winning design engineer with an outstanding academic and professional reputation, explores all this with great clarity and with the authority of a world-class biomimetics inventor and researcher. All students and teachers of STEM subjects interested in origins and biomimetics should read this book.

Stephen Palmer, MA, FFPH, formerly Mansel Talbot Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, Cardiff University, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London

This book has assembled a plethora of evidence for design in human biology, and has done so in a most persuasive way. The approach is unmistakably that of a mechanical engineer, and the way Stuart Burgess has exposed those with the audacity to make unsubstantiated claims of “bad design” carries genuine academic credibility. The author’s personal experience of faltering opposition to a design model is interesting and surely bears out the claim that a tipping point in scientific thinking is fast approaching.

David Galloway, MD, former President, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, author of Design Dissected

Who else better to write this important book than Professor Stuart Burgess, the globally renowned engineering designer. His book is packed with extraordinary examples and insights. I thoroughly recommend it.

Colin Garner, FREng, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Applied Thermodynamics

In Ultimate Engineering, leading UK engineer Stuart Burgess culminates a career of rigorous analysis of life’s amazing and coherent engineered systems. His easily accessible writing wraps a brilliant and astute core insight that is not to be missed—which he neatly sums up in Figure 19.5. Don’t hesitate to give this diagram a sneak peek as you begin your journey through this wonderful book.

Steve Laufmann, systems engineer, chair of the program committee for the 2023 Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, and co-author of Your Designed Body

Most great men I have met are humble but brave. Professor Stuart Burgess is one of them. Ultimate Engineering is a proper name for this great book, in which Stuart shows that the engineering of structures and processes in the human body is superior to any achievements of human engineering. Intelligent design is an obvious explanation for all those who are not blinded by the evolution paradigm, which has its roots in Hegelian process philosophy. Engineering researchers stand firmly with both feet in reality. They rely on observations and logic, and quickly understand the limits of evolutionary processes.

Matti Leisola, DSc, bioengineer, former Dean of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology, winner of the Latsis Prize-ETH Zürich, and co-author of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design

What happens when an engineer—one who has spent a lifetime designing elegant complex systems—takes on evolutionary biologists who deny that living systems were designed? The answer is this brilliant book. Stuart Burgess knows design when he sees it, because he has decades of experience designing things. His engineering credentials are impeccable, and they allow him to enthrall us with insight after insight into why life works the way it does. Spoiler alert: It’s not because life was cobbled together through blind evolution. It’s because the human body — literally from head to toe — was designed by a masterful designer.

Casey Luskin, PhD, co-author of Science and Human Origins, Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision, and Discovering Intelligent Design

If you feel the discussion of origins has become bogged down in the conceptual mire, Ultimate Engineering, by Stuart Burgess, is the book for you. By bringing his internationally recognized expertise in design and engineering to assess human skeletal anatomy and broader physiological processes, Professor Burgess demonstrates that the shallow, Darwinian logic that humans are either poorly designed or only just good enough to survive just doesn’t fit the evidence. By presenting compelling examples of “over-engineering” in the structure and function of the human body, Burgess reveals that these are expected outcomes from a process of intelligent design — the masterpiece of God’s creational prowess. The additional accounts of his own experiences advocating for intelligent design in the UK academic setting are illuminating, adding a personal touch that will surprise many.

Tim Wells, BSc, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Neuroendocrinology, School of Biosciences, Cardiff University

Stuart Burgess has written what will likely become a defining book in the ongoing debate over whether life is the result of purposeful design or an unintended accident. Drawing on numerous examples, he demonstrates that living systems consistently exhibit engineering solutions that appear to represent the best designs physically possible. He further argues, based on the testimony of evolutionists themselves, that undirected processes must produce results far less efficient and elegant than those of human engineers, the opposite of what is observed. Burgess reports several cases where the denial of design has led biologists to conclude that a trait, such as the human ACL or foot-ankle complex, is flawed or even non-functional. Yet his own research has repeatedly shown the opposite. Moreover, Burgess credits his enormous success in his career to recognizing that life is designed and learning from its ingenious strategies. The book also offers an eye-opening personal narrative. Burgess recounts conversations with biologists and engineers who privately admit that the evolutionary framework does not fit the evidence they observe. Yet they feel the need to remain silent out of fear of the professional consequences of challenging the status quo. In summary, the book argues powerfully that a design-based perspective can free biological science from materialist restraints and accelerate scientific discovery.

Brian Miller, PhD, complex systems physicist, Research Coordinator for Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and organizer of the biannual Conference on Engineering in Living Systems

If we really want to think outside the dark box of evolutionary theory, then Stuart Burgess’s concept of ultimate engineering will definitely give you a light and a path in your quest for discovery. I can’t emphasize enough how this book has deepened my thinking and raised arguments against the established views of evolutionists. I would strongly recommend Ultimate Engineering for anyone with rational thinking to read and enlighten themselves.

Muhammad Saleem, MBBS, MRCS, trauma surgeon, United Lincolnshire Teaching Hospitals, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England

Finally! An easily accessible and superbly written book, from a seasoned professional with stellar credentials, that skewers the (supposedly)“bad design” arguments of those quack engineers aka evolutionary biologists. Learn incredible things about how your body actually works that only a design engineer in biomimetics can teach you. Enjoy the ride and pass it on!

Howard Glicksman, MD, co-author of Your Designed Body

In his book Ultimate Engineering, Stuart Burgess takes intelligent design arguments to a new level. Based on forty years of experience in construction engineering and biomimetics, and with more than two hundred scientific publications, Burgess does a lot more than argue that nature exhibits purposeful design. He also demonstrates very convincingly, with multiple examples, that this design reveals ultimate engineering and diversity. This finding strongly points towards a highly intelligent and creative Designer, and it is the opposite of what the evolutionary paradigm predicts. I would say that after reading this book with an open mind, it will be very difficult to be both a fully informed and an intellectually fulfilled Darwinist. I very much hope that Ultimate Engineering is widely read, and that many people who read the book want to get to know the Designer of nature.

Ola Hössjer, Professor of Mathematical Statistics, Stockholm University, probability theorist with applications in population genetics, epidemiology, fine-tuning in biology, and the limits of evolutionary theory; winner of the Gustafsson Prize in Mathematics