Your Designed Body
Steve Laufmann and Howard GlicksmanConsider your body. Every day it must solve hundreds of hard engineering problems simultaneously, or else you’ll die. While you’re going about your daily business, your body stores, retrieves, translates, and manages software for thousands of proteins, switches, setpoints, thresholds, feedback loops, coordinate systems, counters, and timers. It disassembles thousands of different complex molecules, converts them into their building blocks, absorbs the building blocks, then reassembles them into the legions of chemicals and proteins that keep you going.
Your body also safely transports hazardous chemicals to where they’re needed, without spilling them in places where they’d do harm, and employs them as it orchestrates thousands of complex processes and movements, some nearly instantaneous. At the same time it defends itself against threats large and small, and reproduces its own parts to replace those that are wearing out. And this is only a tiny portion of what your body must do to remain alive — all without conscious input from you.
In Your Designed Body, systems engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman explore this extraordinary system of systems encompassing thousands of ingenious and interdependent engineering solutions. They present a compelling case that no gradual evolutionary pathway could have achieved this, and that instead it must be the handiwork of a masterful designer-engineer.
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Plaudits
Your Designed Body is the latest dramatic chapter in the ongoing story of scientific discovery inspired by the theory of intelligent design. The book is a masterful synthesis of modern medicine and engineering, revealing a human body brimming not only with biological information and ingenious molecular machines, but also with exquisitely engineered systems and subsystems that resemble but exceed the most advanced engineering techniques of our best engineers. Laufmann and Glicksman draw on the mainstream and increasingly fruitful discipline of systems biology, but they push the exploration into wondrous new territory. Those who cling to the old paradigm of Darwinian materialism risk missing out on a most fantastic voyage of discovery.
Stephen C. Meyer, PhD, philosopher of science and bestselling author of Darwin’s Doubt and Return of the God Hypothesis
The machinery, integration, and control in human physiology is truly astounding. Your Designed Body provides an excellent and systematic overview of the biological engineering and does so with great insight. The authors are particularly good at raising the relevant questions about how all of this engineering came to be. Evidence of design and intent are everywhere, and as soon as foresight or planning becomes involved in a process, any attempt at a naturalistic explanation is torpedoed. It is all good, but I particularly enjoyed the way the authors tackled claims about “botched design” as well as the implications of following the evidence to its obvious conclusion.
David Galloway, MD DSc FRCS FRCP FACS FACP; former President, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow; Honorary Professor of Surgery, College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow; author of Design Dissected
Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman have written a fascinating description of the basic truth about the human body — a truth that I have also seen in my own research on blood flow in the brain. The human body is an elegantly engineered system, complete with intracellular nanotechnology, organ-level interconnectivity, and whole-body integration of countless delicate and precise systems. The bookshelves in my office are full of engineering texts that are indispensable to understand how the body works, and most of the cutting-edge basic research in neuroscience of my medical colleagues and students depends critically on the implicit assumption that the human body is an engineered system. The modern science of human biology and physiology is reverse engineering, plain and simple. Your Designed Body tells the captivating story of how modern medical science reveals the engineering marvels inside our skin. It’s a magnificent and much-needed accomplishment — the indispensable book on the intelligent design of the human body.
Michael Egnor, MD, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook; former Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery; member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Hydrocephalus Association; named one of New York’s best doctors by New York Magazine
In Your Designed Body an accomplished pair of experts — a physician and a systems engineer — take us on a brilliant tour of the mind-boggling interactive complexity of the human body. They make a compelling case that only an intelligent agent could possibly have accommodated the millions of design constraints needed to produce a living, breathing, moving, thinking, and reproducing organism like us. Readers whose eyes have not been blinded by a materialistic worldview will see irrefutable evidence that our bodies are indeed designed.
William S. Harris, PhD, Professor of Internal Medicine, Sanford School of Medicine, University of South Dakota; Founder of OmegaQuant Analytics, LLC; President of the Fatty Acid Research Institute
A wonderful book! Over my 40+ years of teaching and discussing with engineering students and friends the implications of God’s design, I have had some of my best discussions with those in the medical profession. Doctors and engineers provide complementary perspectives. As engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman wonderfully tell, the human body provides an almost inexhaustible and continually unfolding array of complex and designer-orchestrated systems that continue to be tapped for inspiration by the astute and discerning engineer. Your Designed Body is a worthy and thorough addition to any person who seeks to discover, understand, and discuss the details of the human body’s marvelous design. Particularly helpful for knowledge and preparing to enter into discussion with the skeptic is the chapter on so-called “botched designs.” The book will no doubt inspire and inform numerous conversations, discoveries, and designs in the future.
Anthony Lyle Donaldson, PhD, founding dean and current Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Gordon and Jill Bourns College of Engineering at California Baptist University
Your Designed Body is an excellent overview of the evidence demonstrating how the human body is the result of engineering design. The authors accomplish this by combining the knowledge and experience of both an engineer and physician. In the book they define a theory of biological design, which is primarily based on the concept of organisms being the product of intentional engineering. The book includes a comprehensive description of attributes of the human body characteristic of engineering, including foresight, coherence, interdependence, fine tuning, modularity, and many others. Laufmann and Glicksman evaluate the possibility that these characteristics are the result of a random unguided process such as Darwinian materialistic evolution, and they show that to be extremely unlikely. They also effectively refute arguments that there are many poorly designed elements of the human body. The authors conclude that the source of the engineering is a designer-engineer who must be an intelligent agent.
Eric Cassell, systems engineer, longtime engineering consultant for NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), author of Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts
Your Designed Body is an excellent addition to the rapidly growing library of scientific discussions and books that show us how all aspects of the human being, from conception to death and from macroscopic to sub-microscopic, reflect incomprehensible forethought, irreducible complexity, and complex design. The authors show there is incomprehensible complexity upon complexity upon complexity within the human body. Everything is too coincidental to be a coincidence (per Yogi Berra). In a sense, Glicksman and Laufmann discard the “what came first, the chicken or the egg” conundrum. Instead, they make it clear that one needs both at the same time to make (any) life. Some examples are a man and a woman (the
Geoffrey Simmons, MD, former Governor of the American Academy of Disaster Medicine (AADM), author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links