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MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering

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Here’s how MIT describes its department of biological engineering. Does the research here fall more readily under ID or Darwinism?

Biological Engineering [BE] was founded in 1998 as a new MIT departmental academic unit, with the mission of defining and establishing a new discipline fusing molecular life sciences with engineering. The goal of our biological engineering discipline, Course 20, is to advance fundamental understanding of how biological systems operate and to develop effective biology-based technologies for applications across a wide spectrum of societal needs including breakthroughs in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, in design of novel materials, devices, and processes, and in enhancing environmental health. The innovative educational programs created by BE reflect this emphasis on integrating molecular and cellular biosciences with a quantitative, systems-oriented engineering analysis and synthesis approach, offering opportunities at the undergraduate level for the SB degree in Biological Engineering, and at the graduate level for the Ph.D. in Biological Engineering (with emphasis in either Applied Biosciences or Bioengineering).

SOURCE: MIT-Biological-Engineering

Comments
It most definitely falls under ID. An central theory in ID is design identification (i.e. Explanatory Filter). Furthermore, there are numerous designs which can be mathematically demonstrated to be poorly identified through the presumption of natural selection. The examples that comes to mind are those designs that are of the back-up system variety (in automobiles, spare tires are such designs). You can knock back-up designs out, and the organism is just as reproductively fit if not more so (because of metabolic reasons). Darwinism will fail to detect and identify such designs, but the explantory filter (which all engineers use implicity) will be far more effective at identifying such designs. Like what happened in the medical schools in the USA, I predict will happen here at MIT, the students will be a bit resentful if Darwinism is shoved down their throat since Darwinist dogma will be quite useless to systems analysis.scordova
July 3, 2007
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After browsing the course names, I'm not seeing a course on evolution. Look at the Biology department as well. When trying to make engineering solutions by looking to nature, we should notice that "make random changes and see what works" is never offered. Even though that scenario requires an intelligent agent to do the work of natural selection. But we don't even get that. Random mutation as an engineering solution is a non-starter. There is a reason for that.geoffrobinson
July 3, 2007
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I've seen posts like these before. I'm wondering if this means some see a new direction for ID - not only learning from natural designs (And assuming that nature, both as a whole and in part, is essentially a design), but also advancing their understand, admiration, and even further use? That's what I'm hopeful of, at least.nullasalus
July 3, 2007
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