A recent article at Evolution News featured three major advances for intelligent design: Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis, the “waiting times” paper in Journal of Theoretic Biology, and the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS)
Now, on that last point:
Conference on Engineering in Living System
A third highlight has been the impact of the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS). Biologists, engineers, and other academics convened to examine how employing engineering principles to the study of biology yields deeper insight into the organization and operations of living systems. Presenters addressed the revolution occurring in systems biology, which resulted from systems engineers partnering with biologists in their research. The engineers’ experience and insights have forced evolutionary assumptions to be supplanted by design-based assumptions, language, and methods (here, here, here).
Systems biologists increasingly recognize that they must incorporate the core intelligent design concepts into their analyses, albeit using different language, to advance their understanding of biological systems. Michael Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity is implicit in the tenet of holism. William Dembski’s formulation of specified complexity encompasses biologists’ understanding of functional modules. And more generally, the heuristic of intelligent design is simply a more general rubric for the application of engineering principles to the study of life.
Speakers described how engineering-based models better explain adaptation than natural selection (here,here, here, here). And they detailed how the predictions of these models are being confirmed by a torrent of recent research on adaptation in diverse species, including model organisms (here, here, here). In addition, presentations demonstrated the explanatory power of applying the design models to such topics as ecological interactions and molecular machines.
The ripple effects of the conference will continue for years to come. Participants with training in different engineering domains have partnered with biologists to apply their expertise to specific biological systems to further reveal their underlying design logic. We expect the projects to generate publications in leading journals over the next few years that should significantly advance biologists’ understanding of life. We will not immediately advertise the progress of the research teams to protect the careers of the investigators, but over the long term their work will showcase the necessity of design-based approaches.
Brian Miller, “The Year in Review:” at Evolution News and Science Today (December 28, 2021)
After a while, expecting randomness to develop exquisite machinery within a fixed time frame becomes ridiculous. The big question is, how much more might we learn if we assume it isn’t random?