Regarding Genius

Bioengineers on the Ultimate Engineer

A favorite talking point of intelligent design critics is that the theory of intelligent design (ID) is a science-stopper: You encounter something mysterious in nature; you shrug and attribute it to God. End of story, end of research, end of science. I have covered the various problems with this shopworn talking point more than once in this space. Here I want to present the latest body of evidence against it: the 2026 book Ultimate Engineering: An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body, by ID proponent Stuart Burgess, an award-winning British inventor, bioengineer, and professor of engineering design. The book has already garnered more than a dozen endorsements, some from distinguished life scientists.

Predicting Poor Design: A Poor Prediction

Burgess has held two research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, and his design credits range from a bicycle gear system for three gold-medal-winning Olympic track-cycling teams to a patented invention indispensable to the success of the European Space Agency’s largest satellite. He begins his book by noting that Darwinism predicts a living world crowded with substandard designs. He then asks, Is that what we find in nature?

His unequivocal answer: not even close. In making the argument, he gives a variety of examples from different creatures but focuses most of the book on various parts and processes in the human body. In chapter after chapter he presents examples of how the latest science reveals that our bodies contain biological designs so advanced they are at the limit of the possible. He discusses the foot and ankle; the wrist; the fingers; the spine; and many other elements of the human body.

He also deals realistically with the fact of aging and disease, including genetic disorders, but he notes that such issues often involve degradation over time, whether in the individual organism as it grows old or in a species as its DNA is passed on across numerous generations. As he points out, all engineered systems in the natural world experience wear and tear over time, and none are wholly free of glitches, no matter how brilliantly designed.

What is remarkable is (a) how resistant our genetics have been to degradation over so many generations, thanks to exquisite error-correction systems at the cellular level, and (b) how much mileage and stress biological structures such as our joints can take when used prudently—far more than any human-­designed replacement. No, our bodies are not immune to injury, especially not when forced into activities they weren’t designed for (picture two football players colliding at a combined approach speed of 30+ mph). But again, no engineered system is, no matter how marvelous.

One topic Burgess covers might be familiar to you, since it made an appearance in the Fall 2023 issue of Salvo. There I described Burgess’s important insight into the recurring pentadactyl (five-digit) limb pattern among animals, which led to a peer-­reviewed scientific paper. Darwinists have long argued that the repeated pattern indicates common evolutionary descent reproducing a suboptimal pattern. But Burgess showed that the pentadactyl design represents a masterful engineering trade-off between strength and flexibility/dexterity, precisely what one could expect of a smart designer reusing an optimal design pattern.

Scientific Fruitfulness

Burgess also turns the tables on the Darwinists by showing how the design framework is proving scientifically fruitful while the modern evolutionary framework is in many cases proving to be the science stopper.

His own career illustrates the point. He has published some two hundred peer-reviewed papers, many of them highlighting insights from masterful biological designs for application to engineering and bioengineering. He has received many design awards for his work, including the top mechanical engineering award in the UK. As he argues in the book, his success has come not despite his ID perspective but because of it. “My intelligent design framework was crucial to my success,” he writes. “If I had followed the evolutionary paradigm, I doubt I would have won any of those prizes, because it would have stifled my research.”

He then gives multiple examples. His intelligent design perspective, for instance, convinced him that the human foot was likely a highly sophisticated arched design superior to the best prosthetics. He researched the possibility and was proven correct.

“I went on to develop an advanced bioinspired arched robotic foot,” he writes. “Had I believed [Darwinists] Nathan Lents and Jeremy DeSilva that the human foot is a poor design, I would have been put off even investigating the human foot and lost that research opportunity.”

His ID perspective led him to suspect that the human knee featured an advanced linkage design. This also proved correct. “I went on to spend twenty-five years researching advanced bioinspired knees for robotics, overseeing PhD students in the work and funded by various grants,” he says. “If I had believed Lents that the knee is a bad design, I might never have bothered to investigate the knee joint and would have missed this great research opportunity.”

Burgess’s design perspective also led him to broader insights into biological design. “My design perspective led me to realize that multifunctioning in biological systems, such as the human throat, far from being ill-considered, allows for more compact designs that afford numerous benefits,” he notes. “This inspired me to write a review paper showing how engineers would do well to copy the multifunctioning strategy found throughout biology. If I had listened to Abby Hafer [another Darwinist], who insisted that the human throat is a bad design, I might have missed this important research opportunity.”

His intelligent design framework also paid dividends in the field of drone technology. “My work on dragonfly flight is yet another area where my intelligent design perspective stood me in good stead,” he says. “According to evolutionary theory, dragonflies are relatively primitive creatures, having arrived so early on the scene. However, I studied them expecting to find sophisticated design, and my research benefited from that expectation. My work on dragonflies led to the development of a unique design of a microdrone that was reported in New Scientist, the popular international science magazine.”

Biomimetics

Burgess makes a compelling case that to ignore the reality of optimal design in nature, and to stubbornly attribute designs in biology to a series of mindless evolutionary accidents, is what has impeded the science of biology and bioengineering.

He is part of a burgeoning field wherein researchers take their knowledge of the many advanced engineering designs in biology and use them to make fresh technological breakthroughs—a field known as biomimetics. True, many of them pay lip service to Darwinism and may truly believe in the theory, but when doing successful biomimetics work, they necessarily adopt as a working method of inquiry the idea that the biological systems under investigation are optimal or near-optimal engineering systems, which they then set out to reverse engineer.

Separating Fact from Fiction

Burgess acknowledges that the Darwinian mechanism has a real if limited applicability for certain cases of microevolution. (Polar bears descending from brown bears is a case of microevolution.) And, of course, the framework has proven fruitful in generating imaginative stories of how various animals and biological features supposedly arose during evolutionary history, stories that form the basis for a seemingly never-ending stream of published scientific articles. But as Burgess documents, even some evolutionists have conceded that these stories often are little better than those of Rudyard Kipling’s beloved but plainly fictional Just So Stories for children (e.g., “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” “How the Camel Got His Hump”).

There are so many scientific papers that give lip service to evolution that it can be difficult to separate the substantive scientific fruit that Darwinism really does yield from what it’s wrongly credited with producing. How fruitful is the Darwinian paradigm, really? Philip Skell, a member of the United States’s most prestigious science organization, the National Academy of Sciences, investigated that question and published the results in The Scientist. His findings are worth quoting at length:

My own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin’s theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

In the peer-reviewed literature, the word “evolution” often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for “evolution” some other word—“Buddhism,” “Aztec cosmology,” or even “creationism.” I found that the substitution never touched the paper’s core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had become clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.¹

Ultimate Engineering quotes Skell on this point, but Burgess spends more of his energies on the positive case for intelligent design. The birth of science itself, he notes, depended on the fathers of the scientific revolution seeing nature as the rational work of a rational Creator, as a created order with underlying laws that they had some hope of discovering. He then elaborates on the present context:

The intelligent design perspective, while distinct from theism, is both encouraged by, and encourages, an openness to theism. And this is good for science, because a theistic perspective—particularly Judeo-Christian theism—anticipates and expects advanced and sophisticated design in nature. This expectation encourages one to search out the purpose of various mysterious biological features rather than throwing up one’s hands and assuming bad design.

Not Alone

While the focus of this article has been on Burgess’s new book and his groundbreaking work, he has company. Brian Miller, research coordinator and senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, reported in late December on just a few of the exciting scientific breakthroughs guided by what he terms a “comprehensive and actionable theory of biological design.”

One such breakthrough undercuts what has long been regarded as an unassailable stronghold of neo-Darwinian theory, microevolution by random mutation. Many of the small-scale changes observed in biology, it turns out, “are better explained within an engineering framework than by the standard evolutionary model,” Miller writes, adding that ID researchers “have identified multiple systems that enable organisms to monitor environmental conditions and respond through targeted adjustments.”

He continues:

These systems employ features typically associated with engineering, including sensors, control logic, and pre-programmed responses. Even genetic variation appears to exhibit planning and foresight. Mutations are not entirely random; they are often biased toward changes more likely to yield beneficial outcomes. Moreover, the genome’s informational architecture supports the segregation and rapid dissemination of advantageous genetic profiles within populations. Taken together, these findings suggest that anatomy, physio­logy, genome architecture, and genetic variation have been engineered to enable adaptation that is much faster and more effective than would be possible through undirected processes.²

Such research isn’t restricted to out-and-out ID researchers, Miller is careful to acknowledge, but he says that the work of the ID researchers “is producing deeper insights because [they] are not constrained by assumptions that preclude design-based explanations and because they bring a fuller range of engineering tools and concepts to their analyses. This research is expected to yield multiple publications over the next two years.”

Miller’s article goes on to list other specific breakthroughs by ID scientists. There isn’t space here to even summarize it all. I encourage Operation ID regulars to read the whole thing, to pick up a copy of Burgess’s Ultimate Engineering, and to stay abreast of the fast-moving developments in the field of intelligent design.

Notes
1. Philip Skell, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?,” The Scientist (Aug. 28, 2005).
2. Brian Miller, “Year in Review: Demonstrating the Power of the Intelligent Design Framework in Biology,” Science & Culture Today (Dec. 22, 2025).