Bee design 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Bee algorithm 3

(cont'd from last Friday's post) 

If you are open to the idea that God exists, the obvious appearance of design in the natural world -- in honeybee hives and the intricate dance directing other bees to flowers -- makes sense. If you start with a commitment to believing God does not exist, you have to think up something to explain away the design of the natural world. 

Even the famous crusader for atheism, Richard Dawkins, concedes that living animals appear to have been designed and wisely assembled, though He definitely would not agree that the Creator placed an algorithm in the bee's brain to direct its behavior.

Committed atheistic scientists have to mentally fight the ubiquitous appearance of design in living systems. Francis Crick advises them: "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." 

If they don't fight hard against their own common sense, they'll conclude that a Creator designed it.

image

Bee design 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Bee algorithm 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Boston Research Journal was quoted in yesterday's post saying, "The use of hexagonal honeycombs by bees is not a coincidence." They think they know where this "ingenious" design came from. Not from intelligence or a plan, of course; not from an algorithm in their design; but from natural selection working on random genetic variations (evolution):

"Hexagonal honeycombs built by bees showcase nature’s ingenuity and efficiency. Through their meticulous construction, bees optimize space, create sturdy structures, conserve resources, and regulate temperature within the hive. The hexagonal shape has evolved as a result of millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning, allowing bees to build remarkable architectural marvels that support their survival and collective success."

Isn't a bit of a stretch to assume that evolution made it all happen: optimizing space, regulating temperature, meticulous construction, etc., without any direction or intelligence?

image

These publishers along with most of the scientific world assume that bee behavior--like the "waggle dance" to communicate location of flowers and the building of the ingenious hive--came about solely by chance through evolution, no plan or design or intelligence necessary. 

Like office buildings . . which pop up randomly all the time??!

No, you have to abandon common sense to believe that.

(cont'd next week)

Bee design 1

Nature and the human body, as per yesterday's post, show signs of intelligent engineering design. Consider the honeybee, for example. 

For our many new readers who haven't seen this before, enjoy some re-posts from three years ago.

Bee algorithm 1

You could describe an office building as a complex, functional system designed to enable people to carry out their jobs and accomplish their company's purpose. Well-educated people designed and constructed all the sub-systems (like electrical) that make it work.

You could also say that a honeybee hive is a complex, functional system designed to enable bees to carry out their jobs in this home which provides for their needs while they accomplish the mission to produce honey.

photo

Intelligent, these bees. They start working at their jobs when they're three weeks old. The ones who build the hive don't go to hive-building college, since they're born knowing exactly what to do. How, exactly, do they know that?

Glands in their bodies create construction material: "Wax is an expensive commodity and so comb construction can be quite costly for a honeybee colony. Honeycomb is constructed in such a way to minimize wax consumption." Like a responsible human engineering firm.

Its hexagonal pattern gives optimal strength and stability to its material (wax), while it optimizes space and thermal efficiency for its purpose. "The use of hexagonal honeycombs by bees is not a coincidence" (Boston Research Journal published this week).

from Evolution News

(cont'd tomorrow)

Human body 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

One thing that could go wrong in our bodies would be a failure of sufficient oxygen to get to our living cells. Every one of them (30 trillion cells) needs a supply of oxygen every minute. Our bodies store water and fat, but not oxygen. 

Muscles pull oxygen (O2) from outside the body into the lungs. Molecules of O2 diffuse into blood vessels at a limited speed. 

To maximize how much O2 can get through blood vessel membranes and into the blood, each lung's little air sacs are surrounded with tiny blood vessels. There are so many that the total membrane area of all the blood vessels together amounts to the size of a tennis court. The video pictures it for you.

Engineering--not magic--gets the job done.

We'll come back to these videos of the body's engineering design in a future week. Tomorrow . . design in the honeybee.

Human body

How many kinds of diseases are there? Nobody knows the answer because the number changes. Infectious diseases are caused by pathogens (bacteria, parasites, etc.), genetic diseases are caused by DNA abnormalities; there are degenerative and autoimmune diseases, and the list goes on. Over 7,000 identified diseases are rare, with research discovering more. 

Thousands and thousands of things can go wrong with the human body. It follows that thousands and thousands of things are functioning well in your body if you are not sick. 

Your body is fabulously fine-tuned. It's amazing to non-scientists like me, when I occasionally learn about some complex system. But what about engineers who understand and actually build complex systems? Their opinion would be valuable.

A computer engineer (a problem solver with expertise in changing complex systems to perform new tasks) got together with a medical doctor (who has primary care, hospital, and hospice experience). They both see evidence of a Designer in how our amazing bodies function. We'll take a look at their videos this week.

Yes, they recognize that their thinking is outside the box. Conventional thinking in our culture (and in the field of science) assumes that nothing exists beyond the material world (materialism). They disagree. They are unconventional.

(cont'd tomorrow)

This weekend?

Have some free time this weekend? There's a movie I can recommend to you, The Story of Everything, a beautifully made film that explores a universal question: did a supernatural Intelligence make the world, or was it all a big accident? Is there any evidence in nature that there's a design, a mind behind it all?

It's based on the book, Return of the God Hypothesis. Author Stephen Meyer started asking if anything in his life really mattered--as a 14-year-old. Yes, teenagers do wonder about life's meaning. 

Even if science is not your thing, it's not just about you anymore. People in your life, like your kids and grandkids, are deeply affected by the public opinions of scientists. Maybe they'd like to see some information and a view of the world which they never learned in public school.

Wonder 3

 Even common water is a wonder, when you know more about it.

Water 1

Water is known to be an essential element of the planetary environment which can sustain life. One of the most common substances on earth, it's simple: two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. 

But its properties are rare:

• it's an almost universal solvent
• it holds a lot of heat
• ice floats!

from Salvo

Wonder 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Web 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Different species of spiders make webs of special kinds: collars, trapdoors, tunnels, as well as the familiar net design. But exactly how do they know which kinds of proteins to combine that will give the web its flexibility, its legendary strength, its stickiness? And where to put the anchor points? Spiders don't make conscious choices relating to biochemistry, geometry, engineering.

Instinct is not an answer. It's a way of saying "we don't know." A credible path to evolutionary development of the biological web-building system would require every necessary gene mutation on that pathway to render a survival advantage of some kind (natural selection). A biologist and spider specialist says it may be impossible to figure it out.

Complex functions and behaviors like this bear a strong resemblance to a human engineering project, a very intentional and rational activity that involves mathematical and chemical formulas. 

Maybe science will someday discover algorithms that are somehow built into the genome. Coded information doesn't come from random material causes. But it would be consistent with the Creator God hypothesis.

from Evolution News

Untangler

You've seen images (image) of the DNA within each of our cells. It twists and coils tightly and then gets tangled in itself. It has to be opened up so it can be copied to build every new cell and every new living thing. 

A special protein (an enzyme) in each of our cells does this specific untangling job. The protein is structured like a machine to snip and re-connect strands at the point of the super-coils, so that they can straighten out.

Some have to believe this incredible protein just developed by pure chance (because they must hold to their belief system). Does that seem likely? 

Our bodies were designed on purpose by their vastly intelligent Creator in my opinion. Is that just faith, as materialists would claim? Yes, it is faith because it can't be proved--but there's awesome evidence to draw me to this conclusion, and I love to put some of that on this blog for you.

(If you want more: an award-winning engineer's analysis of the human knee)

US design 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

What else has our new Chief Design Officer accomplished since starting the National Design Studio?

• New website for a tax-advantaged investment that belongs entirely to your child. It's easy to read, it's colorful, and it's easy to understand how to sign your kids up. Millions of kids will have a financial head start.
• A "usability refresh" for the portal for Obamacare (which crashed a lot), for FEMA (glitchy), and for Veterans Affairs.
• New website for the new food pyramid
• New website for cheaper prescriptions

About "30 years of digital dust" has built up on 27,000 government websites. They need work. Accessibility is key. What do they mean by that? 

"We start with a question: can someone who has never seen this before figure out what to do?" That includes someone who is afraid to try again because he may do something wrong, or who drove two hours to a government office because the website failed them. All of them - all of us - need government websites that we can understand and navigate.

from The Free Press

US design 2

(cont'd from last Friday's post)

"Imagine retiring after a lifetime of public service--as a veteran, air traffic controller, or first responder--only to wait months in financial limbo" . . because the process involved paperwork stored underground in file cabinets. In this day and age, it sounds crazy.

A string of 3 failed efforts to modernize in the 1980's, 90's and 00's had all failed to move the process off of paper. They cost taxpayers $130 million. Then the new National Design Studio was assigned the job last year.

"Two engineers (photo, that's Joe on the right) walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the internet." They were Dennis and Yat, both experienced in start-up business technology. They thought the job would be easy (photo).

"Speed was of the essence in order to stop the bleeding." They cut off new paper coming into the mine. Then they had only a month to get the digital replacement online. Their blog tells you about their methods and strategy, if you'd like to know.

from National Design Studio

US design 1

"Chief Design Officer of the United States of America" is brand new in the US government. Joe Gebbia is the first to hold that office. He has a lot of experience in business and technology, and you've seen his name before.

When you last interacted with the federal government for a license, or to visit a national monument, or to manage your Social Security, was it a good experience? Or was it slow, hard to use, with dated technology? That's probably more like it. The US president wants that to change.

He wants these ordinary things to be similar to an Apple Store experience: beautifully designed, run on modern software, excellent. Americans' interface with the government needs a modern overhaul.

"Beautiful and efficient," that's how it should be. Joe calls it "the perfect overlap with what I'm good at and what the country needs right now."

What's he done so far? He and his team at National Design Studio digitized the retirement process for federal employees, which until last year was on paper forms in 26,000 file cabinets stored in a mine:

from The Free Press

(cont'd next week)

Eclipse🔆

Our moon covers the sun perfectly in a total solar eclipse, which can be seen in a path 115 miles wide across the U.S. today. In the shadow of the moon (that is, from a position within that path) all you can see (through the proper filter of course) is the corona of the sun. 

Doesn't it seem unlikely that our little moon would ever perfectly cover the huge sun which is 93,000,000 miles away? Yes it does, what a coincidence. 

image: NationalEclipse.com

Here's the explanation. The sun is about 400x bigger than our small moon--but it's also about 400x further away. From our point of view on earth's surface, the moon matches the size and shape of the sun. A total eclipse isn't visible in any other place in our solar system, and it doesn't matter because there are no observers to see it.

Keys to understanding space and light have been discovered because scientists on earth were able to observe total eclipses (discoveries explained here).

"So the best place to view total solar eclipses in our solar system is just where there are observers to see them. Let that sink in a minute." 

"The universe seems to be designed not just for life but also for discovery."

from The Stream

Meaning 4

(cont'd from last week)

Origin of life research, trying to answer the question of how the very first living cell began, has been going on for at least fifty years. Instead of finding the answer, the more science discovers about the living cell, the worse the complications get.

It's like a "factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.” 

But the cell goes far beyond the function of a factory. Cells replicate themselves.

Meaning 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Human beings do consist of material things: blood, bone, muscle, fat, etc. But most of us believe we are more than material. We have dreams, values, choices, loves, convictions - in short, we have a mind that goes beyond the physics and chemistry of our brain.

You are not just a collection of body parts. You are more.

(cont'd next week)

Meaning 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Back in the 1970's, popular scientist Carl Sagan was speaking with conviction to millions of people on tv, standing in a place of breathtaking beauty, when he famously said:

"The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, and or ever will be." 

But most people don't really believe the material cosmos (universe) is all there is. "It's the point of view - the faith - of a materialist. . . His claim is backed by charisma, rhetoric, and celebrity prestige. But not by facts."

How much of reality does that point of view leave out? A lot - the conviction and experience of millions of people throughout history, as the 6-minute video below explains.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Unit of life 7

(cont'd from this post)

Quick response is required in an emergency. If someone has a stroke and receives proper care within 90 minutes, the outcome can be good.

Your body has a number of quick emergency response systems, and your blood clotting system is one that could save your life.

Unit of life 6

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A bacterium is a one-cell organism, obviously lacking eyes and all other body parts that animals have, and even lacking a nucleus. Fifty of them lined up would cross the diameter of a human hair. 

But inside them are those complex molecular machines, and they do amazing things.

Picture the bacteria living in a small, weedy pond. There's too much oxygen at the surface, so they need to stay toward the bottom where there's less. Having no eyes, how do they know which direction is the bottom? 

Within these one-celled bacteria is a factory - yes, a factory - which manufactures magnetic crystals that are drawn toward earth's core. Watch the video to see how it works:

Unit of life 5

(cont'd from this post)

Biochemist Dr. Michael Behe begins #5 in his series on "Secrets of the Cell" by saying, "What was a mystery to Darwin is now well known. We know that the cell has codes and transmits information that regulates the size and shape of living things."

Complicated machines made of molecules do the individual cell's work. Many of these molecular machines are irreducibly complex. 

They could not have randomly evolved without direction or guidance. If a part of a molecular machine like the bacterial flagellum happened to evolve, it could not be selected by "natural selection" to survive and be passed on to the next generation . . because it would not give any survival advantage by itself--not until all the parts had evolved and were in place.

That's irreducible complexity.

"Natural selection" cannot work toward a future goal or target that doesn't exist yet. That's what a mind does.

Unit of life 4

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Evolution, change over time in living organisms, is driven by random variation (random gene mutations) and "natural selection," meaning that good mutations spread when individuals with that mutation have a survival advantage. 

But gene mutations don't typically install new, beneficial features. Genetic mutations may help the species adapt to its environment, but not by giving it new updates--like a new generation phone with updated features.

"In short, helpful mutations don't install new features-- they are not a DNA upgrade." They don't add a new functions that create higher forms of life.