Stuart Burgess Informs Evolutionist Nathan Lents on the Design Genius of the Ankle and Wrist
David Klinghoffer
When engineers educate evolutionists about where their theory falls short, the results can be enlightening and entertaining. Sometimes they are spectacular. That’s the case with distinguished mechanical engineer Stuart Burgess and his presentation at the recent Westminster Conference on Science and Faith. Burgess addresses some claims of forensic scientist Nathan Lents in the latter’s 2018 book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. As Burgess says, “It should be called Lents’s Errors.”
Professor Lents is a proponent of the “unintelligent design” hypothesis. He looks at engineering marvels like the human wrist and ankle and sees only “blunders,” “pointless bones,” “anatomical errors.” Burgess has studied those wonders of biology more closely than Lents has and explains in detail why they are, in fact, “ingenious” solutions to engineering problems that leave the genius of human engineers far behind. Burgess is simply on fire.
A Certain Generosity
Lents is like fellow evolutionist Jerry Coyne in that there’s a certain generosity to him: Coyne and Lent are so profuse in their blunders that they have both provided years of material for Darwin skeptics to work over. For example, in his book, Lents writes: “Humans have way too many bones.” Of the wrist, he says that “it is way more complicated than it needs to be….The small area that is just the wrist itself has eight fully formed and distinct bones tucked in there like a pile of rocks — which is about how useful they are to anyone.” Burgess tells exactly what functions depend on every one of those useless “rocks.” The design is supremely intelligent. And the same goes for ankle.
By the time you get to the end of the presentation, you won’t have any doubt that, in these cases — which can stand in for many others — Darwinists have been led by their philosophy to grossly misjudge human anatomy. Lents, in his ideological fervor, “ignores biomechanics research,” “ignores engineering research.”
Now here’s an interesting question. Lents likes to hang out at computational biologist Joshua Swamidass’s online community Peaceful Science. Swamidass is another ID critic, though a Christian one rather than an atheist like Lents. Will the folks over there watch the video and prod their friend Nathan Lents to respond to the exceptional case it makes that Nathan doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Let’s find out.
