Marvel of Marvels

Your Body Is a Walking System of Systems

What would it take to build a human body? That’s the question addressed in Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann (a systems engineer) and Howard Glicksman (a physician), wherein they present human physiology as seen through an engineer’s eyes. Your Designed Body (YDB) summarizes for everyday readers the eleven major systems of the body, revealing how each one interacts with and depends upon the others and thus squarely challenging the notion that such complex physiology could arise by unguided processes.

The overarching takeaway point is this: the human body is a system of systems. The book describes each subsystem and includes additional chapters on the senses of sight and hearing, with not-too-technical explanations carefully crafted for the everyday reader. Human physiology is amazing in itself, but the extraordinary contribution of this book is its explanation of the engineering procedures needed to design, assemble, and integrate not only the individual subsystems but the whole body as a system.

The authors explain how the individual cells and organs carry out their operations by comparing them to man-made systems that are familiar to us. The body operates subsystems for the harvesting, transportation, and delivery of raw materials, which often must be coordinated using sophisticated supply chain management techniques. And manufacturing subsystems build products from specific materials according to precise structure, shape, and size specifications, with each having the required rigidity, range of motion, and strength for its intended purpose. Meanwhile, all the subsystems must together respond to changing factors and conditions, which requires continuous signaling and control mechanisms communicating among them.

Further, the individual subsystems, as well as the whole body, must defend themselves against injury, invaders, and environmental toxins while also maintaining systems that clean and repair or replace elements as needed and dispose of waste products. Integrated within all these features are subsystems to coordinate and control each system’s chemistry and energy. Ultimately, as the conscious mind thinks, computes, and makes decisions about human actions to be taken or avoided, the subconscious brain orchestrates the operations of all these systemic activities in real time. The mind and brain must interconnect with all subsystems such that each affects the other, much like the way we would design and build a sophisticated, computer-driven robot.

Design Considerations

YDB tracks the engineering view of the body and asks two key questions of every feature: (1) How does it work? and (2) What would it take to design and build it?

Assuming we could figure out how the system with its subsystems would work, we would need to design each specialized module, organize the modules physically and functionally, integrate each module into its larger subsystem, and coordinate all the operations using communication signals and feedback loops. Once that massive task is understood and mapped out, the implementation steps must follow, meaning all the components must be fabricated, assembled properly, and put into operation.

Such big, efficient words describe what would need to happen but obscure what engineers would actually have to do. One passage in YDB, for example, identifies some of the engineering feats needed to give life to cells:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. [These include]: containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

“Designing solutions to problems like this is hard,” the authors lament, “especially given two additional requirements.”

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.… The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use. Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

YDB not only overviews the engineering for any given cell, it also shows how the design of organs and subsystems must be specified and implemented through all the major body systems.

Cascading Design Challenges

Non-engineers may not realize that engineering problems are not of the “one and done” kind. As you proceed with design and implementation, there inevitably appears a cascade of problems to solve. The book describes a few examples. One is getting oxygen (O2) to every cell so they all can stay alive and do their work. The body cannot store O2, but each of the body’s 30 trillion cells continuously needs O2 now. Here are the major tasks required to solve that problem:

1. The lung system must be triggered to breathe and take in air.

2. Blood must deliver the O₂.

3. The heart must pump the blood.

4. Vessels must carry the blood.

5. Hemoglobin in the blood must carry the O2 (water won’t work).

6. Iron, which is toxic to the body, is required to build hemoglobin.

7. Systems (including intestines and liver) must regulate iron intake and storage.

8. Systems (including bone marrow and kidneys) must ensure enough red blood cells.

9. All systems must react dynamically to ever-changing demands for O2.

10. All cells must maintain continuous waste removal.

These challenges present enormous problems to be solved, even for whole teams of brilliant engineers. Yet the O2 delivery problem must be fully and nearly perfectly solved, with the solution in operation, before any of the body’s subsystems can work—including all the components and subsystems needed to obtain and deliver the O2 in the first place.

Accidental Engineering: A Contradiction in Terms

Concerning theories that living beings came to exist by unguided natural forces acting upon matter, YDB’s engineering-focused analysis shows such origins of biological systems to be beyond implausible:

As all working engineers know, it’s hard to build a coherent interdependent system that actually functions. Designing, building, and fine tuning such a system takes a combination of creative problem-solving and plain old hard work. For such a system to work, many parts need to come together at the same time. These parts must be specialized, organized to fit and work together, and the whole must be operated in strictly orchestrated processes. There’s a reason companies employ thousands of engineers to make complicated products like Atlas 5 rockets or iPhones. Products of this kind never just “emerge” from the properties of physics and chemistry.

So can materialist origin theories explain how unguided processes could engineer self-replicating systems and their interdependent subsystems? As Laufmann and Glicksman show, they cannot.