Your Designed Body

Consider your body. Every day it must solve hundreds of hard engineering problems simultaneously, or else you'll die. While you're going about your daily business, your body stores, retrieves, translates, and manages software for thousands of proteins, switches, setpoints, thresholds, feedback loops, coordinate systems, counters, and timers. It disassembles thousands of different complex molecules, converts them into their building blocks, absorbs the building blocks, then reassembles them into the legions of chemicals and proteins that keep you going. Your body also safely transports hazardous chemicals to where they're needed, without spilling them in places where they'd do harm, and employs them as it orchestrates thousands of complex processes and movements, some nearly instantaneous. At the same time it defends itself against threats large and small, and reproduces its own parts to replace those that are wearing out. And this is only a tiny portion of what your body must do to remain alive—all without conscious input from you. In Your Designed Body, systems engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman explore this extraordinary system of systems encompassing thousands of ingenious and interdependent engineering solutions. They present a compelling case that no gradual evolutionary pathway could have achieved this, and that instead it must be the handiwork of a masterful designer-engineer.