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MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering

July 3, 2007 Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design
33 Comments

Here’s how MIT describes its department of biological engineering. Does the research here fall more readily under ID or Darwinism?

Biological Engineering [BE] was founded in 1998 as a new MIT departmental academic unit, with the mission of defining and establishing a new discipline fusing molecular life sciences with engineering. The goal of our biological engineering discipline, Course 20, is to advance fundamental understanding of how biological systems operate and to develop effective biology-based technologies for applications across a wide spectrum of societal needs including breakthroughs in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, in design of novel materials, devices, and processes, and in enhancing environmental health. The innovative educational programs created by BE reflect this emphasis on integrating molecular and cellular biosciences with a quantitative, systems-oriented engineering analysis and synthesis approach, offering opportunities at the undergraduate level for the SB degree in Biological Engineering, and at the graduate level for the Ph.D. in Biological Engineering (with emphasis in either Applied Biosciences or Bioengineering).

SOURCE: MIT-Biological-Engineering

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33 Responses to MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering

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  1. 31
    PhinehasJuly 7, 2007 at 11:44 pm

    Reading some threads the other day about how much information might be stored in DNA and how, I got to thinking that ID might make predictions about how studying DNA could lead to break-throughs in information systems such as the following:

    - New methods for writing error correcting code (ECC)
    - New software engineering design patterns
    - New compression techniques
    - New methods for storage, distributed processing, clustering, or other forms of data and process redundancy
    - New approaches to parallel processing

    Does anyone know if these kinds of predictions have been made in a more formal manner?

  2. 32
    FreelurkerJuly 8, 2007 at 3:49 pm

    JGuy,

    “… nobody here is saying the EF will tell you that this orderly clump of matter(design) is a system designed for doing XYZ or QRS…”

    Well, there is still the matter of the EF identifying backup systems. Sal has not changed or clarified his position.

    “But you can, I’d argue in most cases, still determine if the clump is designed using the EF (implicity).”

    And I would argue otherwise, but I don’t have some new argument to introduce here. (My favorite critique is “The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignorance.” http://tinyurl.com/hqu4l)

    “Then by simply unbiasedly recognizing that there is a design present, one will then inherently be inclined to make a successful discovery of an actual succinct description/abstraction of that design [eg. in naming it’s function and/or purpose].”

    Here again, the semantics can be treacherous. This is the area that MIT correctly refers to above as engineering analysis; it’s the part where they “advance fundamental understanding of how biological systems operate.” When people perform engineering analysis they produce models. Saying that they are discovering designs is only adding unnecessary and unsupported teleological assumptions.

    The upshot of all my previous comments is that the work of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering does not fall readily under either ID or Darwinism; it belongs under Engineering.

  3. 33
    FreelurkerJuly 9, 2007 at 5:50 pm

    Sal,
    Your comment dated 07/05/2007 (currently #21) did not appear until some time yesterday, 07/08/2007. It must have gotten stuck in a queue. I guess it can happen to anybody.

    ”Freelurker, good question.”

    Actually, I didn’t ask a question. I asked you to provide an example that would back up a claim you made.

    You claimed that the EF could be used to identify designs such as backup systems. Please show how the EF, a tool that is intended to do nothing more than attribute things to law, chance, or design, can do this.

    You don’t have to go through the steps of the EF; just start from the end of the EF process, where you have already determined whether or not there was intelligent causation. Then take us to where you have identified a backup system.

    From here, it looks like you are just equivocating on the word “design.”

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