System Engineering and Biology

For a while now, biologists have been starting to look at living things from an engineering perspective. They are a bit skittish about it, because if things are engineered, there must be an Engineer a Designer. Indeed, C. Richard Dawkins and other Darwinists tell scientists to remind themselves that things only appear designed.

Another reason for the reluctance of evolutionists to admit to engineering approaches is that biblical creationists have been talking about biological engineering for some time now. A paper in the Intelligent Design community discusses systems engineering in biology.

Construction, Pixabay / Adi Rahman

Systems engineering requires making a plan to build something in order to accomplish a goal, models are developed, testing happens, and all that good stuff before a final product is made. Taking inspiration from mechanical engineering, the authors describe model-based reverse system engineering. To show how their approach would work, glycolysis was used. If a basis of design was used in biology, more progress could be made than is happening now.

In the IEEE Open Journal of Systems Engineering, I recently co-authored a paper with Dr. Gerald Fudge at Texas A&M on the intersection of biology and engineering. Our paper does two things: 1) It lays out a methodology based on systems engineering for biologists. 2) It illustrates the usefulness of the methodology with a case study of glycolysis. 

The project was inspired a couple of years back when I read Uri Alon’s An Introduction to Systems Biology, which made me realize that biologists could benefit from the same engineering approaches used to build iPhones. These approaches could lead to uncovering the intricate designs in life.

Some of the article is rather technical, but lay people can get the jist of it by reading "Studying Biology with System Engineering Principles."