Stuart Burgess of the United Kingdom is one of the finest engineers in the world, having designed among much else in his career patented gearboxes used in the European Space Agency’s four largest Earth-observation satellites and the transmissions used by the British cycling team in winning gold medals in the Rio, Tokyo, and Paris Olympics.

He has also held academic positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol in the U.K., and Liberty University here in the United States. He has been awarded the James Clayton Prize as the United Kingdom’s top engineer and recognized as Guest Editor of the journal Biomimetics.

But odds are good that when historians look back on the present century, Burgess will be best known for two words — “Ultimate Engineering,” the title of his just-released book with the subtitle “An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body.” This book very well may have an equal or greater cultural, scientific, and political impact on Western civilization than did Charles Darwin’s landmark “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.”

The reason is because Burgess makes a tremendously compelling case for the proposition that, for all of Darwin’s undoubted brilliance, his evolutionary theory’s fundamental assumption — that natural selection enables species to evolve over the millennia by accepting variations that contribute to survival and rejecting those that don’t — is incapable of accounting for the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of engineering technology required to create and sustain the human body.

As Burgess explains in his book’s introduction, not only is evolutionary natural selection incapable of explaining the engineering genius required to design the human wrist, knee, and foot joints, but it also encourages the increasingly common conclusion voiced by many evolutionists today that such joints are poorly designed precisely because of the evolutionary process.

“For four decades, I have worked alongside top researchers in biology and engineering, and together we are not only awestruck by the engineering marvels of the biological realm, but inspired by them to make significant engineering breakthroughs outside of biology. That pursuit, now a subdiscipline of its own, is known as biomimetics,” he explains.

Burgess continues, “Despite all this, some evolutionists, including Nathan Lents, Abby Hafer, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, insist biology is characterized by bad design. They further argue that this supports the theory of evolution, since Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection working on chance variations (now understood as random genetic mutations) is a mindless trial-and-error process that can be expected to have routinely drifted into decidedly suboptimal design solutions in the history of life.”

In short, according to Burgess, “evolution is constrained by a limited ability to shed vestigial parts, and it cannot evolve much beyond the organism’s survival/reproduction needs.”

Dawkins and Coyne should be familiar to readers of The Washington Stand, as the two men are not only committed evolutionary advocates, but leading figures in the New Atheism movement that came to prominence in the first decade of the 21st century. Neither Lents nor Hafer are identified with the New Atheists as such, but both have written extensively and critically about the alleged conflict between religious belief and scientific inquiry.

In his 335 pages of “Ultimate Engineering,” Burgess argues that “biology contains design that is far superior to human technology, design that is in fact ultimate engineering. By this, I mean design at the limit of what is possible. … This expectation of ultimate engineering fits comfortably with the Intelligent Design paradigm, for if the whole universe — including its laws and materials — is understood to have been made by an intelligent designer, as theism holds, then it follows that this designer would possess intimate knowledge of how to use those laws and materials to produce designs at the limit of performance.”

Designs, that is, like our wrist, knee, and ankle joints, the human spine, jaw, eye, middle ear, blood circulatory system, and much, much more. In the interest of brevity, let us here consider Burgess’s analysis of the ankle joint and the foot that together are capable of performing remarkable actions that no other creature on Earth is capable of matching.

At the heart of the amazing characteristics of the ankle and foot is how working together they provide humans an unequaled agility required for walking, running, jumping, climbing and dancing, among many other activities. To achieve such flexibility over a wide range of physical demands, the ankle and foot, according to Burgess, must be “both stiff and flexible, competing requirements very difficult to achieve in one structure. On the one hand, the foot has to form a very stiff lever for pushing off the ground in running and walking. On the other hand, it has to become very flexible when it lands.”

Burgess describes multiple genius design features in the ankle and foot, including the triple arched structure that he describes as “a design masterpiece.” These three arches include the medial arch that extends from the heel to the three biggest toes, the lateral arch that connects the heel with the smallest two toes, and the transverse arch that links the other two arches via both ankle and forefoot bones.

Together, these three arches “give ideal three-point contact with the ground. All three arches are able to deform and flatten to absorb shock as well as store and release energy. There are also specific functions for each arch. The Medial Arch is the strongest arch and can form a very stiff lever for push-off in walking and running. It has two contact points on the ground, one at the heel and one at the ball of the foot at the base of the big toe. The Medial Arch has many ligaments that store significant elastic energy during each running stride. The Spring Ligament is one of the most important of these energy-storing ligaments, hence the name,” Burgess explains.

“The Lateral Arch creates the third contact point with the ground, at the ball of the little toe, thus maximizing the distance between the two front points of contact, and thus maximizing stability during activities like running. The Lateral Arch gives stability to the foot, such as when standing on the toes. The Transverse Arch helps transmit loads from the Lateral Arch to the Medial Arch during pronation when the foot rolls from the outside of the foot to the inside,” he continues.

By contrast, Burgess notes that the evolutionist Lents “describes the ankle bones as among ‘the most obnoxious example of bones for which we have no use.’” Burgess further notes that “paleontologist and evolutionist Jeremy DeSilva also sees poor design. The title of his lecture on the topic says it all: ‘Starting Off on the Wrong Foot: How Our Ape Ancestry predisposes Us to Foot and Ankle Maladies.’”

DeSilva’s title illustrates how slavish devotion to a theory, as opposed to observed facts, can dictate how one perceives the world. Evolutionist theory posits that upright humans evolved from apes who moved about using both arms and legs from a stooped position. But the superior range of capabilities of the upright human, plus the more than 200 million steps taken by a human over an 80-year lifespan (Google AI estimates half that many for the ape with a 30-40- year lifespan), point to an obvious superiority in design.

Burgess expresses optimism in his chapter entitled “Intelligent Design Ascending” that the day when the suffocating dominance of evolutionary dogma in academia and scientific circles is overwhelmed by the evidence marshalled by him and legions of others continues to mount. After reading “Ultimate Engineering,” one can only hope that day is coming soon.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

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