Stuart Burgess

Evidence of Intelligent Design in Animal Joints

Animal joints have very impressive performance in terms of functionality, compactness and efficiency. The talk will describe 10 animal joints and show how they employ sophisticated linkage mechanisms in order to fine-tune performance characteristics such as kinematic amplification or force amplification. It will be shown that these linkage mechanisms are irreducibly complex because the mechanisms can only have a useful function when all links are present. The 10 joints include six fish jaws, the human knee joint, insect wing joints, bird wing joints and the mantis shrimp striking mechanism. The work was published as a review paper by the Institute of Physics in June 2021.

About  the speaker

Stuart Burgess is Professor of Engineering Design at Bristol University and an adjunct professor at Liberty University, USA. He was Head of Department of Mechanical Engineering at Bristol University from 2004-2011. From 1994 to 1997 he was a Bye Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge University and in 2021 he was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall College, Cambridge University. He has been an external examiner at Cambridge University and Tokyo University. He has published over 180 scientific articles on design in engineering and nature. As well as academic research, Stuart Burgess has also been involved in leading-edge design projects in industry. He led a team designing the transmission for the bicycles used by Team GB for the Rio (2016) and Tokyo (2021) Olympics. He has also worked for the European Space Agency designing solar array deployment systems. He has received many academic awards including: (i) the top mechanical engineer award in the UK in 2019 (out of 120,000 professional mechanical engineers); (ii) the Turner’s Gold Medal for spacecraft design for the European Space Agency; (iii) a Design Council Prize for mechanism design presented by the UK Minister of State for Trade and Industry; and (iv) the Wessex Scientific Medal for work on biomimetics. He has written several books on Intelligent Design including Hallmarks of Design. Read more on his website