Not long ago I stepped on the scale for the first time in a few months. I had put myself on a diet last summer and it brought me down about fourteen pounds, but then I got sidelined by an ankle injury and let myself go for a while. When I finally decided to face the music, I found out I’d gained back twelve of those fourteen pounds.

Fat. Who needs it? You and I do, actually. And as I discovered through a fascinating article at Evolution News and Views this week, fats are a whole lot more amazing than I had ever thought.

Evolution News and Views is one of the websites of the Discovery Institute, a non-profit think tank based in Seattle, best known for its research and publications regarding the theory of intelligent design. Often misunderstood and mischaracterized by its opponents, ID is a scientific research program exploring the likelihood that nature cannot be fully explained apart from an intelligent designer — whom I would take to be God Himself, as would many ID theorists.

Information and Complexity Signaling Intelligent Design

Nature includes information (such as coding regions of DNA) and complexity (as we’ll see in a moment) that’s of the sort that we routinely ascribe to intelligence. That’s the whole idea behind intelligent design. When we see Mount Rushmore we know it was sculpted by people who planned it and who knew what they were doing. When our computers work we know there’s intelligence behind the hardware and the software. Actually, we can tell there’s intelligence there even when they don’t work. We might wish there were more, but we still know our computers didn’t happen without intelligent design.

So what does this have to do with fat? I’m not sure it was so intelligent for me to let those twelve pounds come back. As it turns out, though, lipids (the technical term for fats) are essential for life. The biochemist interviewed in this Evolution News and Views article — highly credentialed in his field, yet left unnamed because ID is so hotly controversial among biological scientists — explains it this way:

Lipids are amazingly complex. If you look at the lipids that we have in our lipid bilayers today, you’ll find a huge number of chemical structures, each of which differs slightly in its composition.… It’s been estimated that there might be 10,000-100,000 different chemical structures of lipids in the cell. And if you change even one of them, you could end up with dysfunction in the cell. …

Complexity abounds … within the cell as well. … We have organelles — the nucleus, the Golgi apparatus, the lysosome, and so on. Each one of these is surrounded by a different lipid bilayer. No two organelles have the same lipid composition. Moreover, a lipid bilayer has two layers: one pointing out, one pointing in. The lipid composition of the two halves of the bilayer is not the same. It differs completely. Moreover, lipids change their composition depending on the physiological state of the cell. It’s amazing.

The Question Biologists Aren’t Allowed To Ask

He goes on to tell how biologists have tried to explain how this could have evolved without guidance:

How exactly, chemically, did lipids evolve? To me, it’s not a question of this or that philosophy; it’s a question of science. At the level of biochemistry … do these studies provide a valid explanation of how lipids evolved? And I personally have yet to see that. In almost any field of biochemical sciences, I just don’t see it.

The “philosophy” he’s speaking of is the belief that life must be explainable on purely non-intelligent terms, without any designer involved. Blind evolution must have happened, is the idea, so whatever features and function we observe in life, the question isn’t whether it evolved in the Darwinian sense — biologists in “mainstream science” really aren’t allowed to ask that question — but how it evolved. Scientific papers frequently discuss how things might have evolved, or even how they must have evolved. That kind of thing is easy to find. But it’s fairly impossible to find any research explaining how anything of real biological importance actually did evolve by natural selection and random variation.

A Two-Part Argument for Design

As for lipids, the Evolution News and Views interviewer summed it up this way:

So just to be clear, you really have a two-part argument. Number one, all known natural processes are inadequate to produce these highly complex lipids. And number two, we know that designers can produce this level of complexity. So from our experience we have not just negative reasons against unguided processes, but also positive reasons based on what we know designers do. And that’s true even if we don’t know exactly how they did it. Is that right?

The biochemist answered,

Yes. But let me take it one step farther. We have not yet managed in the lab to design a lipid bilayer that corresponds to the complexity that we see in nature. … There’s a level of design in lipids that is far beyond our powers of invention.

And I’m sure he would add, it’s far beyond the inventive powers of blind forces, too.