Are the gifts of sleep and wakefulness the result of an unguided evolutionary process, or are these complex systems further evidence of design? Identifying the futureWe conclude our conversation with Dr. Eric Hedin on the intelligent design of sleep. In Part 2, we dig deeper into the purpose of sleep and why it’s so important to living organisms. We also explore why the origin of sleep and wakefulness is unlikely to be due to Darwinian gradual evolution, and why intelligent design is a better explanation.
To solve this mystery, some scientists have hypothesized that organisms were born to sleep and only needed to evolve a wakeful state. But Hedin believes that the process of waking up is an even bigger obstacle to evolution than falling asleep. “Frankly, if the coordination of physiological and neurological processes required to produce sleep seems difficult to emerge from natural processes without a designer, producing wakefulness, with its associated qualities of mind and associated with consciousness, seems completely intractable for Darwinian mechanisms.” Instead, Dr. Hedin argues that the process of sleep and wakefulness shows a complex engineering design known as the push-pull principle. At the end of the interview, he explains why intelligent design is a better explanation for the phenomenon of sleep than evolutionary processes.
Find the podcast and listen hereThis is part two of a two-part discussion. Listen to part one.
Digging deeper
Read the article by Dr. Hedin that inspired this interview: