IEX 162: Biomimicry - Lessons From Nature
Nature's designs are still the high water mark for incredible innovation.
Even after tens of thousands of years of human progress, the core building blocks of life still remain beyond our engineering reach. From the humble cell where energy is produced through a turbine-like ATPase protein, to the brain, which runs on under 20 watts of power, but contains 86 billion neurons, and trillions of connections. Yes, we've have made amazing progress in the past decades to better understand cells, brains, and genes. But our best efforts at present still come from copying biology rather than leading it. Imitation is still our greatest compliment to mother nature.
In fairness, the history of innovation taken across the ages is analogous to the story of evolution. For genes, read ideas and memes. The same patterns of cross fertilisation, chance, and natural selection apply, as do inter-dependence, competition and the complex layering of progress, while responding to the environment. For example, Franklin's work on crystallography is a critical step for the DNA double helix discovery of Watson and Crick. But Franklin's work is crucially dependent on Wilhelm Rontgen's work in discovering X-Rays. And Rontgen needed Crookes Tubes to run his experiments. And so it goes all the way back, much like evolutionary biology.
But in a much more micro and specific sense, the interplay between human innovation across engineering and design, and biology is an extremely rich area, especially as our knowledge and understanding of biology goes deeper than ever before. This is not new of course. Gaudi's architecture, that adorns the city of Barcelona is heavily influenced by nature. The use of light, and the lack of sharp corners and straight lines are just a couple of ideas that are immediately visible in the Casa Batllo, or the Sagrada Familia. Cut to today, and Neri Oxman's work on material ecology, which sits at the intersection of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, computational design, and advanced materials, is my favourite example of the potential synthesis between design, engineering, and nature. (Her Ted Talk is unmissable).
Sometimes we replicate nature without even realising it. In 1920, Nikola Tesla patented a valve which involved unidirectional flow of liquids without any moving parts. A hundred years later, we learnt that this is exactly how shark's intestines work. Also, having gone from LANs, to WANs, to the Internet, we now realise that nature is full of large, complex, networks which behave similarly and from whom we have much to learn. From Starling flocks (speed and adaptability at low cost), to slime mould (no apparent intelligence in the component parts), to the nervous system (the sheer sophistication), these complex networks still have properties we would struggle to replicate.
Even behaviourally, we tend to borrow from nature. Consider Dunbar's number (extrapolated from research on primates), which suggests the maximum number of people we can have meaningful social stable relationships (about 150), which has had a profound influence on organisational design. Or consider the teamwork of migratory birds in formation, used by competitive cycling teams, as well as referred to in leadership studies.
Across the world today, we see more and more willingness to emulate nature, arguably because our engineering and design capabilities now allow us to approximate nature much more effectively. Google's new office is an attempt at flowing, modular, and regenerative architecture, that also looks to synthesise with its surroundings. Animal Dynamics is an Oxford based start up that is looking to create products such as UAVs (unmanned vehicles) based on bio-mimicry. Boston Dynamics (now a part of Hyundai) has long been thrilling us with its humanoid and canine robots. There are plenty of scientific analyses to show how this space is evolving and trying to bring more muscle like movement into robotics. Even design is continuously borrowing from nature.
We also have a long history of products that are seemingly unconnected to human or animal forms that nonetheless draw inspiration from nature. Crash helmets designed based on woodpecker skull designs, for example. Or colours and pigments drawn from butterflies. And there are a host of others from turbines, to trains, to coats. And let's not forget that even velcro was invented based on observation of burrs on dogs coats. How about maple trees for air flow in turbines? Or Gecko feet for NASA rockets? Office buildings inspired by termites?
As with any area, there are risks because when we understand something well, as humans we have an urge to engineer it. Some may seem constructive, such as persuading the body to regenerate lost limbs. Others are fraught with unknown risks, for example, bringing mammoths back from extinction. What could possibly go wrong with that??
The biggest lessons from biomimicry are perhaps in the way we think. A lot of companies adopt an engineering mindset, where we tend to construct things based on their component parts and with a very clear understanding of every single cause and effect. Perhaps we should be thinking like gardeners, rather than systems engineers, acting as catalysts and enablers. Because Godel showed that systems will ultimately fail. Thinking like nature also fundamentally assumes that we will add to our surroundings rather than erode them. Nothing is wasted. And anything we build is born from and returns to the natural environment. Isn’t that worth striving for?
(With thanks to Chandos, Sudhakar, and Llewy for inputs)
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Sweet Tooth: The story of the Baklava