

Natural Motifs - choxi
http://roshfu.com/2012/03/22/natural-motifs.html

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asolove
You may know the architect Christopher Alexander from "A Pattern Language" and
his influence on design patterns/agile.

Later in life he studied the organizing principles of nature and well-man-made
artifacts and discussed the common patterns in his books "On the nature of
order" [1]. The ideas are perhaps more grandiose than this author is
discussing, but also very interesting when applied to engineering.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-
Environmental-...](http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-
Environmental-Structure/dp/0972652914)

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cousin_it
> _What Would Nature Do?_

I dunno, make a trillion creatures who are desperate to survive, then kill
them all to find an answer by trial and error?

~~~
Drbble
Not _all_ of them, my friend and fellow winner in natural selection!

~~~
cousin_it
We will die too, my fellow winner, and not necessarily in a pleasant way.

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oakenshield
While it may be tempting to look to nature to draw inspiration for
engineering, realize that nature/evolution often makes horrendous engineering
"decisions" precisely because it is not intelligently engineered. The most
often cited example is the inferior laryngeal nerve in mammals, which is 15
feet longer than necessary for giraffes:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evide...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evidence_of_evolution)

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firefoxman1
Has it ever been determined where the first seeds of life came from? Hydrogen
atoms don't spontaneously mix with whatever else is needed for a cell and just
_become_ a bacterium or virus. It is widely accepted that everything on earth
evolved from single cells, but where did the very first "parent" cell come
from in the universe?

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NathanKP
Assuming that 100% unassisted evolution is feasible (an assumption that I
personally don't believe in) then the random interactions of basic building
blocks within an early primordial soup plus external factors such as
temperature, atmosphere, and lightning eventually resulted in random
combinations which eventually connected to each other to form proteins and
other cell building blocks which eventually formed the first cell.

~~~
Drbble
Why was this downvoted? Does HN etiquette have a sentence length penalty?

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firefoxman1
They're just downvote-happy nowadays. I gained "downvote priviledge" two weeks
ago and still haven't used it.

If I don't like something, I don't read it. And if the comment is legitimately
against HN community guidelines, usually 5+ people have beaten me to the
downvote, so I don't waste my time.

