

Ideas Without Frontiers - Nature is a Brilliant Engineer - mikefrancis

The relatively recent science of BIOMIMETICS is the application of methods and systems found in nature, to engineering and technology. Think "cat's eyes" lining the highway at night, or think of space-age Velcro (derived by an engineer observing plant burrs in his dogs fur,
after a walk). Other notable examples are literally in front of our very eyes with virtually limitless capacity for innovation - gecko's sticky foot pads, the whales 'bumped' fins to lower water resistance and increase effectiveness. Observations are not limited to physical mechanisms either - the swarming behavior of ants, bees, termites, and other social insects has implications far beyond the hive. Swarm intelligence  "the collective
behavior of independent agents, each responding to local stimuli without supervision" can be used to understand and model phenomena as diverse as blood clotting, highway traffic patterns, gene expression, and immune responses, to name just a few. Swarm technology is proving useful in a wide range of applications including robotics and
nanotechnology, molecular biology and medicine, traffic and crowd control, military tactics, and even interactive art.<p>Nature has a ~13 billion year start on us - i.e the age of the universe. So there is no possible way we can catch up with that head start - or is there ??????
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JCThoughtscream
Nature isn't particularly brilliant. Just impossibly patient. Every seeming
moment of genius has a few million years of relentless trial and error behind
it.

Human ingenuity's managed to catch up this far in what is an infinitesimally
shorter amount of time. We can catch up - Zeno's Paradox is fallacious.

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mikefrancis
Agreed - particularly as mankind's awareness level of nature's engineering
tricks is increasing at a pace undreamed of, even fifty years ago.

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mikefrancis
Good points, articulately delivered. But you'll note my use of irony - "or is
there ??????"

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rizzn
We most certainly could catch up - as is often noted in just about every post
on evolution v. creation I've read, evolution is a very inefficient process in
terms of time required to accomplish change.

Kurzweil's graphs on the human and machine acceleration of evolution spring to
mind as well (the logarithmic curve).

