Mimicking Materials and Structures In Nature

eldavojohn writes "From special organic molecules to organic surfaces with special properties to organic concrete, MIT's Technology Review takes a look at inspirations in nature that materials scientists are currently mimicking for human purposes. You may be able to name other fields that have turned to evolution for inspiration as well."

Comments

Nature is haphazard and random

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Although Nature is random and haphazard in its designs, it still has to follow the laws of physics. So large structures like trees, termite hills, and basalt cliffs are structured to be very strong.

Structures that must hold their form like honeycombs and coral reefs have interesting geometric structures.

And things that must be flexible, lightweight, and resistant to breakage like spider webs use multiple methods of increasing tensile strength.

If they didn't, physics would force them to break. So for each iteration of Nature, you get some strong and some weak structures, but due to the constant barrage of forces only the most adaptable survive. If genetically controlled, these traits get passed down to subsequent generations.

Re:Nature is haphazard and random

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Consider the time required to create either of those "solutions" though. The basalt quickly solidifies into its columnar shape while granite may take many multiple times that amount to become monolithic in the same scope.

Are there points of weakness in columnar basalt? Undoubtedly. But the rapid development and reasonable lifespan of these is a pretty good tradeoff.

Re:Other fields...

[HBoar]

Hmmm, I wonder what parameters give a mutation of ID/creationism an advantage.... A higher degree of logical circularity maybe?

Biomimetics

[MeatBag PussRocket]

Regardless of ones theological views i've always found the field of biomimetics fascinating. Looking at systems in the world around us to find better ways of doing human things creates novel solutions for oftentimes complex problems. Personally i believe in an intelligent Creator, and to me i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share. Again for the sake of the hypersensitive evolutionists out there, i'm not trying to change beliefs here, but from my perspective this is an especially interesting subject.

Re:Biomimetics

[turing_m]

It seems pretty clear that if there is a creator, the creator was either very stupid or simply hasn't involved itself in the design of life. Which of those do you prefer?

The former doesn't really make sense, especially when it is evident that there are a bunch of immutable laws (physics) that govern the behavior of things and he is both too stupid to design things properly and at the same time too clever to allow his immutable laws, er, not to be. If the latter, perhaps those laws were designed along with the rest of the universe, as an experiment. Evolution would be an emergent property of the initial distribution of matter, the physics of the system, and possibly a random function. Kind of like Blizzard not intentionally designing the evolution of battle tactics in Starcraft, but creating a system where it will happen. (If this sort of creator is in existence, we might expect periodic nerfing of exceptionally successful forms of life, and buffs applied to the losers of life.)

Looking at astronomy porn like those NASA milky way galaxy pics earlier, my mind boggles at the sheer vastness of the scale involved. To think that anything could compute such a thing in simulation would be very difficult to believe. It might be easier if outside the solar system was a light show, somewhat like the Truman Show on a larger scale. But still, the patience of the creator involved would be amazing, as supernovas have been occurring throughout history, and each would have to have been planned. So I suspect that, while technically it could be possible that the universe is a simulation or experiment of a "god", I think it is unlikely. A micromanaging god much moreso.

Re:Biomimetics

[ShakaUVM]

>>It doesn't take a "hypersensitive evolutionist" to see that this argument is incredibly weak. If an intelligent designer was constructing clever solutions and using them for life then it seems incredibly strange that solutions don't get used multiple times.

Good thing birds and bats evolved from the same lineage, or you'd have a problem with your argument, eh? (You may want to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution)

Besides, intelligent design is not creationism (though creationists tend to use it as a sort of disguise, hence the confusion). ID simply says that an intelligent wossname helped guide evolution. Depending on how you formulate it, it's either the weak form: a nice thought but not really provable either way (the approach the Vatican takes, FWIW), or the strong form, which says evolution couldn't happen without a guiding hand.

I do find it interesting though that even the strongest evolutionists can't get away from the design mentality. I remember a fierce evolutionist sitting in front of me during a bio lecture, and the professor was lecturing about how things pass through the intestine walls... essentially the whatever would get packed, then unpacked, then packed again. The guy in front of me wrote this down, then wrote "WTF" and circled it, since it didn't make sense to him for the process to work that way. (He later asked the professor why, and there was actually a reasonable explanation for it.)

Re:Biomimetics

[JoshuaZ]

I'm familiar with the notion of a fallen world. I didn't address it above for the simple reason that the individual wanted more examples. If we want to discuss that bit of apologetics we can. First of all, the whole notion of a fallen world really only makes much theological sense in Judaism and Christianity not for Islam or the Ba'hai. So we need to narrow the set of discussion a lot if we are going to use that particular argument.

The entire claim has much less theological justification in either Judaism or Christianity than one might think otherwise. In particular, the general pointer made is to the "fall" after Adam and Eve eat from the tree. Yet the Biblical text itself has very little to say about this. Eve is cursed in childbirth and Adam is cursed that the ground will be hard to work. There's no broad "fall" that makes everything worse. There's no claim in the text that the world as a whole has fallen. That's very late claim being read into the text. The verses that talk about waxing old really don't help matters at all. The two verses that do so are in Psalm 102 and in Isaiah 51. (There's another verse in the New Testament in Hebrews but it is a paraphrase of Isaiah. I don't know much Both those verses talk about the world falling apart in the indefinite future in contrast to God's eternal nature. That's not claiming that the world has fallen apart but that eventually all things come to an end but God.

This should be a serious problem for Protestants who emphasize the direct Biblical text. Less of an issue for Catholics, Orthodox and liberal Protestants, but they generally aren't shouting about ID. Jews actually have a slightly better position here theologically in that they can point to the larger body of tradition, the midrash, and note how it has elements that support the notion of a more general Fall or at least that things have gotten a lot worse since Adam (they use a phrase that translates as "the decline of the generations"). However, they are minor elements. Moreover, there are sections of midrash which only make sense if the Earth is flat, others seem to think that the phoenix is a real bird, and still others tell of Alexander the Great fighting the Amazons (not kidding. This is in one of the later sections in Tamid). So the Jews don't really have a great defense of this either. Better than the Christian one, but it takes a lot of picking and choosing from various texts.

Even if one did grant the notion of a fallen world, it really doesn't help with most of these sorts of examples. The notion of a fall as it is generally described is that things are getting worse due to the presence of sin. But the sort of examples we are discussing aren't just things getting worse due to decline or problems. The laryngeal nerve example used elsewhere is a good example. It isn't even inconvenient to humans. It is just freaking weird and unnecessarily complicated. Doesn't seem to be part of the punishment of Adam or anything like that. Contrast this for example with the human tendency to occasionally have babies born with a small, non-functional tale. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section2.html#atavisms_ex2. Some sort of explanation akin to the Fall might actually work here if one posited that Adam and Eve had tales and that we've lost most of the ability to have them. Indeed, that would fit in some interesting ways with the Biblical text about their curse. But most of the major examples don't fit this mold unless you believe that at the Fall the entire world got redesigned more or less from the ground up, and that you had a seriously deceitful redesigner.

It is an odd coincidence that the bad things from the fall exactly mimic what evolution actually explains in detail. The fall is theologically unsound, Biblically unsupported, philosophically untenable, and scientifically useless. It is an ad hoc argument to preserve faith in a view directly counter to reality in the face of overw

Re:Nature has hard more time

[rarel]

The one serious advantage of intelligent entities is that we can look at the solutions used elsewhere and adopt them to our purposes. Nature doesn't have that option.

That's the basis behind Primer:

No one would say that what they were doing was complicated. It wouldn't even be considered new, except for maybe in the geological sense. They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more.

:)

Ask Nature

[axlrosen]

Check out the bio-mimicry database: http://asknature.org/

Here's the really interesting TED talk where the founder introduces it, and describes some examples of nature's engineering at work: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html