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

Other fields...

[Tynin]

Other fields like ID/creationism have been evolving their arguments over time?

Re:Other fields...

[Jakeva]

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

If creationists are right, then God created circular logic............. ohmygod! I just proved nothing!

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

[plover]

Not sure about your example of a basalt cliff... How exactly does a cliff evolve?

Look at his nick: BadAnalogyGuy. What did you expect from him, a car analogy?

Re:Nature is haphazard and random

[physburn]

I wouldn't catgeorize nature as random or haphazard. Although in quantum mechanics particle movements are intrisically random, as soon as you get to thermodynamically significant ammounts of 'stuff'', physics acts very regularly. Even for non-living things, nature is often produces very regularly and mathematically precise objects from the spiral arms of a galaxy to the pattern of snowflakes.

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Materials Science Feed @ Feed Distiller

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

[JoshuaZ]

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. A material can be incredibly strong and yet it will show up only in a handful of generally related lineages. Moreover, if one looks at a scale beyond the details of exceptional materials the designer made some really strange decisions. The recurrent laryngeal nerve for example which goes from the brain to the voice box feels a need to loop already down around the heart and back up. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective given the essentially segmented form that vertebrates arose from (and hence that mammals were forced to work with). Yes any reasonable engineer would just have this use the direct path. This is even more glaring in other animals: The giraffe for instance has the exact same thing. That means that there are about 15 feet of extra nerve tissue. 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?

Re:Biomimetics

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yes the amazing designer. Who for some reason gave whales hips and leg bones, fused inside their bodies. He/she gave flightless birds wings with light weight bones. He/she gave us eyes with the nerves and blood vessels in front of the retina instead of behind, what a designer. At least the dude who invented the octopus got the eye thing right.

So much wisdom and love went into the design of cancer, MS and typhoid, the designer loves us so much he prefers us to painfully die so we can be closer to him. /sarcasm

You sir are and moron.

Re:Biomimetics

[JoshuaZ]

Your argument seems to be "look! Here are things we thought we're useless and now they aren't. Therefore we should conclude that everything falls into that category even if we have no good reason to think so and no hypothetical mechanism for what it is doing usefully." That's great. Because after the laryngeal nerve I've got dozens of other examples. And your point doesn't deal with the primary issue raised which is that the mysterious designer seems oddly unwilling to use his clever solutions. And as long as were positing inherently untestable claims with no basis why not just posit that there was a designer but that the designer is a colossal dick who likes to mess with biologists. So the designer made sure to make things look just like everything had evolved without any intervention. Makes about as much sense. Indeed, that actually makes slightly more sense because the "designer is a dick" hypothesis also explains why so many nasty things like malaria seem to be so wonderfully made.

Re:Biomimetics

[MeatBag PussRocket]

You sir are and moron.

you sir, made my day. ;)

Re:Biomimetics

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I believe what you are referring to is called a "false dichotomy."

Re:Biomimetics

[JoshuaZ]

Convergent evolution is an example where it isn't the same thing at all. Why would an intelligent designer redesign the same thing for multiple lineages instead of using the same lineage? That's precisely what makes sense under evolution. It doesn't make sense for an intelligent designer to go through all the work again. It makes perfect sense for these to evolve. And note the original context we were discussing about really clever biological materials that aren't reused. This actually provides a perfect example; despite bats converging similarly to birds (albeit with very different muscle and skeletal structures you would expect from evolution), bats still don't get feathers. And nocturnal birds don't get the whole sonic radar system.

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.

People may use "intelligent design" to mean something other than strict young earth creationism, but the term was made specifically to disguise to get creationism into the American public schools. In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled that "creation science" was the same thing as "creationism" which couldn't be taught in public school biology classes because it violated the First Amendment. Then the creationists decided to start talking about intelligent design. Indeed, the very next draft "Of Pandas and Peoples", a creation science textbook that was in the works did a search and replace for every single use of "creationists" or "creation scientists" or "creationism" and replaced them with the correct form of "intelligent design." However, in a truly ironic step, they screwed up in the next draft and actually left a transitional form of "cdesign proponentsists". This strange hybrid of "creation scientists" and "design proponents" was corrected in the next draft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdesign_proponentsists#Pandas_and_.22cdesign_proponentsists.22 However, this draft, which remained unpublished, was disclosed during the Kitzmiller v Dover trial where it was decided that intelligent design really was just a cheap disguise for creationism. The decision in the Dover trial is really worth reading. The text can be found at http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf. It includes a lot more very clear evidence that ID was made solely as a term to disguise creationism and get it into our public schools.

Re:Biomimetics

[ShakaUVM]

>>Like for example, causing the temperature of the planet to drop for a period of time to nerf cold-blooded animals?

Yeah, God took out Velociraptors in the 1.2 patch. They were too OP.

Reptile players kind of bitched about it on the forums, but the introduction of flying units in 1.3 gave them a strong advantage that only late game mammal players can counter.

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

Re:The soylent nature of /. --- is people!

[MeatBag PussRocket]

Ants.

the suggestion made me laugh, it reminded me of a Radio Lab episode where they were discussing patterns of life. they interviewed a researcher of some nature (pun) that examined the behavior of ants and she marveled at how frustrating it was to watch them try to move a leaf or a twig "one would tug it a millimeter this way, the other would tug it that way, still another a different direction and it would go on for weeks" yet out of all that seemingly thoughtless effort a working community managed to sustain itself.

at the best of times, when i'm feeling optimistic, i feel that /. is a colony of ants.