If it’s true that actions speak louder than words and, if this applies to science, then the idea of intelligent design is a lot more popular than many scientists let on. For example, from his assumed Darwinian framework, atheist Richard Dawkins famously described biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” In Dawkins’ worldview, living things were not designed at all but are the result of aimless natural forces operating over eons. A simpler word for that would be “accidents.”
Yet, as Jonathan Witt pointed out recently at Evolution News and Views, those “accidents” have a curious habit of upstaging human technology and even teaching humans how to improve our designs. That’s the realization behind what Witt calls the “hottest branch of experimental biology”: biomimicry. Or as my colleague Shane Morris likes to call it, plagiarizing God.
Biomimicry is the practice of observing designs, processes and systems in the living world and copying them to improve the function and efficiency of human technology. As Witt points out, biomimicry “adopts as a working heuristic the view that biological systems are optimally engineered.” The problem is that efficiency and elegance are the opposite of what we should expect according to a Darwinian view.
At the recent Conference on Engineering in Living Systems in Denton, Texas, as Witt described, a growing number of designers reported on the living systems they were looking to for inspiration, and they discussed surprising designs scientists might never have discovered had they stayed in the lab. For example, Japanese bullet trains have been designed to imitate the shapes of kingfisher bird beaks, dramatically reducing noise, drag and electricity use. Better ventilation systems are now modeled on the naturally air-conditioned burrows of prairie dogs. New bacteria-resistant surfaces mimic the texture of shark skin. And wind turbines are now equipped with drag-reducing “tubercles” modeled on the fins of humpback whales and arranged in the pattern of a flock of birds for optimal airflow.
There are even fruitful insights afoot based on our feet. Stuart Burgess, professor of engineering and design at England’s Bristol University, explained at the conference that the “pentadactyl,” or five-toed foot so common among land vertebrates, “provides an optimal trade-off between strength and flexibility/dexterity.” Grow more than five toes, and you have less strength, but consolidate strength in one big toe and you have no flexibility. Witt concluded: “Five digits thus represent what engineers describe as a constrained optimization of competing attributes.” In other words, the natural design of the foot is the optimal design, but that is not what you’d expect from the product of a blind process.