Emulating nature’s genius (appeared on L'Express, Mauritius, October 2011)

If you are struggling with a design or engineering problem, and Google could not search deep enough, try nature. Our biological world is an amazing R&D lab created 3.8 billion years ago, when the first bacteria showed up. So many solutions have been tried by life forms in their quest to constantly adapt, innovate, and survive. The fittest solutions have prevailed, and they are generally energy-efficient, pollution-free, and available without patent or copyright issues.  

We have always looked at nature for inspiration and design. Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers turned to pigeons and other birds in their dreams to make us fly. More recently, the Kingfisher beak’s design led to energy-efficient and less noisy trains in Japan.  In Mauritian Kreol, an apt metaphor for being cool and unaffacted is dilo lor bred sonz. Well, water-repellent plants have inspired a new generation of impervious paint, glass, and fabric finishes that greatly reduce the need for chemical cleaning.

Some African termites can maintain a constant temperature and humidity in their nest, by closing and opening vents all over the nest, and thus meticulously regulating the flow of air. This principle has been used to design buildings that save massively on air conditioning. 

Your grand-mother’s plant concoctions for illnesses have been learned painstakingly. This wisdom has actually evolved over millions of years of trial and error, and now we are learning more on how other animals, like chimpanzees, developed their own pharmacy in the forest.

Dolphins can communicate 25 kilometers apart, even in turbulent water (by using multiple frequencies). This has helped creating underwater data transmission that is currently employed in the tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean. 

And the list goes on. www.asknature.org catalogs thousands of the most elegant ideas derived from nature. They represent a tiny fraction of all innovative solutions developed by 10 millions of our bio-mates we are sharing the planet with, and roughly 90% of these species are yet to be discovered! 

Biomimicry

We have always tried to emulate life’s genius. Computer scientists have developed software that are (loosely) based on several of nature’s ideas, like the brain’s architecture (neural networks), survival of the fittest solutions (genetic algorithms), or the collective behavior of ants or bees (swarm intelligence). But on the “hardware” side, it is only recently that the approach of replicating nature is formally studied. 

Biomimicry is a new discipline that was popularized by Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute. In her 1997 book, she defines biomimicry as a "new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems". Biomimicry has become particularly important in our quest for sustainable development, and it could be an economic game changer. A recent US report estimated that it will have a US$300 billion annual impact on the US economy, and $50 billion more on environmental remediation. 

Humans have, of course, crafted marvelous artifacts to improve their quality of life. Nonetheless our style of innovation is radically different from that of other species – the latter inherently sustains life rather than destroy it. Unlike shareholders, nature’s notion of profit is larger in scope and is not measured quarterly. To save the planet, there is a paradigm shift towards sustainable technology, and this can be achieved by paying more attention to the biological world around us. A lot can be learned on how certain algae clean water, how tissues self-assemble and self-repair, how the Namibian beetles pull water from the air, how leaves harness solar energy, how nature designs shapes that are energy-efficient, how microbes mine metals, how spiders synthesize strong fabric, how life forms conserve without a refrigerator, how nature clocks bio-degradation, how locusts sense and manage their traffic without collisions, or even how an oak-hickory forest runs its economy! 

Maybe the boardrooms of tomorrow should have more biologists. As Benyus puts it, we can look at nature as a model, measure (of the quality of our solutions), and mentor, especially in sustainability. We have certainly learned a lot about nature – we should now learn more from nature.