Nature’s Unifying Phantoms

Another view on how the living world solves problems

Although Biomimicry.org has been moving steadily away from the idea that nature has any principles, there are still many statements that are either not true or are misleading. There is no reason to think that this is due to anything other than a lack of clarity of thought. As an Italian colleague once said of the English language “There are no rules, only exceptions”. The same is true of the natural world.

1. Nature uses only the energy it needs and relies on freely available energy

In its implied comparison with humans accessing and using the Earth’s resources, this is more a complaint about the way most human societies currently work. “It doesn’t have to be this way”. To that extent, all of the “Unifying Patterns” could be considered a polemic on Man as an invasive species that has not found (or been forced into) equilibrium with its surroundings. 

2. Nature recycles all materials

Nature’s landfill is all around us, resulting from over-production. Examples that are very obvious are coal, oil (including tar sands) and chalk. Coal is produced from the anoxic decay of plants in peatbogs, oil from rotting algae and small animals, and chalk (and limestone, marble, etc) is the accumulation of skeletal matter of unicellular organisms (mostly), sometimes geologically metamorphosed and recrystallised. Many (most?) mineral deposits are the waste products of bacterial metabolism. Our planet gets more energy from the Sun than it knows what to do with.

3. Nature is resilient to disturbances

The resilience of nature is due largely to investment in a variety of insurance policies, for which there is a price to be paid. Feral plants and animals tend to maintain the variability and adaptability that support survival of at least part of the population in the face of disease, climate, etc. But nature is a ‘free market’ in that nobody really cares if you die. Hom. sap. doesn’t do that, at least overtly. 

4. Nature tends to optimise rather than maximise

The optimise / maximise pattern is a misdirection. All organisms have a large number of functions that have to be integrated or balanced or traded-off against each other. A trade-off, isolated and measured experimentally, can set a limit to performance. In cases where it is possible to calculate the performance quantitatively, it is more than likely that the organism will be found to have maximised its performance. Why should it not?

5. Nature provides mutual benefits

Much confusion here about “benefit”, which is better characterised as mutual exploitation, leading to better survival rates. The selfish gene model classifies this as altruism which, together with mutualism, can be described in terms of trade-offs.

6. Nature runs on information

As any teacher knows, the toughest part of communication is the last three inches (from ear to brain). Transfer of information is due not to the “sender” signalling but to the “receiver” interpreting something the the sender does as a reliable and predictable reaction to some sort of change. The reaction can be chemical, physical, behavioural, etc. Depending on the receiver’s sensory abilities it registers the sender’s reaction, ‘decodes’ it, decides whether or not to respond to it.  The implication is that the receiver can thus prepare for imminent change and improve its survival, probably by better integration with its surroundings. But the sender is probably unaware that it has sent a signal of any sort. This applies equally to individuals in a population and individual cells within an organism.

7. Nature uses chemistry and materials that are safe for living beings

What about toxins used by snakes, spiders and many plants? They are significant in the history and practise of drugs, medical, recreational, criminal and political. Safety is the last consideration. More to the point, the chemistry of life is performed at ambient temperatures with a narrow range of readily available elements. The chemical bonds tend to be low energy rather than covalent; ‘self-assembly’ (synonymous with liquid crystallinity) ensures that the resultant polymers can polymerise and assemble into the structures of life. One result is that it takes relatively little energy to break the materials down when their time has come, and their recycling is easy. Especially as the basic chemistry throughout nature is very uniform.

8. Nature builds using abundant resources, incorporating rare resources only sparingly

This is a circular argument. If nature builds structures at ambient temperatures (see Phantom No. 1), it is better in terms of embedded energy to go local and use easily processed precursors. These tend to be small and abundant elements. Zinc, manganese, iron, etc are used for special enzymes or for their material properties.

9. Nature is locally attuned and responsive

Otherwise it would not be where it is.

10. Nature uses shape to determine functionality

The replacement of energy and specific materials of technology (a high cost strategy) with information and structure (a low cost strategy) is the aim of this site. In short, natural materials are superior in many ways to technical materials being cheaper, more durable, more easily recycled, lighter, etc, mostly because they are not only much better assembled from the molecule up, but they are also modified from a single precursor to yield materials with a wide range of properties but a uniform chemistry and structure. An archetypal example is collagen.