Mimicry is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
Often, the innovation that humans exalt assumes that our new solutions are truly new— that our illuminated approaches will now simplify problems for people everywhere. However, humans often fail to remember that other organisms have already solved these same problems, and not only that, but their natural innovation has been what Janine Benyus calls, “conducive to life.” In other words, nature does not introduce artificial materials in its designs that the Earth cannot break down. For example, rather than the 350 polymers humans use to design products and solutions, nature focuses on just 5.
Biomimicry is a field of design and engineering which looks to nature’s elegant recipes in order to solve complex human problems. Here are some examples that have been demonstrated in expert Janine Benyus’ 2009 TEDTalk on the subject:
- ANTI-BACTERIAL SURFACE DESIGN: The skin of a galapagos shark is marked with a unique pattern which effectively repels bacteria. Due to the growing rate of infections spread through hospital environments, this pattern has been used by a company called Sharklet to coat hospital surfaces such that harsh chemicals and antibacterials are no longer necessary. Confounding the problem, many of us are becoming increasingly drug resistant to these chemicals anyways.
2. SWARM TECHNOLOGY: A company called Encycle looks to the methods that insects like ants, wasps, termites and bees use for swarming; namely, the way they individually optimize their search for food as a group. This algorithm has actually been used in the domain of energy management in order to minimize maximum power usage for interconnected home appliances in a smart home or other smart grid.
3. SYNTHETIC WATER PUMPS: A group of researchers at Cornell have created a synthetic tree which emulates the process, called transpiration, that roots and trunks use to pump water from the ground and into leaves. Using a wallpaper-like substance, you can actually coat a building’s interior with this technology, to transfer water a drop at a time without even using pumps.
4. MULTI-USE CHIPS BASED ON THE HUMAN EAR: In 2009, a radio chip was developed by MIT researchers that is based on the design of our ear’s cochlea. It is capable of picking up signals from internet, television, radio, and wireless frequencies in an extremely quick and power-efficient manner.
All of these examples should shake your understanding of what it means to innovate design solutions while we are living in such a lush, self-sustaining ecosystem. Our Earth has provided us with natural solutions for recurring, centuries-old problems that are not at all unique to the human condition.
The logic of this approach echoes the theme of Don Norman’s publication, “The Psychopathy of Everyday Things.” While biomimicry relies on nature and biology to provide intuitive and elegant solutions to new, human processes, Norman focuses on the other end of that spectrum. Specifically, he asks how to optimize the design of artificial objects such that the same degree of elegance is incorporated into the product’s structure. But being tasked to understand the design expectations of people can also mean referring to the expectations of sharks, bees, or even trees, which all require the same designs as us in order to properly function.
The compelling difference though, is that those organisms do not consider various prototypes for possible design routes. They naturally pursue one approach — one which has kept them peacefully functional for centuries. In this way, you could argue that nature’s designs are all fully efficient ends for humans to strive for.
A research question that scintillates me is how and why electric eels are able to insulate their own bodies from the electric charge that they conduct. This question has never been studied before, and it could pose interesting insights as to the mechanisms humans follow and whether the two approaches are incompatible.
Biomimicry and Cybersecurity
Interestingly, biomimicry can be extended to empower preventative cybersecurity assessments as well. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) explains the lizard metaphor; it sheds its tail when threatened by predators in attempt to safeguard its vital organs and escape. Experts apply this model to decoy systems, which sacrifice less important information during attacks such that the defense can observe the attacker’s moves. Not only does this approach give you insight into your adversary’s nature, but it also buys you time to incorporate better defense within the critical infrastructure.
A second example of the integration of biomimicry and security has been implemented with digital ants. Individually, these ants proactively survey systems in search of a threat, and once one is found, one will signal its discovery to the rest of its colony using a stronger ‘scent trail’. The stronger the scent, the more ants that emerge and come to its aid. As a colony, they then work together to defeat the threat and notify the system administrator of the vulnerability.
Security and biomimicry experts, Stuart McClure and Idriss Aberkane explain,
“‘Natural’ intelligence is for the time being still surpassing the one we like to call artificial; in nature, the ultimate measure of intelligence is, well… survival. Deep learning mimics nature: looking at the Internet as an organism, we can attempt to copy the way organisms ensure their internal security. Our body is protected by an entangled web of both network and endpoint security solutions: there is a dedicated immune system for our brain while white blood cells patrol our entire bloodstream (the network) simultaneously… Artificial evolution, as one critical tool of deep learning, is in fact mimicking nature, though at a much faster rate.”
If our security systems are designed to resemble life, they will actually fall closer in line with what “intelligence” actually means: to make connections. Biomimicry is often described as the secret yet essential ingredient to the future of cybersecurity, but the idea isn’t as commonplace as experts like to believe. Maybe if we all look a little closer, we will find that the answers are hidden in nature.
