Biomimicry versus Top-Down Engineering

Photo by Daniel Buhat on Unsplash

Modern society is a marvel of top-down engineering and organizational structures. We plan and direct, we build and assess and iterate, often with a whole-system view in mind. 

Nature does not do this. Nature builds from the bottom up, evolving via mutations and selecting for fitness (in a resilience sense, not a personal-trainer sense) over a long time scale. Humans, trees, elephants…. We are all the products of countless minute changes compiled and tested over millennia and eons.

It can seem like a miracle that complex organisms even function at all, given the complexity of the numerous processes that produce and maintain life. Even relatively primitive unicellular organisms are adaptable and resilient: witness the continued persistence and spread of pathogenic bacteria despite myriad antibiotics.

Structure from the bottom up

So, what does it mean to build from the bottom up? In a human organism, at the intracellular level, genetic information is encoded in DNA, which is transcribed selectively to RNA. Ribosomes translate RNA into amino acids, which get assembled into proteins. Cells also perform other tasks like synthesizing triglycerides in the endoplasmic reticulum and producing ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the energy molecule that drives many biological processes) through glycolysis and cellular respiration. These and many other activities keep us alive and in stable homeostasis, all without our conscious awareness. 

At increasingly higher levels of organization, our cells form tissues, which form organs, which form organ systems, which form organisms. Every level builds on the prior ones. Humans, for example, are a conglomeration of differentiated systems: muscular, skeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, endocrine, immune, and so on. Those systems are themselves composed of individual organs, each of which contains cells performing specialized functions alongside more general processes like ATP production.

On brains and bottom-up building

The human brain is an interesting case in point, because even with all our scientific advances, we still understand only some of how the brain works. The brain is a network of countless bottom-up interactions among molecules that have no higher view or goal of why they’re doing what they’re doing. They operate within their role to optimize their own conditions and maintain homeostasis. 

The end result—the sum—is a big picture and the ability to generate innovative solutions to problems as they arise. But that big picture isn’t generated whole-cloth and then transmitted to underling molecules and cells to carry out. Just the opposite: countless molecules acting in concert generated the big picture of human thought, which is imperfect but constantly shifting to balance itself within its environment. 

Emergent versus enforced strategy

On the other hand, humans often try to think top-down, coming up with a strategy and then grafting it onto a situation, rather than taking inspiration from biology and observing how highly conserved processes (aka processes widely used over time and across organisms) tend to have a relatively small and organized foundation or core (like the genetic code for proteins), with a vast apparatus of cascading biological processes and bespoke compounds building on that foundation. 

Top-down planning can make us feel good, like we are in control. Even our scientific exploration is often conducted in a top-down way! But our greatest innovations sometimes bubble up from the grassroots (e.g., startups). And when companies get too large, top-down bureaucracy can stifle their progress. (There are ways around this, like acquiring a startup or giving a small division or team a lot of autonomy and insulating them from bureaucracy—which in essence makes that division more like a startup!) 

Biomimicry as inspiration

Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute, wrote a great book called Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. (There’s a TED talk for the time-pressed!) And biomimicry offers inspiration for the curious across many fields: green architecture for energy efficiency in buildings (which appears to be a moderate leverage point based on projections from the EN-ROADS Climate Simulator), regenerative agriculture, materials chemistry, transportation, and more.

Also and importantly, as we build ever more complex systems, it’s worth keeping in mind that nature is a spectacular risk manager, making tradeoffs in elegant ways to achieve resilience and using resources with far greater efficiency than humans have ever achieved. Choosing not to learn from nature is a choice not just to repeat mistakes that have been solved elsewhere, but to turn away from an entire world of innovation. Biomimicry is worth a look, despite the temptation of top-down strategy.