Biomimetics and intelligent design

Scientists are well aware that the majority of the research papers they publish in scientific journals, usually are only read by a few colleagues and fellow specialists in the area. Thus scientists are mostly pleased when their papers reach a wider audience. However, there are situations where this does not fully apply.

I had a review paper about biomimetics and my doctoral research on locomotion in ragworms published in the journal Naturwisseschaften in July. I have just discovered that this paper has been discussed and commented upon in a blog about intelligent design (ID, the idea that living things are so complex and perfectly designed that they cannot have arisen by a random evolutionary process. Instead there must be some non-defined intelligent designer, i.e. God, behind).

http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/liter...

The entry has appeared on the blog ‘The ID Update’, which according to its mission statement publishes news and commentaries of interest to the intelligent design community. The site is well made and the entry by Dave Tyler (DT) is well written and clearly shows that the author has read my paper carefully. However, things go seriously wrong towards the end of his entry, when he interprets my paper in such a way that biomimetics can be viewed to support intelligent design. He infers that biomimetic researchers need to have a holistic (DT’s own word as it does not appear in the paper) approach to the study of the organisms that they wish to get inspiration from. It is correct that I argue that biomimetic researchers need to take the context, in which the imitated mechanism or function appears, into account. But by this I mean, which should also evident from the paper that evolution does not act to optimise one specific function or mechanism, but acts on the survival and reproductive rate of the whole organism. It is, therefore, necessary to be aware that the solutions found in nature cannot in all contexts be considered optimal. Biomimetic researchers, therefore, need an understanding of the biology and ecology of the organism as well as the physical and biological conditions that have constrained the evolution of the mechanism or function in question.

DT chooses in his entry to completely ignore the paragraph in the paper, where I argue that the fundamental idea behind biomimetics is that researchers and engineers make use of the million of years’ trial-and-error which nature through evolution has had to reach ‘optimal’ solutions to some of the problems that our technology also encounters.

To recap, there is absolutely nothing in the study and application of biomimetics that supports the idea of intelligent design.