commentary: evolution, bioinspiration, and biomimicry

   I am doing something a little different this week. Instead of investigating the foundational work underlying a biological discovery, I am going to talk about the difference between bioinspiration and biomimicry in the context of evolution. These are terms that have come up in previous blogs, and understanding the implications of each is both interesting and important.

Spiny-headed worms inspire. Roohi & Sattari (2015) Image caption: Fig. 2. P. laevis recovered from S. cephalus intestine stained with acetocarmine.

    Last week I engaged in some enlightening intellectual banter with one of my dear friends from college. She is a social scientist and I am an evolutionary biologist, and so it goes without saying that we are exposed to different literature, experiences, and applications of our research. One thing that came up during our conversation was whether there was directionality to evolution. We were talking about human evolution specifically but I, of course, was drawing on my own work studying evolution in beetles. Evolution by way of natural selection, as posited by Darwin and Wallace, can only operate on the variation present in a population at any given time. If we put this in terms of my favorite reality TV show, So You Think You Can Dance, it would go something like this. During the tryouts, the only option the judges have is to move someone to the next round or eliminate them. The judges cannot pick the feet of one contestant, add them to the legs of a second contestant, and then move the chimera to the next round. They must work with the variation at hand and either send a contestant to Vegas or send them home. Evolution is also much more dynamic, mostly due to the constantly changing environment organisms live in. Trait A, which may be favored most of the time, gives way to trait B during drought conditions.

Darwin, Charles (1845) Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology ofthe Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (from1832-6). Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy.

   In other words, just because a bird beak has been evolving for millions of years, it doesn’t mean it is optimized. There is no optimum in evolution. What was optimal 100 million years ago may no longer be optimal now, but it may be 100 million years in the future. Just like bell-bottoms were high fashion in the 70’s, but definitely not in the 80’s. Then they made a comeback in the 2000’s, went out in the 2010’s, and may be coming back now (maybe, mom?) [2/23/16 update from my mom - they are now called flares].

   What does this have to do with bioinspiration and biomimicry? Many biologists, engineers, and bioengineers prefer the term bioinspiration over biomimicry because they feel it more accurately portrays the process of evolution. Biomimicry implies that we can mimic an optimal biological solution to a societal problem. But if we do that we are selling ourselves short because, from an evolutionary perspective, there is no optimal solution. As an engineer, you can take feet from one contestant and add them to the legs of another and generate a product that was inspired by nature, but not an exact mimic. Is this a matter of semantics? Maybe, but I think the distinction is important. Not just to have something to blog about, but to really try and understand the evolutionary process. And, to use that understanding to the benefit of our society by developing solutions to hard problems. Some organisms have already evolved adaptations to some of our problems, so why not take their millions of years of experience and break free from the constraints of natural selection? We are not limited by the variation currently at hand, and we shouldn’t let our curiosity be either.