We should always look to nature, yes. A lot of aerodynamic designs seem to look a lot like the world’s fastest birds. Trees really do seem to optimize for capturing solar energy in an easily encoded blueprint.
But also there are a few areas where we should recognize the limits of scope of the solutions nature has provided, or recognize the path dependency in how evolution might optimize for a particular pathway that no longer should continue to pose a restriction (the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example).
We’re allowed to mix and match. Just gotta be careful and recognize just how powerful billions of years of evolution is, as an optimization method.
We should always look to nature, yes. A lot of aerodynamic designs seem to look a lot like the world’s fastest birds. Trees really do seem to optimize for capturing solar energy in an easily encoded blueprint.
But also there are a few areas where we should recognize the limits of scope of the solutions nature has provided, or recognize the path dependency in how evolution might optimize for a particular pathway that no longer should continue to pose a restriction (the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example).
We’re allowed to mix and match. Just gotta be careful and recognize just how powerful billions of years of evolution is, as an optimization method.