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Friday, November 16, 2007

Two Questions

There's something revealing about this line from a story at American Scientist:

"Civil engineers may be able to design more innovative and improved structures by borrowing from genetics."

Why are structures like bridges and buildings, whose engineering is borrowed from the biological world, considered to be well-designed, but the biological structures which they copy are just the product of blind chance?

Why do we repeatedly find structures in nature which have a design far superior to anything that intelligent engineers have developed yet those biological structures are assumed to be the result of blind, unintelligent, unintentional accident while the relatively inferior efforts of engineers are evidence of intellectual brilliance?

Just asking.

RLC