Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
May 28, 2010 by AboutNanoWires.com
Product Description
Biomimicry is a revolutionary new science that analyzes natures best ideas–spider silk and eyes, seashells and brain cells, photosynthesis and DNA–and adapts them for human use. Janine Benyus takes us into the lab and out in the field with the maverick researchers who are discovering natures ingenious solutions to the problem of human survival: studying leaves to learn how to make microscopic solar power packs that will clean up toxic spills and light our homes; harnessing DNAs coding power to make blindingly fast computers; discovering miracle drugs by observing what animals eat; and much more. The answers are there for the finding, poemlike in their elegance and economy.
Anyone interested in the people and ideas that are shaping our future must read this book to know where the most exciting revelations lie–literally all around us.
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Ms. Benyus’s book was for the most part enjoyable to read giving many perspectives of this new emerging science. The book was well written and many of her arguments were compelling. One element was terribly troubling, however, her constant reference to evolution as the source of all things natural. Evolution is the biggest farce of modern science and has been proven invalid in so many ways that to use it as the argument of origins diminishes the value of her work. As I read her book, I kept thinking at each reference to evolution that if she had just left that unsaid or that reference to evolution out, none of the force of her conviction would have been lost. Instead I kept reeling from the evolutionary references. It is too bad that she did not stick to true science.
Rating: 3 / 5
I had no need for it in my class so I did not use it.
Rating: 1 / 5
A book that purports to be about taking inspiration from nature for our inventions sounds like a scientific book about genetic engineering or nanotechnology. It’s not. This book is really an environmental manifesto, taking “nature is good” as an axiom and going from there, to explain unpromising technologies that will allow us to be more like nature and live in harmony with the Earth. The pseudo-religious arguments presented for why we should do this are vacuous. It’s just sort of assumed we all would rather make the required sacrifices to “be in harmony with mother earth”. If that’s your thing, this book is for you. Just don’t make the mistake I did and buy something that you think has some scientific validity.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book deals with an interesting concept which is ‘biomimicry’. In summary, it says that Mother Earth offers many models on which we can base our innovation/creation. But the book is not so easy to read and not so well planned. I skip many parts which in my sense go to deep in details and some parts are a bit repeatitive. The book is quite large but offers only few interesting ideas that are then developed and so detailed to an end which you don’t remember the purpose. Some parts don’t have a conclusion so you finish the chapter quite frustrated because you have read a big technical part and uoi don’t see what was the point the author wanted to demonstrate. If you are interested in technical sciences then you might like it but otherwise, the ideas on biomimicry in this book could be summarize in a more compact book.
Rating: 2 / 5
The Vancouver Sun says Benyus “Writes like an angel.” That scared me. But they were right.
Unfortunately, it’s not one of those no-nonsense Biblical angels. She writes like one of those daffy, dewey-eyed, diapered, dinky-winged ones instead. Let me clarify.
The science described in this book is interesting. This is where the author is at her best. However, she wanted to seem like a deep thinker, too, and that’s where she founders into New-Age-like poofiness, seasoned with ecological alarmism. But you want specifics.
“… [l]ife has learned to fly, circumnavigate the globe, live in the depths of the ocean … lasso the sun’s energy … in short … everything we want to do, without guzzling fossil fuel, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future.”
Sorry, sis, nature doesn’t move hundreds of 120-lb passengers at a time along with their luggage, or make trips to the moon, or produce supercomputers. Our sights, for better or worse, are higher, and so are our needs.
“Virtually all native cultures that have survived without fouling their nests have acknowledged that nature knows best, and have had the humility to ask the bears and wolves and ravens and redwoods for guidance. They can only wonder why we don’t do the same.”
Perhaps she hasn’t heard how native Americans would decimate thousands of buffalo at a time, or burn trees for after-dinner entertainment, or basically slash-and-burn their way through nature. Nature knows best? How silly can you get? Does that include the violent killing of prey, volcanoes, tidal waves, disease? And why should Nature “know” anything?
“We humans regard limits as a universal dare … other Earthlings take their limits more seriously, knowing they must function within a tight range of life-friendly temperatures, harvest within the carrying capacity of the land, and maintain an energy balance that cannot be borrowed against.” More idiocy. Other organisms know nothing of the sort. They merely function as programmed, reacting to situations by instinct, blissfully ignorant of all these issues. Unless she’s talking about Disneyworld, which seems to be where her mind is when not describing biological marvels.
“Who’s to say we won’t simply steal nature’s thunder and use it in the ongoing campaign against life? … This is not an idle worry. The last really famous biomimetic invention was the airplane … by 1914, we were dropping bombs from the sky.” The silliness goes on and on, believe me. Doesn’t she understand that anything can be used as a weapon? Are we to stop making chairs and tables? Even then, nature-made rocks are handy.
She quotes an organic farmer: “The native peoples … worshipped the Earth; they were educated by it. They didn’t require schools and churches – their whole world was one.” Well, maybe that’s why they regularly slaughtered and mutilated one another, missy. Did she get all her history from “Dances with Wolves?”
She throws in some latin here and there to reinforce her intellectual image, but it just seems pretentious.
The rest of the book is interesting but somehow spoiled by her nauseating pretensions to philosophizing. Unfortunately she starts out with a rather boring (to me) topic – biomimicry in farming. But it gets better – she goes on to harnessing solar power, making wondrous materials, and so on. She does this quite well, and it’s too bad she didn’t stick to this.
Also, unfortunately, she has been caught up in the assumption that nature is in a state that is “just right” – related to the “nature knows best” myth – that is the most puzzling belief of environmental alarmists. Why should it be? Supposedly nature is continually evolving – species here today, if unfit, should simply be gone tomorrow, nary a second thought. But she doesn’t grasp this, although she says at the beginning, “failures are fossils.”
If you can stomach this kind of naive psychobabble, you’ll marvel at the ingenuity and complexity of nature … in this way, this book is a good companion to “Darwin’s Black Box.”
Rating: 2 / 5