Intelligent design makes headway

While the darwin-worshippers in academia keep bleating that intelligent design isn't going anywhere, engineers in the real world are more concerned about getting the job done so it's no surprise that they're swift to recognize design in nature. So the Biomimicry Institute is helping them do exactly that.

At first glance, a humpback whale and a wind turbine don’t have a lot in common. For that matter, neither do a shellfish and a sheet of plywood. But both sea creatures are the inspiration behind products designed using biomimicry, or looking to nature’s designs and processes to solve human problems.

People who work with design every day can see it in nature when they look clearly:

Instead of harvesting organisms, or domesticating them to accomplish a function for us, biomimicry differs from other "bio-approaches" by consulting organisms and ecosystems and applying the underlying design principles to our innovations.

Bird beaks designed like bullet trains:

The Shinkansen Bullet Train of the West Japan Railway Company is the fastest train in the world, traveling 200 miles per hour. The problem? Noise. Air pressure changes produced large thunder claps every time the train emerged from a tunnel, causing residents one-quarter a mile away to complain. Eiji Nakatsu, the train's chief engineer and an avid bird-watcher, asked himself, "Is there something in Nature that travels quickly and smoothly between two very different mediums?" Modeling the front-end of the train after the beak of kingfishers, which dive from the air into bodies of water with very little splash to catch fish, resulted not only in a quieter train, but 15% less electricity use even while the train travels 10% faster.

But of course the kingfisher's beak just happened in some non-design way. At least that's what some people would really want you to believe, regardless of whether they really think that themselves.


Find out why there's a design controversy: