Symposium

So What Would Nature Do?
Steven Vogel
Duke University
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Biology/faculty/svogel

Summary
Non-human living systems provide the only technology other than our own to which we have access. While close copying of nature has a poor history and only limited prospects, much can be learned from this alternative reality. In particular, looking at natural design can free us from the strait-jacket of our own tradition. Here we will consider several situations in which evolution’s designs might provide useful guidance for our own technology, situations ranging from fairly specific devices to quite general approaches.

(1) Life’s need for gas and heat exchange has led to the elaboration of some remarkable ventilatory devices and conservative exchangers—for instance the flow induction scheme of sponges and limpets and the nasal heat conservation system used by small mammals and birds. As an example of biologically-inspired but not slavishly copied design, a heat-trapping ventilation system for a sealed home will be described. (2) Life builds more often to a criterion of strength than stiffness, and its consequent mechanical flexibility is multidimensional in ways we rarely consider, much less capitalize upon. Thus the relative resistance of flower stems and wing feathers to bending and twisting might provide hints for making cheaper and less obtrusive towers. (3) That tolerance of the strong but non-stiff by nature has led to all manner of inflatables, membranes, and ropes—perhaps because stiffness costs material and tension can be resisted more cheaply than compression. We might take her designs as the jumping off point and envision something even more extreme—an entire technology devoid of compression-resisting solids.

Biography

Steven Vogel asks how organisms contend with their physical worlds. He has looked at how leaves are designed to stay cool in near-still air and to minimize drag in storm-level winds, at how organisms from sponges to burrowing rodents use wind and water currents to force internal flows, and at how creatures such as squid and whales use flows around themselves to suppliment their muscles. In addition he writes books on biomechanics—textbooks (Life in Moving Fluids, Life's Devices, Comparative Biomechanics) and less formal ones (Vital Circuits, Cats' Paws and Catapults, Prime Mover). These last two explore the intersections of biomechanics, technology, and culture.