Biomimicry: Imitating God’s Genius

Biomimicry uses nature to solve human problems. For Heather Bennett, biomimicry can also hold deeply spiritual principles, and connect us to the Creator.

Slime molds and city planning?

I’m not sure I want to know more! :scream:

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It is not a case of choosing between God and science, but there is an element of compromise. Science is ,limited by what can be measured or identified. It will try and formulate answers with that in mind.

Richard

For me the most stunning example of biomimicry is the Velcro® fastener based on the hooked barbules of birds’ feathers. A beautiful biblical picture from nature is the church as a growing, thriving, interconnected, interdependent body, e.g. Eph.4:15-16

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I always asked myself how “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen

What I see is the physical expression of an underlying Intention, that gives form to everything we are able to see. It is that which we mimic, because it is the underlying reality that we exist in.

This Intention I call God, and revere the fact of my experience, and the existence of everything else. I am in awe of the variety and the vastness of what I see.

And yet, I know that my brain is interpreting what my senses send to my brain - so reliably, that people can mimic those impressions. I am also in awe of that.

But reality has so much more in store and we must not assume we know enough to rule anything out.

The slime molds do not model the sliminess of the relevant politicians, etc. Rather, certain slime molds are effective at producing efficient networks.

Regrettably, the Discovery Institute recently put out a bad claim that biomimicry is evidence against evolution.

Ha! Fantastic!

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It would probably short circuit their brains to learn how heavily the process of evolution is mimicked in modern technology. The main modes of training AI’s is essentially mimicking evolution. There are a whole host of physical designs that are the product of genetic algorithms which harness a process of random changes filtered through selection.

As it turns out, a bottom up approach can find solutions that are not intuitive to a limited human mind.

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That’s part of how the bridge inspecting robot I’ve mentioned before got trained – it observed what human inspectors did and guessed at how to reproduce their results. And eventually it got better than any of the human experts.

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