Birds Grow on Trees

… in the early 1960s, we were as blind as the moles in a fable by the Czech immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub: his poem ‘Brief reflection on cats growing in trees’ imagines the moles trying to make sense of the world. Lookouts emerged at different times of day to report on the way things were above ground. The first scout saw a bird on a tree: ‘birds grow on trees’, he reported; the second found mewing cats in the branches: ‘cats grow on trees, not birds.’ The conflict worried one of the elders so, up he went:

By then it was night and all was pitch-black.

Both schools are mistaken, the venerable mole declared.
      Birds and cats are optical illusions produced
      by the refraction of light. In fact, things above

Were the same as below, only the clay was less dense and
      the upper roots of the trees were whispering something,
      but only a little.

‘Things above were the same as things below’, or vice versa in our case. We had only our knowledge of chemistry at the bottom and the world of visible objects at the top to guide us. When we look around we can see only such objects as can be seen with eyes like ours. We make use of materials that we can grasp and manipulate to make objects on a scale that suits creatures around 1.5 – 1.8 m tall. We may not like to think of ourselves as being as cramped in our perception as the moles, but on the scale of the universe, from quarks to galaxies, we are. In the scale of things, we are trillions of times larger than the smallest things known, evanescent subatomic particles, and trillions of times smaller than the largest cosmological objects known.

That and all the rest of today’s quotes are from The Gecko’s Foot: Bio-inspiration: Engineering New Materials from Nature by Peter Forbes (2005).

… The nanoworld is like a complex jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions. We try to piece it together by viewing it with different magnifications and techniques. Behind the picture we can see with the unaided eye, there is another picture we have to zoom in on with the light microscope; behind that is a more detailed picture that we need the electron microscope to see; beyond that is the picture revealed by X-rays; and there are new types of microscope such as the atomic tunnelling microscope, that all add information to the puzzle. To add to this, our knowledge of chemistry also sheds light on the three-dimensional structure. By combining all the information, we come to a picture that begins to approach completeness.

… While the human engineer instinctively reaches for metals to heat and beat into shape, nature goes for proteins that are grown inside living cells at body temperature. A single protein molecule is made from hundreds to thousands of smaller component molecules, virtually all of which have to be in precisely the right place for the protein to work. A protein molecule is first made as a long chain and then it folds up precisely into a three dimensional ball, like a piece of wet origami.

… To understand why the realm of bio-inspiration is such a terra incognita, something really new under the sun, we need to look at the two currents of 20th-century science. So powerful were these two prongs of attack that many people were dazzled into thinking that they revealed all we needed to know about the material world. These sciences were nuclear physics and molecular biology. Both ignored the multiplicity of the natural world — the several million species of living creatures (some estimates go as high as 30 millionor more), all with different shapes, sizes, habits and curious adaptations; the more than 24 million known chemical combinations of the 92 natural elements; the architecture of matter in the honeycombs of the beehive, the fantastic filigree forms of the radiolarians of the ocean, and the interlocking spirals of a sunflower head. These were cast aside in the search for the ultimate, universal components and principles of matter (physics) and the chemical unit and mechanism of genetic inheritance in biology.

The idea behind these quests was that if successful, they would somehow explain everything else. And, of course, they were successful. Nuclear physics uncovered the unexpected power of nuclear forces and molecular biology determined the mechanism of inheritance; a precise sequence that has chemical form (the DNA molecule) but which functions as a code for the synthesis of proteins, nature’s prime functional substances.

But, dramatically brilliant as these sciences were, they left enormous gaps. They did not begin to explain complex forms of nature, nor did they determine the composition of these forms. What the physics and biology obscured was the fact that to create functioning organs, the fundamental building blocks of atoms and molecules have to be synthesized into large structures whose properties cannot really be explained by a knowledge of which molecules compose them.

… Across the wide range of technologies covered in this book there is one overriding message: shape, shape, shape. At every size,from atoms to cabledomes, we see that shapes can do things we could hardly have expected.

… it is the patterns these structures make in space rather than what they are made from that creates the effect. Galileo’s intuition, from the birth of modern science in the 17th century, that the book of nature is written in circles and squares and triangles, has been vindicated, although some of the shapes are far more complicated than he could ever have foreseen.

“There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”
– from Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (quoted within the Gecko’s Foot)

The kernel of what I’m getting at with all of the above is summed up in this one sentence, “What the physics and biology obscured was the fact that to create functioning organs, the fundamental building blocks of atoms and molecules have to be synthesized into large structures whose properties cannot really be explained by a knowledge of which molecules compose them.” In many cases, the whole is greater (and entirely unexplained by) than sum of the parts.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/