Outsourcing to Nature: Recognizing Brilliance in Other Living Beings

Plants are not objects. On an intellectual level, we all know that. We know that plants are living beings and even that they move - albeit very slowly. However, if you ask most children if they think that plants are objects or creatures, they will answer objects.

A plant sees the light.

 It is a fundamental failure on the part of us people to view other living beings (and even sometimes other people) as objects. Perhaps it's the nature of our ego or our will to survive to see ourselves as more worthy than other living beings. We claim for ourselves the height of evolutionary brilliance because of our ability to dominate and control other beings. Yes, our brains have made us great generalists, so that we can even survive in the most inhospitable climates. But by being a generalist, we also aren't the most advanced or naturally skilled at everything.

Monarch butterflies are an excellent example of how - in comparison - we are troglodytes. Even with the most minute of brains, these butterflies can navigate a complex migration path using light as a guide. Perhaps with our increasing reliance on technology, we have lost this ability to navigate with light. Our technology even stands in the way of even seeing the light. Despite the brilliance of creating GPS systems that can lay out a path for us, we ourselves are not capable of finding a migration path on our own. Are we better than butterflies because we can outsource our navigation or are they better than us because they do it innately? These questions seem to become more and more irrelevant in face of our growing body of knowledge that exposes the sophistication of other living beings' abilities. Is it not time to discard the claims of the Enlightenment: reason and ratio have incurred far more destruction than they have brought light.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a small but noticeable trend to recognize the brilliance of many highly specialized adaptations by plants and animals. In recent years, this trend has reappeared in the return to designs in nature to solve issues in robotics and networking. But before this could happen, there needed to be a change in the way we viewed other living beings. We had to overcome our need to sit at the top of the pyramid and outsource our designs to creatures whose abilities far outreached our own.

Nature builds like this (Revue des Monats, 1928)

And people build like this.