The Genealogy of Biomimetics: Half a Century?s Quest for Dynamic IT

Biologically inspired approaches to the design of IT are presently flourishing. Investigating the scientific and historical roots of the tendency will serve to prepare properly for future biomimetic work. This paper explores the genealogy of the contemporary biological influence on science, design and culture in general to determine the merits of the tendency and lessons to learn. It is argued that biomimetics rests on bona fide scientific and technical reasons for the pursuit of dynamic IT, but also on other more external factors, and that biomimetics should differentiate the relevant from the superficial. Furthermore the search for dynamic capacities of IT mimicking adaptive processes can bring is put forward as both the history and raison d’être of biomimetics. 1. Lifelike – á la mode Biology is enjoying enormous attention from different scientific fields as well as culture in general these days. Examples are legion: The victorious naturalization project in philosophy and psychology spearheaded by cognitive science in the second half of the 20th century; the exploration of biological structures in the engineering of materials or architectures [1]; a dominant trend of organismoid designs with ‘grown’ curves replacing straight lines to convey a slickness and efficiency not previously associated with life;1 World Expo 2005 being promoted under the slogans “Nature’s Wisdom” and “Art of Life”;2 and biology’s new status as the successor of physics as the celebrity science which gets major funding and most headlines. These examples are neither historically unique nor culturally revolutionary. Life and nature have been fetishized before. Yet the fascination with the living has never previously dominated with such universality and impetus, as we presently experience. So we might ask: What is the reason for this ubiquitous interest in life and is it a result of cultural and scientific progress or merely an arbitrary fluctuation soon to be forgotten again? 1 Think of cars, sports apparel, furniture, mobile phones, watches, sunglasses etc. 2 http://www.expo2005.or.jp/ 2 Mikkel Holm Sørensen In order to prepare properly for future biologically inspired approaches to IT design, this paper investigates the roots of the biological dominance by reconstructing the recent history of ideas. A history that can be characterized as a pursuit of dynamic IT. The objective is to distill important lessons learned to provide good conditions for the continued effort to develop dynamic IT through biomimetic design by identifying the proper challenges to embark on and dead ends to avoid. 2. Biomimetics: Definition, Characteristics and Motivations The first step in this investigation of biologically inspired approaches to IT design3 is clarifying and qualifying the notion of biomimetics [2, 3]. ‘Biomimetics’ is chosen as the best unifying notion for biologically inspired approaches to design of dynamic artifacts being intuitively descriptive and adequately precise. If the following analysis reveals a specific and even idiosyncratic notion of biomimetic design, it hopefully nonetheless contributes to an increased awareness of the conceptual foundation for biologically inspired approaches in general and helps prevent misunderstandings and conceptual vacuity. According to Miriam Websters online dictionary biomimetics is: the study of the formation, structure, or function of biologically produced substances and materials (as enzymes or silk) and biological mechanisms and processes (as protein synthesis or photosynthesis) especially for the purpose of synthesizing similar products by artificial mechanisms which mimic natural ones.4 This definition covers two slightly different meanings of biomimetics: 1. The artificial synthesis of naturally occurring materials, substances or other structural configurations. 2. Mimicking biological processes in creating life-like products. Both meanings concern the synthesis of specific materials or structures, i.e. the synthesis of a certain ’product’, and they merely differ in how directly and in which manner the product is brought about. Biomimetics thus characterized is not well suited for IT design. Instead I would like to put forward a notion of biomimetics more interesting for the purpose: 3. The mimicking of complex self-organizing natural processes to obtain dynamic artifacts harboring adaptive and self-maintaining capacities. Whereas 1) and 2) concern the creation of fait accompli products, a biomimetic IT design methodology 3) instead creates dynamic ‘produces’, i.e. evolutionary processes involving IT devices that adapt in use [4]. 3 Design is a broader notion than engineering and covers all aspects of creating artifacts (methodological, aesthetic, sociological etc.) whereas engineering only concerns the concrete bringing forth of the artifact. 4 http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary The Genealogy of Biomimetics: Half a Century’s Quest for Dynamic IT 3 However a better integration of software and hardware will become highly relevant for future IT design. Firstly in the effort to enhance physical objects and spaces with digital dimensions, providing novel functions free of spatial constraints [5]; secondly to develop self-assembling, evolvable and re-configurable materials for ‘deeply’ (not only software-level) dynamic IT with adaptive infrastructure and hardware interfaces; thirdly in the study of computation itself, with models integrating structural characteristics of natural computation as it occurs at the chemical level (e.g. ’lock and key’). In addition integrative design becomes a necessity as hardware starts showing individual characteristics in otherwise identical components due to microphysical effects resulting from miniaturization. Miniscule hardware will have to be functionally coupled with its software through collective growth to remedy heterogeneous characteristics coming from micro scale physical effects. 2.1 Biomimetics: Design for Dynamics A biomimetic design methodology capitalizing on the self-organizing capacities of evolutionary processes might appear to be a contradiction in terms. ‘Design’ normally denotes an intentional and teleological human practice whereas order in nature rise ‘blindly’ and post hoc from self-organizing processes. Biomimetic design thus seems to mean ‘un-designed design’. According to [6] a crisp distinction between the teleology of design and the causality of evolution does not stand up to close inspection. The argument goes, correctly (cf. [7, 8]), that because the human brain itself basically operates by amplification of fluctuations (variation and selection dynamics) thoughts and ideas are evolutionary selected post hoc rather than deliberately created de novo. The difference between cognition and other evolutionary dynamics therefore becomes merely ontologically regional and not intrinsic. If our designing skills in other words are just the result of high level biological processes there is no essential difference. The middle way, which I will put forward, is that there is a significant difference between human design and other evolutionary processes, if only in degree and not in kind, but this does not render the idea of biomimetics incoherent. So despite some terminological fuzziness and the merit of the argument of [6] with respect to cognition, the notion of biomimetics nonetheless aptly covers the specific design methodology under scrutiny here. Whatever the micro-processes underlying cognition, there is a difference between the emergent macro-process of human deliberation and the agent-less achieving solutions merely by due means (e.g. by an autonomously selforganizing technology). In fact a biomimetic methodology is quite different from conventional design approaches, and the outcome no less different. The notion of design simply changes when the role of agency in designing is distributed and in some cases perhaps even unclear, as is the case for example with evolutionary algorithms. The standard notion of design as top-down controlled act no longer holds if parts of the design emerge from self-organizing processes [4]. Moreover identifying the ‘agency’ responsible for a specific state of affairs is pivotal for psychological and ethical issues related to technology and this becomes relevant with increasingly autonomous technology. 4 Mikkel Holm Sørensen The concept of biomimetics also needs qualification in a different sense. The principle of nature primarily mimicked by a biomimetic approach to IT design evolutionary dynamics is not exclusively biological. Much research suggests that the selforganization of groups by variation, selection and reproduction is a universal ordering principle governing basic physical laws as for example crystal growth to sociological processes such as the proliferation of ideas [7, 8, 9, 10]. Biology is just one, albeit very prominent, domain of evolutionary dynamics and happened to be the field first described by such terms. Again this lack of terminological adequacy is not harmful if the notion is deployed rigorously for the specific approach characterized in this paper. On the basis of this terminological clarification, biomimetics can be characterized. Biomimetics is a design methodology for complex artifacts, deployed to support human design with self-organizing evolutionary mechanisms. Biomimetics is a ‘metagoverning’ approach that retains human control of the overall functional norms of artifacts while exploiting evolutionary processes to provide the functions required (cf. [11]). Biomimetics provides simultaneously improvement of our design and reduction of the labor going into it by leaving some parts of design to evolutionary selforganization. Biomimetics thus seeks to capitalize on the respective strengths of evolutionary processes and human creative and teleological capabilities. There is a range of reasons why a general bio-inspired tendency has arisen and most probably will continue to grow within IT-research. Let us take a look at some of these to get a better picture of the nature of biomimetic IT design.5 One of the main challenges facing IT design is finding the means to develop and maintain ever growing IT systems. IBM’s Autonomic Computing Project6 is motivated by estimations that the development and maintenance of future IT systems will be impossible without new ways of designing such systems. IT needs to take care of itself, and living systems provide so far the only examples of just this capacity. Life has developed means to deal with evolution, development and learning by adaptive dynamics and since we have got sciences concerned with the organization of adaptive systems primarily biology but also younger transdisciplinary fields such as dynamic and complex systems theory it is instructive to consult models and theories from these fields when developing future IT. Second, our cognitive capabilities are evolutionarily constrained and we simply cannot fully overview, let alone control, very complex structures or processes. History is filled with examples of how technologies turned out differently than expected, and we have no reason to believe that this is about to change.7 Who could predict that the surfing behavior resulting form the introduction of the remote control would change the very content of TV broadcasting [5]; that SMS-organized mobs would bring about social change because of a simple feature on mobile phones [12]. Faced with highly non-linear and complex systems our cognitive capacities are simply inadequate, leaving analytically impenetrable long term and global consequences increasingly common with growing systems. Add to this fluctuating user practices increasing proportionally to the freedom technology provides. Acknowledging our limited powers 5 For supporting or additional reasons to apply biomimetics see [1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 13] 6 http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic/ 7 The uncontrollable nature of technology is the very basis for the argument of ‘technology determinism’ popular among luddites and variants of philosophies of technology. The Genealogy of Biomimetics: Half a Century’s Quest for Dynamic IT 5 we should abandon the notion of a fully controlled top down design process and join a fruitful alliance with some of nature’s benevolent ordering principles. Third, modern theories of complex adaptive systems have gained valuable knowledge on dynamic processes and offer models for the local behavior of constituents as well as global characteristics of systems. Such a conceptual toolbox will prove immensely important in designing IT systems as nested and hierarchical complexes of systems interacting on multiple levels. Further, the theories facilitate design of scaling to avoid disintegrated ‘stratified’ views.8 The quality of future technology depends on a better general understanding of interacting systems on different scales, from devicedevice to whole networking societies. IT systems have to be designed in ways that facilitate rapidly changing practices, mobile, long-distance and trans-media corporations and other forms of (often unforeseeable) changes of conditions. From the design of individual devices to the general organization of IT systems architectures and protocols must be mutually supportive to carry biomimetics to its full strengths [2, 3]. 3. Genealogy of 20th Century Bio-centrism The present interest in life is not historically unique, but seems to occur periodically. In relation to biologically inspired design of IT, technology has always been modeled after as well as been model for the dominant conception of life. This dialectics stem from our desire to understand and master nature. To (re-) produce is to comprehend – verum et factum convertuntur – has been the credo through scientific history. Hence by recreating life we might hope to get behind the veil of nature’s mystery and peek into God’s workshop. The only variations in this perennial dream have been changing époques metaphysical conceptions of life. For example the ancient sculptures created in dirt thought to be one of the four basic elements, Hellenic hydraulic automata modeling Aristotelian ‘motivation’ and ‘movement’ (‘movere’ is the etymological root of both motion, emotions and motivation), the intricate mechanical animals and chess players with the dawning mechanistic natural science, steam driven machines of the 19th century thermodynamics, the postwar computational robots and self-organizing ALife at the turn of the millennium. The bio-techno pivot is completed by the fact that the technological reproduction of nature is fueled by mans perpetual religious and pragmatic awe for the ingenuity of nature’s ‘design’. This awe is so firm that it has been difficult to convince people (some are still not convinced!) that the ‘design’ of nature in fact emerges spontaneously by self-organizing processes without any teleological agency. However scientific developments since the late 19th century paved the way for a hitherto unparalleled blossoming of our fascination with the living and not least the efforts to make good use of our insight into its governing principles. During the last century science became increasingly preoccupied with systems, complexity, dynamics and information. Phenomena that are all notoriously manifest in organisms and thus biology naturally took the center of the scientific stage. At the same time pollution 8 As instrumental as the ‘software hardware’ distinction is descriptively, it might turn out to be a methodological hindrance for future IT design if taken ontologically. 6 Mikkel Holm Sørensen entered the stage and sympathy for nature rose. After a following period of dichotomization of nature and technology, scientific insights into the wonders of complex systems proliferated. From being pictured as slow, vulgar, dirty and beastly nature suddenly became appreciated for speed, immunity, efficiency and economy. Capacities normally identified with hi-tech but now borrowed from nature. In the following sections I will provide a brief reconstructions of the main scientific and technological tendencies of the 20th century that led to the present interest for living systems. The reconstruction is divided into historical themes, which should not be taken rigidly. Historical overviews are by nature selective and begin in media res. Besides I have no wish to undertake a comprehensive review of recent scientific history. To simplify and clarify matters cybernetics will be our protagonist. Both as our point of departure and as the undercurrent of the genealogy of biomimetics.