The Imitation of One Form of Life by Another—Biomimesis

Abstract

I would like first to place bionics in a broader framework because there are several fields of interest which surround it on all sides. I therefore pick for my title “The Imitation of One Form of Life by Another—Biomimesis.” There is nothing new in biomimesis. It is so important in avoiding enemies and catching prey that it is determined in the genes of many insects: the walking stick, the velvet ant, and so on. It has been of enormous importance; it has given us the images of our gods and the costumes of our witch doctors. It has given us, since the wings of Daedalus, all sorts of transportation. We have mimicked and mimicked. There are a few things of which we can boast, like the wheel and the seeking of power from indirect sources—first from the sun by eating each other, so to speak, and then from steam engines and what not—all one way or another from the sun until we got fission and now fusion. But aside from sources of power, and from the wheel, most of what we have done has been an imitation. The imitation used to be primarily for our muscular chores:to pump out a mine, to carry material from one place to another, and so forth. The first major deviation from that, curiously enough, was in the steam engine itself. It was not the replacement of the boy who used to push the slide valve by a stick; the boy still did that. That gave us the regenerative cycle. It was by replacement of the boy at the throttle, the boy who controlled the rate at which the steam was admitted to the slide valve, that the first major deviation from doing mere mechanical work came about. I would like to start from that point with what seems to me the major problem we have to face in bionics, as opposed to cybernetics.

This work was supported in part by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force [ASD Contract AF 33(616)-7783], and the office of Naval Research; and in part by the National Institutes of Health [Grant B-1865-(C3)].