Life science
Jonni Bidwell, long suspected of being a robot, hears from Claire Janisch about the secrets and genius of nature.
Jonni Bidwell, long suspected of being a robot, hears from Claire Janisch about the secrets and genius of nature and how mimicking it would lead to better code.
on Chemical engineering “The first factory I visited was a huge, disgusting mess – it brought to mind Mordor, really.”
Claire Janisch is a Biomimicry Professional and cofounder of the Biomimicry for Africa Foundation. Her work involves taking inspiration from nature to solve complex problems, from engineering to material science to software development. Whether it’s buildings inspired by termite mounds, or next-generation materials based on spider silk, nature offers all kinds of creative solutions to the world’s exigencies. By studying key principles of life, such as modularity, information exchange and self-organisation, Claire helps people around the world find new and innovative approaches. Open source, it turns out, already embodies these principles, as we found out when we met her at O’reilly’s Velocity conference in October 2018, at which she was a keynote speaker.
Linux format: For some reason, when I think of mimicking nature, the first thing that comes to mind is humans’ early attempts at flight: running off the end of some structure, flapping some cumbersome wing-like attachments and invariably landing in the water a few metres from said structure… But biomimicry is something more subtle than that and has lots of different levels to it, right?
Claire Janisch: I think biomimicry’s been innate in human culture for a long time. Most indigenous cultures mimic nature in some way, whether it’s the Inuit building igloos like a polar bear, or in [her native] South Africa, there’s a culture that builds these beehive-like structures. It’s been in our history for a long time, but since the industrial revolution and thereafter we’ve deliberately designed ourselves as separate from nature and more or less forgotten about it.
Since then, a few geniuses have popped up and reminded us of this; da Vinci’s known for saying we must copy nature, and then Buckminster Fuller was deeply concerned with solving systemlevel challenges. Biomimicry didn’t really become a recognised field until at least the ’70s and ’80s. Going into the ’90s people started labelling it ‘bionics’, ‘biomimetics’. Then Janine Benyus wrote the book
Biomimicry: Innovation inspired by Nature” in 1997. She was saying that this is a pattern that’s emerging in human intelligence, and gave it a name. The first group of people came together to study to be Biomimicry Professionals in 2008. That was the first cohort ever, and I was on board. We had to study engineering, design, business and biology while travelling to seven different ecosystems around the world, and meeting with other professionals working to establish this field. That was the time when Biomimicry Professional became an actual profession. So when I was doing my Masters degree, my field of work didn’t really exist until ten years later.
LXF: How did you get into this tremendously interesting field?
CJ: I studied chemical engineering. I thought I was going to be making chocolate and beer because that’s what I thought chemical engineering was about. The first factory I visited was a huge, disgusting mess – it brought to mind Mordor, really. It was horrendous.
I sat in that space asking the question, “If chemical engineers are supposed to be some of the more intelligent humans in the world, why have they made this place that’s the stupidest exhibition of human potential?”. I was completely confused, and I knew that I never wanted to be involved in such a disgusting field.
As I investigated more, I realised we made oil and pesticides, and lots of other things that contributed directly to the problems of the world. So I studied for a Masters in Clean Tech, learned how to clean up the mess, and then for ten years I worked on solving some of the biggest, complex challenges in Africa: hazardous waste and water issues. Ten years in I discovered the field of biomimicry, and realised that for every single one of those complex challenges that I was trying to solve – which were all based around avoiding destruction of the environment – the environment itself held all the answers. That’s when I joined the first cohort of Biomimicry Professionals, then I was hired as the engineering instructor on the second cohort.
LXF: Do you have some nature-inspired chemistry examples?
CJ: The chemical engineering level is my favourite level because of all the ways we mimic nature –the software is cool, the way we design structures is cool, but the material we make stuff from is still pretty toxic. In fact, this entire conference is all about software, which is amazingly biomimetic, but the hardware is [environmentally] horrible. At the moment we’re looking at new materials to replace the toxic ones currently in use.
If you think about a spider’s web, that silk is five times stronger than steel, equivalent to titanium – and in fact Kevlar, which is used in bullet-proof vests. But we make Kevlar by boiling petrol in sulphuric acid and then extruding it at high pressure, whereas the spider’s web is made from dead insects and some water at the temperature of the body of the
spider. So a whole lot of companies are now mimicking the spider’s web. They’re not industrially milking spiders – just the recipe. That involves understanding amino acid sequences, so taking those proteins and fermenting them and doing other interesting work. In this way they’ve got some amazing results. It’s still expensive, but I think it’s one of those exponential things that’ll get faster and faster as we get better at it. And one day that could replace all those horrible manufacturing processes. The most abundant material in nature, after cellulose (a plant protein), is chitin, which is found in insect skeletons and shrimp shells. The Wyss Institute at Harvard has mixed chitin with silk – they called it shrilk.
LXF: Portmanteau level: glorious.
CJ: Ha! They reckon that shrilk could replace plastics very effectively. These neoplastics are totally edible, so if they end up in the ocean, that’s cool. These sorts of materials are where I think the greatest innovation’s going to happen.
LXF: I’ve dabbled with various forms of programming, and have come across genetic algorithms. My lay explanation of those is we take a bunch of imperfect solutions to a problem, pick the best ones, then try and ‘breed’ an even better solution. That mimics, in some sense, evolution. How else can biomimicry apply to software engineering?
CJ: What’s interesting about this planet is that it’s highly complex, it’s constantly changing and everything in nature’s constantly growing. That’s exactly what computer software is these days, and we can go on. Nature’s extremely resilient, it’s scalable and it’s extraordinarily able to respond after a disaster and renew itself. So there’s a heck of a lot of stuff in common with this conference, where we’re all talking about building robust, scalable networks.
What the Biomimicry Group has done is to distill a set of core principles that you find in every single one of these species. You find it in your body, you find it in a leaf, you find it in a tree, you find it at your cell level. So at every scale, at every phase of development, in every single species, every single one of these organisms meets those core principles. This is extraordinary, and for the past ten years I’ve been applying those principles to everything from redesigning soap to redesigning cities.
When you look at those principles and delve into them, every single one of them makes sense to a software engineer, except maybe the life cycle and the chemistry cycle. But what’s interesting to me is that the hardware of our world has to catch up with the software, and those key patterns and principles – how to be resilient, how to scale effectively, how to be efficient, how to adapt to change and how to evolve – they’re going to be critical for every single thing.
I was just sitting in the speakers’ room, and I don’t know if this is confidential, but one of the speakers worked for [a big company that will remain nameless]. They were talking about how near-impossible it was to be employed by this company because of all the bureaucracy and red tape they had to get through. Getting an email address was problematic because they had to first prove that they were actually human, and all sorts of other tribulations happened.
Anyway, this struck me because here was this huge monolithic company, with all these very talented software engineers who were distinctly non-monolithic in the way that they think. So what if you took that software genius, the same that mimics these deep patterns in nature, and apply that to the way we design business organisations, energy infrastructure, water infrastructure?
LXF: We definitely have a lot to learn from the animal kingdom. And the super-
organism stuff always strikes me as being the other way around for humans. A single human might have the odd smart moment, maybe even a stroke of genius, but put a bunch of them together and things always seem to devolve into ego and politics and other things that really don’t seem so smart at all.
CJ: You say that, but that’s quite an old idea. Someone [Francis Galton] thought that mobs were idiots, so he got together a group of people and asked them to guess the weight of an ox. No one got it exactly right, but taking the average of everyone’s guesses came to within a couple of kilos of the right number.
So we’re looking for this idea of a ‘brain of brains’, and there’s a wonderful company called Unanimous AI (https:// unanimous.ai) that’s actually looking at how we can use AI not to compete with humans, but to leverage the wisdom and genius of humans together with AI – to get a result greater than the sum of its parts.
LXF: How do ideas from biomimicry tie into the structures that open source development lead to? I mean, here we have people organising into communities, solving problems and exchanging information freely. Decentralisation has become quite popular too.
CJ: Nature has modules that combine together to a certain size, right? That’s like centralisation at a certain scale. The moment it needs to become rapid and urgent, then it needs to have a network. The other thing is nature needs diversity, so we hear a lot about distributed systems, which are critical.
So you can imagine centralised ownership of information doesn’t get you very far. As soon as the holder loses it, it’s gone forever. Distributed ownership of information, where it isn’t really even owned, only shared, gives everybody equal access so that it can’t be lost. That’s the first level of it. The other thing that nature has in its distributed systems is that they’re all diverse, and that gives us extraordinary resilience and also the opportunity for reshuffling information. With that in mind, looking at open source we see that it’s mimicking the evolution of where we should be going. We might start with centralisation and specialisation, but the next level of evolution requires co-operation.
Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris talks about competition between species. Competition between species only happens for a short period of time in a new emergent space, then it evolves into co-operation. Within species there’s still competition, because you want the ‘strongest’ DNA to evolve – you want the buck with the biggest horns. Betweenspecies competition starts to take up too much energy, so it leads to co-operation.
I’ve got a comment I’ll borrow from my talk tomorrow, which says it’s a combination of quite a few deep patterns in nature: modular systems, that are diverse and distributed, that are extra (redundancy), that have feedback loops that self-organise to emerge a solution. Those are all deep patterns in nature and open source, but ultimately cultivating cognitive relationships fits all of them. LXF: This might in fact be the opposite of what we’re talking about, but for some reason it springs to mind talking about feedback loops and interdependencies. When I got started with Linux, I chose Gentoo for some reason (Masochism?
– Ed). It had good documentation. But its whole premise is that you compile everything from source.
Very quickly I realised how much the different packages depended on each other, so a small update to this library over here, say a font-rendering library, would result in that library over there, which maybe parsed web pages, breaking – and lots of things in between requiring recompiling.
It was quite a profound, albeit frustrating realisation, because this was 2004 and compiling things took a long time. You take this for granted when you run a binary distribution, but that’s because someone behind the scenes makes sure everything’s kept in sync. CJ: So Gentoo and [lots of post-industrial systems] are parts, modules if you like, that co-ordinate into a whole. Nature is holonic, so every ‘part’ is automatically integrated into the whole, and is extraordinarily connected into the whole, to the extent that there aren’t really separate parts at all. The critical difference is how these modules work in nature. Each module has a specific function, but those individual functions will be able to continue even if that module’s not there. There’s a diversity of responses to how to fulfil those functions, so if one fails the other one will kick in. So what we do is we create bigger things, and if something fails in one of those then we have a problem [because we don’t have that same redundancy at these higher levels]. But think about it: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen make almost everything you’re made of – and that all breaks back down into those elements. But before that it makes up all these complex things, DNA for example. So by starting at that atomic level where all the modules self-organise into basic building blocks, then again at the next scale, and growing beyond that.
Take ‘Ubuntu’, which means something like ‘I am because you are’. It’s going to take humanity recognising that connectedness. But at the next level down, and at every scale across the way, and every phase of development, when all those recognise and adopt this idea, that’s when the power’s going to happen. But we need that first level to work first. If you try and add it in as an afterthought, then it doesn’t work.
open source and nature “Gentoo and lots of systems are parts, modules if you like, that co-ordinate into a whole.”