Biomimicry & Biomimetics

It has always been a seriously awakening thing to observe for ourselves how the most up-to-date scientific advancements have their roots of conceivement firmly embedded in the things around us, ie nature itself. Because of this, scientific journals have been published bearing titles connotative of that very idea; "Science is imitating Nature" and " Biomimicry:Genius that surrounds us" are just a few examples.

And it is not just books or journals that are speaking about this. Documentary channels such as National Geographics and Animal Planet too share this magnificent knowledge, in an of course, a more engaging form of media. My tafsir class Ustaz Ahmad Shamsuddin, the one i label "ustaz gelak", never fail to mention either one of these channels in every of his lessons. it was fun though.

My favourite program when it comes to this topic of Biomimetics or the excellence in the design of these splendid creations would undoubtedly be " The Most Extreme" where the narrator counts down the top 10 animals in the kingdom possessing the most extreme qualities with regards to the criterion chosen for that particular episode.

One of the episodes was about the top 10 inventions in nature:
so here goes, to the best my memory serves

10: Wasps and paper making, millions of years ahead of the Chinese
9: Dolphin's sonar, 4x more powerful than the best human version
8: Jet powered squid that employs Newton's 3rd Law
7: Infra-red equipped beetles that can sense fires
6: Air bags used by high speed water diving birds
5: Stealth flying owls, almost perfect silence
4: High-end swimsuit that sharks use to minimise friction with water
3: 100x more sensitivity in flies' hearing
2: Geckoes and their super hairy feet that acts as a powerful suction, using van der Waals forces
1: Frogs frozen alive, ability to prevent ice damage and execute antifreeze properties in their cells

subhanallah, those are just 10, plus we do not know ALL the creatures completely. Cognizance of such knowledge can only make us more humble, for we tend to consider ourselves smartest in the animal world yet their functional mechanisms can at anytime light up the candle to our face and say " we have smoked you in this regard!"

Oh well, atheists now have come to admit a rather shameful admission. All these while they have been conjecturing the most simplistic and underestimated perceptions about Allah's magnificent creation. They once said that bacteria are JUST SIMPLE SINGLE CELLED ORGANISM that generate spontaneously in decaying matter or dirty places until the microscope shows them otherwise, then they take back their words. Similarly, they thought that chance produced all these grandeur and they are now admitting that humans are stupider than chance, YES they have admitted such things, i've read it somewhere.

Their argument, well it's not exactly a shameful thing to say that chance is smarter than us and have produced wonders more brilliant than ours because chance had millions of years to strive for perfection whereas we humans comparatively only had thousands of years. Perhaps the Cambrian Explosion in the fossil record can highlight that the most advanced creatures appear all of a sudden and FULLY FORMED and functional which until today remain identical. Bees were bees millions of years ago just as they are bees today, the same can be applied for other animals.

If truly chance can produce intelligence, then surely a tornado blasting through an enormous pile of metallic garbage could produce a Boeing A380 with the materials therein. Scientists have calculated the probability of a cell being formed by chance to be lesser than 1 in 10 to the power of 100, that is 100...with 100 zeoes behind it. And in maths, anything smaller than 1 in 10 to the 50 is zero probability, aka absolute impossibility.

fatabaarakallahu ahsanul khaliqeen
Glory be to Him, the Best of Creators