Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
Where to buy Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Scenery books online?
- ISBN13: 9780060533229
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Biomimicry is a revolutionary new science that analyzes scenery’s best thoughts — spider silk and prairie grass, seashells and brain cells — and adapts them for human use. Science writer and lecturer Janine Benyus takes us into the lab and out in the meadow with the maverick researchers who are applying scenery’s ingenious solutions to the problem of human survival: stirring vats of proteins to unleash their signaling power in computers; analyzing how spiders manufacture a waterproof fiber five times stronger than steel; studying how electrons in a leaf cell convert sunlight to fuel in trillionths of a second; learning miracle drugs by observing what animals eat — and much more.
The products of biomimicry are things we can all use — medicines, “smart” computers, super-strong materials, profitable and planet-friendly business. Biomimicry eloquently shows that the answers are all around us.
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Ms. Benyus’s book was for the most part enjoyable to read giving many perspectives of this new emerging science. The book was well written and many of her opinion were compelling. One element was terribly troubling, but, her constant reference to evolution as the source of all things natural. Evolution is the largest farce of modern science and has been proven invalid in so many ways that to use it as the argument of origins diminishes the value of her work. As I read her book, I kept thinking at each reference to evolution that if she had just left that unsaid or that reference to evolution out, none of the force of her conviction would have been lost. As a replacement for I kept reeling from the evolutionary references. It is too terrible that she did not stick to right science.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I had no need for it in my class so I did not use it.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
A book that purports to be about taking inspiration from scenery for our inventions sounds like a scientific book about genetic engineering or nanotechnology. It’s not. This book is really an environmental manifesto, taking “scenery is excellent” as an axiom and going from there, to clarify unpromising technologies that will allow us to be more like scenery and live in harmony with the Planet. The pseudo-religious opinion open for why we should do this are vacuous. It’s just sort of assumed we all would rather make the required sacrifices to “be in harmony with mother planet”. If that’s your thing, this book is for you. Just don’t make the mistake I did and buy something that you reflect has some scientific validity.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book deals with an appealing concept which is ‘biomimicry’. In synopsis, it says that Mother Planet offers many models on which we can base our innovation/creation. But the book is not so simple to read and not so well plotted. I skip many parts which in my sense go to deep in details and some parts are a bit repeatitive. The book is reasonably large but offers only few appealing thoughts that are then developed and so detailed to an end which you don’t remember the purpose. Some parts don’t have a conclusion so you end the chapter reasonably frustrated because you have read a huge technical part and uoi don’t see what was the point the leader wanted to demonstrate. If you are interested in technical sciences then you might like it but otherwise, the thoughts on biomimicry in this book could be summarize in a more compact book.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The Vancouver Sun says Benyus “Writes like an angel.” That frightened me. But they were right.
Sorry to say, it’s not one of persons no-nonsense Biblical angels. She writes like one of persons daffy, dewey-eyed, diapered, dinky-winged ones as a replacement for. Let me clarify.
The science described in this book is appealing. This is where the leader is at her best. But, she wanted to seem like a deep thinker, too, and that’s where she founders into New-Age-like poofiness, seasoned with ecological alarmism. But you want specifics.
“… [l]ife has learned to glide, circumnavigate the globe, live in the depths of the ocean … lasso the sun’s energy … in fleeting … everything we want to do, lacking guzzling fossil fuel, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future.”
Sorry, sis, scenery doesn’t go hundreds of 120-lb passengers at a time along with their luggage, or make trips to the moon, or produce supercomputers. Our sights, for better or worse, are privileged, and so are our needs.
“Virtually all native cultures that have survived lacking fouling their nests have acknowledged that scenery knows best, and have had the humility to question the bears and wolves and ravens and redwoods for guidance. They can only marvel why we don’t do the same.”
Perhaps she hasn’t heard how native Americans would cut down thousands of buffalo at a time, or burn trees for after-dinner entertainment, or basically slash-and-burn their way through scenery. Scenery knows best? How silly can you get? Does that include the violent killing of prey, volcanoes, tidal waves, disease? And why should Scenery “know” anything?
“We humans regard limits as a universal dare … additional Earthlings take their limits more seriously, knowing they must function within a forceful range of life-friendly temperatures, harvest within the carrying capacity of the land, and maintain an energy balance that cannot be borrowed against.” More idiocy. Additional organisms know nothing of the sort. They merely function as plotted, reacting to situations by instinct, blissfully ignorant of all these issues. Unless she’s talking about Disneyworld, which seems to be where her mind is when not describing biological marvels.
“Who’s to say we won’t simply steal scenery’s thunder and use it in the ongoing battle against life? … This is not an idle worry. The last really legendary biomimetic invention was the airplane … by 1914, we were dropping bombs from the sky.” The silliness goes on and on, judge me. Doesn’t she know that anything can be used as a weapon? Are we to stop building chairs and tables? Even then, scenery-made rocks are handy.
She quotes an organic farmer: “The native peoples … worshipped the Planet; they were educated by it. They didn’t require schools and churches – their whole world was one.” Well, maybe that’s why they regularly slaughtered and mutilated one another, missy. Did she get all her history from “Dances with Wolves?”
She throws in some latin here and there to reinforce her intellectual image, but it just seems pretentious.
The rest of the book is appealing but somehow spoiled by her nauseating pretensions to philosophizing. Sorry to say she starts out with a rather dull (to me) topic – biomimicry in farming. But it gets better – she goes on to harnessing solar power, building wondrous materials, and so on. She does this reasonably well, and it’s too terrible she didn’t stick to this.
Also, sorry to say, she has been caught up in the assumption that scenery is in a state that is “just right” – related to the “scenery knows best” myth – that is the most puzzling belief of environmental alarmists. Why should it be? Supposedly scenery is continually evolving – species here today, if unfit, should simply be gone tomorrow, nary a second thought. But she doesn’t grasp this, although she says at the beginning, “failures are fossils.”
If you can stomach this kind of naive psychobabble, you’ll marvel at the ingenuity and complexity of scenery … in this way, this book is a excellent companion to “Darwin’s Black Box.”
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5