Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

If it's true that actions speak louder than words, and if this applies to science, well then the idea

of intelligent designs a lot more popular than many scientists led on.

For example, from his assumed Darwinian framework, atheist Richard Dawkins famously

described biology as, and I quote,

the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

You see in Dawkins' worldview living things were not designed at all, but are the result of aimless natural forces operating

over eons. Another word would be accidents.

Yet, as Jonathan Witt pointed out recently at Evolution News and Views, those so-called accidents have this curious habit of upstaging human

technologies, even teaching humans how to better our designs.

In fact, that's the realization behind what Witt calls the hottest branch of experimental biology,

bio-memicry, or as my colleague Shane Morris likes to call it, plagiarizing God.

Bio-memmimicry is the practice of observing designs, processes, and systems in the living world, and copying them to improve the function and the efficiency of human technology.

As Witt points out, bio-mimicry, quote, adopts as a working heuristic the view that biological systems are optimally engineered.

The problem is that efficiency and elegance are the opposite of what we would expect, according

to our Darwinian view.

At the recent conference on engineering and living systems that was held in Denton, Texas,

which described how a growing number of designers reported on the living systems they were looking to for inspiration

and they discuss surprising designs scientists might have never discovered had they stayed in the

lab. For example, Japanese bullet trains have now been designed to

imitate the shapes of Kingfisher birdbeaks, dramatically reducing noise, drag,

...