Biomimicry -- Part 1

John 3:3:

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Consider the great commission in Mark 16:15-16:

15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.

16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.

Have you been born again?  Are you ready to begin a brand new life?  If you once walked close to Christ but are now standing afar off, would you like to begin anew?  Today is your day of salvation.  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  Receive God’s supernatural love and grace and the power to live for Jesus.  NOW FOR TODAY'S SUBJECT. 

GOD SAID, Ecclesiastes 1:9-10:

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

GOD SAID, Isaiah 66:1-2:

1 Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?

2 For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.

MAN SAID:  Our destiny is in our own hands.  Man’s science will lead the way.  We are gods unto ourselves. 

Now THE RECORD.  Greetings in the mighty name of Jesus Christ.  Psalms 31:7:

I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy: for thou hast considered my trouble; thou hast known my soul in adversities;

This is GodSaidManSaid feature 631 that once again proves the full inerrancy of God’s Holy Word.  All of these features are archived on this site in text and streaming audio for the edification of the blood-washed and as ammunition in the battle for the souls of men.  Nearly 150 hours of GodSaidManSaid features are downloadable to your iPod and the Tell-A-Friend feature above allows you to send a feature to someone you love, or to one you are trying to win to Christ.  Also, take advantage of our search bar at the top right.  Type in a keyword from the question you have, and related features will populate the screen for your perusal.  Thank you for visiting with us today.  May the face of our God shine upon you and your home with Light and Truth. 

Globally, billions of dollars are spent on R&D (research and development), and in all instances, the product they seek to create will mimic something that already is, such as man’s age-old desire to fly like the birds of the sky and today’s air travel.  The relationship of invention and mimicry is so pervasive that science has now given this mimicry a name.  It’s now a scientific discipline called Biomimicry.

“No new thing under the sun.”  God’s critics confidently point out its error, but could it be literal and could it be true?  The answer, of course, is yes, and this feature will confirm. 

When looking for something new, the vaunted computer comes to the top of the mind—the mind, the brain, the neurological computing system that exists throughout the entire body.  Genesis 1:26-27:

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

The scientist of the brain once said that we only use 10% of the brain’s power, but when you consider that Adam was created with a God-like brain and a whole body computing system, it is obvious we only use a fraction of 1%.  Of course, this onboard computing system flies in the face of Darwin’s time, chance, and need.

The following few sentences come from the GodSaidManSaid feature The Superhuman Brain:

Imagine: your brain weighs only three pounds.  Yet, a computer with the same number of “bits” would fill a building 100 stories tall that would cover the state of Texas. 

Whether or not that calculation is still accurate would require a review of the original data.  But I do wonder whether anyone has ever considered that in addition to all the brain’s other functions, between your ears dwells a pharmaceutical plant producing medicines on an at-need basis that sustain and heal the body.  [End of quote]

The human computer, the brain designed by God, that is reproduced through natural, enjoyable procreation, is worth more than the earth’s aggregate wealth.  A few excerpts follow from the October 2012 issue of Scientific American.  The headline on the cover reads “The Language of the Brain,” with the sub-head “How the world’s most complicated machine processes and communicates information.” 

Our brains are better than Google or the best robot from iRobot. 

We can instantly search through a vast wealth of experiences and emotions.  We can immediately recognize the face of a parent, spouse, friend, or pet, whether in daylight, darkness, from above or sideways—a task that the computer systems built into the most sophisticated robots can accomplish only haltingly.  We can also multitask effortlessly when we extract a handkerchief from a pocket and mop our brow while striking up a conversation with an acquaintance.  Yet designing an electronic brain that would allow a robot to perform this simple combination of behaviors remains a distant prospect. 

How does the brain pull all this off, given that the complexity of the networks inside our skull—trillions of connections among billions of brain cells—rivals that of the Internet?  One answer is energy efficiency: when a nerve cell communicates with another, the brain uses just a millionth of the energy that a digital computer expends to perform the equivalent operation. 

Beyond offering insight into the most complex known machine in the universe, further advances in this research could lead to entirely new kinds of computers.  Already scientists have built “neuromorphic” electronic circuits that mimic aspects of the brain’s signaling network.  [End of quote]

Engineer and physician Dr. Randy Guliuzza, in his book Made in His Image, wrote this in reference to human motion under the paragraph heading of “The Brain Integrates Sensations with Body Movement:”

The part of the brain managing much of this data and turning it into information is the cerebellum.  It contributes only 10 percent of brain mass but contains nearly 50 percent of the neurons in the brain.  Why?  Because the data it manipulates in just one second would fry the world’s best supercomputer at the same speed or take years to process at normal speeds.  [End of quote]

God has given man wisdom to create a computer and that is truly noteworthy, but it is not new and it will always be vastly inferior to the computer system God has placed between your ears that man attempts to mimic.  There can be no question that man was created in God’s image and after His likeness.  The super human brain is a standing testament. 

One science writer noted that the DNA, the building instructions of life, of every human on the earth could fit into one aspirin tablet.  An amazing engineering feat of man is in the miniaturization endeavor, but surely it cannot even sniff at the glory of God’s handiwork.

In the February 23, 2013 issue of Science News, Rachel Ehrenberg headlined with “DNA could soon prove practical for long-term data storage.”   A few paragraphs of that feature follow:

Big data could soon be stored in a very small package:  DNA.  A team of scientists has demonstrated that storing information in synthetic DNA could represent a feasible approach to managing data in the long term, bumping aside the magnetic tape favored by archivists today. 

To illustrate the technique, the research team stored five files—totaling about 750 kilobytes of data—as DNA: Watson and Crick’s classic 1953 paper describing the structure of DNA (a PDF), a color photograph (a JEPG), a 26-second excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech (an MP3), all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets (a text file) and another text file containing a code used in the translation process.  One sonnet, the researchers estimate, can be stored in 0.3 picograms, less than a trillionth of a gram, of DNA. 

“The sweet spot for this is archival applications,” says synthetic biologist Drew Endy of Stanford University, who was not involved in the work. 

DNA is most attractive for storing things that people will want to retrieve hundreds or thousands of years from now because it is the information storage medium for life itself. 

In a picture in the feature, the caption reads:

Bioinformaticist Nick Goldman points to a DNA sample in the bottom of a pinkie-sized test tube.  He and his colleagues used a similar amount of DNA to encode 750 kilobytes of data.  [End of quote]

That’s biomimicry. 

In the November 2012 issue of Popular Science, the headline on a short feature reads “Impenetrable Armor.”  Here is what it reports:

“In many areas of materials science, we’ve reached the best we can do with engineering techniques,” says McGill University engineer Francois Barthelat.  “I think nature has a lot of new tricks to teach us.”  The protective armor of many marine animals is up to 3,000 times tougher than the materials that form it.  By replicating the structure of fish scales, Barthelat similarly amplified the toughness of a composite material.  Engineers at Villanova University stacked ceramic crystals in a softer compound at angles similar to those in a conch shell.  Because cracks zigzag and peter out instead of shattering the material, it is 10 times as strong as the base ceramic.  Such advances could fortify armor in three to five years.  [End of quote]

Several years ago, we published the following:

The military organization called DARPA, which stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, released $50,000,000 in the spring of 2001 to various organizations to develop a legs-only exoskeleton for trials by 2003 and a whole-body exoskeleton by 2005.  The following excerpt is from the article titled “Really Special Forces” in the February 2002 issue of Discover magazine.  It reads:

Wearing a device built to DARPA specs, a grunt, without grunting, could heft 400 pounds, including bigger weapons, bulletproof armor, better communications devices, and more food, and remain continuously active for at least four hours.  Exoskeletons could be optimized for other combat tasks, too, such as running much faster than ordinary humans, jumping over fences, or picking up rubble during rescue efforts.  Add a soupcon of artificial intelligence and the suit could save its wearer if he is wounded.  “You could send a command to take this guy home,” says Stephen Jacobsen, CEO of Sarcos.  [End of quote]

Of course, this is not new: simply consider the human body.  This is obvious in the following quote from Jacobsen concerning the challenge of developing the exoskeleton, “Muscle is so [darn] good at this stuff.  If you took all of the muscles of a healthy adult male and put them in full contraction, they would lift 20 tons.  And they run on carrots.”  They acknowledge that the secret to success is to find a way to duplicate the efficiency of muscle tissue.  God said, “No new thing.” [End of quote]

God’s pronouncement that has taken such abuse by the willingly ignorant, that states “there is no new thing under the sun,” is true and that necessitates biomimicry.  There is no other way.

GOD SAID, Ecclesiastes 1:9-10:

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

GOD SAID, Isaiah 66:1-2:

1 Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?

2 For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.

MAN SAID:  Our destiny is in our own hands.  Man’s science will lead the way.  We are gods unto ourselves. 

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

 

 

References

Authorized King James Version

Aaronson, L., “Material World,” Popular Science, November 2012

Delbruck, T. and Sejnowski, T., “The Language of the Brain,” Scientific American, October 2012

Ehrenberg, R., “DNA could soon prove practical for long-term data storage,” Science News, February 23, 2013

GodSaidManSaid, No New Thing

GodSaidManSaid, The Superhuman Brain

Guliuzza, R., Made in His Image, Institute for Creation Research, 2009

 

• Go Further With Christ
• Email To a Friend
• Comments or Questions?