"Intelligent" Design

Here is a fascinating list of intelligent and smart design approach (no pun intended): of design following or borrowing from nature. Such cross-domain fertilization is a truly powerful way of cracking some of the hardest challenges of the modern world.

In a previous post we discussed the potential of biomimetics or mimetics in general. What is needed is the ability to connect scientific challenges with potential solutions from learning in nature and a variety of other domains.

Despite valiant efforts by some academicians and some in industry, such a project needs a lot more resources to reach critical-mass. One wishes there was a full-fledged collaborative effort from government, academia and big pharma and other businesses to push for a shared knowledge corpus (a la Wikipedia), but published in a machine-understandable or machine-query-able format that could be leveraged for such cross-domain breakthroughs.

The Semantic Web concept is a a great step in that direction, but we hope baby-steps could be taken by people and organizations just publishing more metadata and better descriptors of their data, on which approaches like the above can be built upon. It certainly need not be a single repository like the Wikipedia, but a just a collection of sources much like the current WWW.