It’s no secret that I’m interested in things that strongly correlate with nature. Even if I didn’t realize it at first, my focuses in immunotherapy and machine learning are both heavily inspired, or in the case of immunotherapies, use nature. More interesting than a personal anecdote, however, is the fact that these are some of the most successful innovations in their respective fields. Some more include: CRISPR, the Eastgate Center in Zimbabwe
While it could be a coincidence that systems based on nature could offer us the best solutions, I think that there is much more behind this. In this short analysis, I will try to explain my reasoning behind studying these fields and using nature as a basis for future innovations.
Before humans were able to change the trajectory of an asteroid, rip and heal the ozone layer, and edit our genes, we were very much at the mercy of nature. If a famine wasn’t starving us, then a natural disaster may be on the way soon. Either that or a deadly disease started rapidly spreading across the world. Whatever way you look at it, humans were trying to survive in the conditions that nature put us through. However, things have changed. Since the dawn of civilization, we have been getting better at defying the odds and getting around the things that we used to dread. We created vaccines to protect us from sickness, we created planes to make up for our lack of wings, and we created homes to protect us from the elements.
The product of our fear of nature was trying to escape it. For the most part, it worked and we successfully were able to create a better life for many people on Earth (for the most part). Now that we have crossed these easy to medium-level challenges, there are still enormous mountains that need to be climbed. These are the problems like brainpower, computing, and cancer. To overcome these challenges, we may need to start looking at nature as not something to overcome, but to learn from.
Every time we think we figured out how nature works, there is always something new that comes up. Even the simplest entities, like viruses, are very far from being fully understood. To fully understand nature’s complexity and tangibly understand it, we have to look at it from its root: mathematics. Mathematics is a system that is so deeply rooted in our universe that it’s existence is nothing short of astonishing. It can cover topics so simple such as addition, which helps a kindergartener learn math, to advanced calculus which got us to the moon. There is one thing that connects both of these concepts though: vast complexity.
While everybody can see how complicated calculus is, it is harder to see how number sense could hold complexity. Well, this is why the Collatz conjecture is so frightening to people. It is one of the simplest patterns that someone could think of, simply multiplying by three and adding one at an odd number, and dividing by two at an even number. With this pattern, somehow every single positive integer will come to the same pattern: 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1, …
Even more terrifying, we still have no clue why. While mathematics is a complicated topic to understand, it’s even harder to understand the complexities of its most basic form. This is why I study mathematics, to see those connections behind the questions with uncomplicated math.
Now that we know nature is so complex, why does it work so well in our systems? I think the reason behind this is proof of concept. Evolution is the progression of species through long periods of time, so the systems that managed to survive are, for the most part, very well adapted for the problems they tackle. If they were terrible, then they simply wouldn’t have survived the test of time. So if all of these solutions already exist for us, why don’t we use them?
Sometimes, we don’t understand nature enough to fully see how its solution even works. For example, we could never have created neural networks without first understanding how neurons in our brain work. Without understanding the system, it’s impossible to create something modeling it. You may ask: doesn’t this go against the idea that we never know something fully about nature? I think that while this is true, for the outcomes that we need to get, knowledge of the entire system isn’t needed. When we first start out, we didn’t need a vast expertise in how the immune system works to make a CAR-T cell. All we needed was to know that T cells exist, we can design artificial receptors, and we can implant that receptor gene into the T cell. There was no need for understanding the complex signaling pathways of immune cells to optimize the construction of the receptor.
As we improve our solutions though, we start to realize that we need more knowledge. This is another benefit of following nature: it provides a pathway to understanding more about our world. If we were just trying to cure cancer with brute force, we would just be trying to design new drugs aimlessly. However, when we follow nature, we always know we can go deeper and understand more. I think that this a reason why we have been so successful at engineering things that seem like magic. In physics, the things we try to find are always fundamental parts of the universe, so when we try to come up with solutions, it is always tied back to nature. In biology, however, this is not the case as instead of going deep into the fundamentals, we look at the surface level.
So by following nature, we are able to come to better solutions, understand nature more fundamentally, and gain more knowledge; seems like a win-win to me.
Thanks for reading.