Nature’s playbook
Metadata
Highlights
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Nature’s tactics for overcoming the pitfalls of warm-bloodedness illustrate a key strategy for any complex adaptive system – whether that’s organs managing flows of nutrients, blood and enzymes in an animal, or the global interchange of energy and nutrients between the biosphere, atmosphere and solid Earth. Built-in mechanisms to self-correct, maintain homeostasis and keep conditions amenable for life are critical for our planet and its inhabitants.
- The yin and yang of networks perhaps provides nature’s most essential lesson for the human-constructed world. Modern civilisation can’t function without trade networks and flows of information. Investments in redundancy, with multiple routes within networks, pay off, as they do for loopy leaf veins and plant-pollinator partners.
- The termites’ abilities in self-organisation speak to humanity’s growing awareness that people can sometimes solve their own problems from the bottom-up.