The Unnatural Economy - Part 1: The One Percent Solution: Why 3.8 Billion Years of R&D Matters

Key Takeaways

1. Nature’s 3.8 billion years of R&D: Evolution has tested trillions of designs, with only 1% surviving—offering vetted solutions for human problems.
2. Biomimicry as economic imperative: Learning from nature provides energy efficiency, waste elimination, and competitive advantage.
3. From hippo sunscreen to sharkskin paint: Biological adaptations solve complex problems without toxins or side effects.
4. The new gold rush: Biomimicry could generate $1 trillion in global GDP by 2025.

Nature’s Superior Sunscreen

Most young ladies sunning by the pool or beach probably aren’t thinking about a hippopotamus, let alone its perspiration. Yet, in a stark illustration of nature’s engineering superiority, the rust-colored secretion of the hippo provides a highly effective, four-in-one sunblock. While humans rely on salt water evaporation to cool the skin, the hippopotamus secretes a complex, nontoxic blend of chemicals that is simultaneously antiseptic, insect-repelling, antifungal, and an excellent sunscreen. Researchers found two pigments in the mucus blend that absorb light across the ultraviolet-visible range, with crystalline structures ensuring the material spreads effortlessly across the skin—a crucial feature for an animal that cannot apply lotion by hand. The market for human sunscreen is substantial, but many of the existing eighteen hundred products fail to live up to their claims and introduce toxins into the bloodstream, creating secondary cancer risks. This single biological adaptation illustrates a profound truth: nature routinely solves complex problems—like integrated sun protection and anti-infection—without generating the side effects that plague human industrial design.

This contrast highlights the catastrophic dilemma facing humanity. We are living through a mass extinction of species, coping with escalating cancer and disease rates, navigating unstable fuel prices, and dealing with weather that is rapidly growing more severe. The viability of our race is in increasing danger, despite living in a period with more trained researchers, engineers, and doctors than in all of history combined. Our current environmental and economic woes are largely the result of an out-of-date way of doing business, rooted in unsustainable industrial methods.

The Biomimicry Revolution

The survival of humanity requires a fundamental shift in our attitude toward nature: from attempting to dominate and manipulate her to learning from her ingenuity. The key lies in embracing biomimicry—the rapidly growing discipline that identifies, analyzes, and adapts natural strategies to solve technological problems. The story of evolution is less about random chance and more about a rigorous 3.8-billion-year research and development cycle where roughly 99% of designs that didn’t work got recalled by the Manufacturer. The 1% that survived can teach profound lessons about how things should be made, how they work, and how they fit harmoniously. The stakes are nothing less than our collective future: we must leap into this new business and technology model or face catastrophe due to outdated industrial methods.

Evolution’s Efficiency Lessons

The Great Vetting Mechanism

Biomimicry, derived from the Greek bios (life) and mimesis (to imitate), is founded on the principle of optimal resource management. Nature constantly evolves, survives, and thrives while avoiding the depletion or endangerment of its base resources. It is a system that demands efficiency, constantly testing and vetting solutions across millions of species and billions of life-forms. The designs that succeed are, by definition, clean, green, and sustainable.

The human approach, formalized during the Industrial Revolution, took a dramatically different and short-sighted path. Innovation focused on “heat, beat, and treat” methods, driven by the cheap and plentiful power available at the time. Instead of seeking efficiency, the philosophy became: “If you needed more speed, you didn’t look to nature to find a more efficient way, you just shoveled in more fuel and blasted your way forward”. This paradigm valued uniformity and mass production, making thousands of the same forms out of flat metal plates and square building blocks. In the rush to understand the world mechanistically, nature’s design genius—the blueprints for non-toxic, streamlined efficiency—was left behind.

The immediate consequence of this divergence is shocking inefficiency. Nature’s mandate is to use the least amount of material and energy to accomplish the task. Consider the energy management inherent in the human body: the ultra-efficient cardiovascular system, comprised of 96,561 km (60,000 miles) of plumbing, is driven by approximately one-and-a-half watts of power—less than the consumption of many night-lights. The fact that any machine can drive anything 96,561 km (60,000 miles) on such minimal power underscores the distance between human engineering and biological mastery.

The Economic Cost of “Not Invented Here”

The mounting side effects of our wasteful energy use—polluted air and water, diminishing fossil fuels, global warming—have created the imperative for a new global economy centered on biomimicry. For businesses, the benefits of adopting nature’s methodologies translate directly into profitability and competitive advantage. Bio-inspired technology is inherently energy efficient because evolution has carried out trillions of competitive experiments over millions of years.

The economic projections are compelling. By 2025, biomimicry could represent an estimated $1 trillion of global gross domestic product, with $300 billion in the U.S. alone. Furthermore, an additional $50 billion could be realized just from the consequential reduction of carbon dioxide pollution and resource preservation. Venture capital investment in this field, currently intersecting with clean tech and biotech, holds the potential to eclipse those sectors in the years to come.

Biomimicry delivers competitive advantage through several specific economic vectors:

1. Efficiency: Designs are dramatically more energy efficient than traditional inventions.
2. Material Sourcing: Nature builds only with locally derived materials, eliminating high transport energy costs.
3. Waste Elimination: Nature’s manufacturing principle, mirrored by nanotechnology, builds devices molecule by molecule, resulting in zero offcuts or excess.
4. Toxicity Reduction: Nature cannot afford to poison itself; green chemistry, a branch of biomimicry, develops molecules that are safe by design, reducing liability and compliance costs.

Evidence of a Quiet Revolution

The momentum is undeniable, confirmed by objective metrics. The Da Vinci Index, the first formal measure of biomimicry activity, showed that between 2000 and 2010, biomimicry activity expanded more than seven and a half times, maintaining a compound growth rate of 22%. Scholarly articles on biomimicry, a precursor to industrial adoption, multiplied five times in ten years, with engineering and chemistry being major focuses.

Early commercial successes illustrate the immediate payoff. The most well-known example is Velcro, created by a Swiss inventor who examined tenacious burrs under a microscope and discovered the hook-and-loop structure. In modern applications, German scientists developed a special paint, inspired by the texture of sharkskin (dermal denticles), that, when applied to a ship hull, reduces drag by 5%. This single improvement can result in savings of 1,814 tonnes (2,000 tons) of fuel per vessel annually.

Looking elsewhere, scientists are learning about computer network optimization by studying the pathways of slime molds seeking food, and are researching anticoagulants modeled on leeches. This shows that biomimicry is more than just copying shapes; it is a systematic design and problem-solving process that seeks optimal strategies related to form, function, and ecosystem.

Reclaiming Nature’s Wisdom

The cumulative evidence demonstrates that our fundamental economic and environmental problems stem from a deeply ingrained, outdated paradigm—a paradigm that views nature as a warehouse of raw materials waiting to be plundered, rather than a master instructor. This shortsighted orientation has obscured nature’s library of elegant, efficient methodologies, freely available to those who ask the right questions.

With scientists having already identified over two million species, and possibly up to one hundred million in total, the variety of vetted solutions is immense and represents a truly inexhaustible resource. Each of these life-forms, successful adapters in a competitive world, offers hundreds of optimized solutions applicable to human technological, biological, and design challenges. The story doesn’t have to end in catastrophic decline.

Biomimicry is the new gold rush, a wave of possibility rapidly gaining momentum. It offers a path to greater wealth and economic sustainability without demanding sacrifice or compromising the planet. By studying and faithfully copying nature’s strategies for energy use, we can avert the escalating energy crisis. This approach shifts the survival imperative from an individual, competitive struggle against nature to a collaborative partnership with nature.

The adoption of biomimicry is akin to finding an ancient, essential design manual that was discarded during the frantic early days of industrialization. By reclaiming this 3.8-billion-year-old wisdom, we stop burning our paycheck and start building a civilization that is, finally, conducive to life.