My husband's work in R&D often involves him looking to nature to find ways to improve the efficiency of designs and materials. Evolution has done a lot of trial and error that often results in the most efficient way to deal with a problem, so giving a look to natural adaptions seems like a smart move.

And that's why everything that we've designed to solve a problem in our house is a crab.

[–] Chriswild@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You'd be surprised how inefficient much of evolution is. Look at a giraffe's laryngeal nerve and you'll see what I mean but because it hasn't been a reason to die or deter mating it carries on.

Even in humans or knees are awful but because we evolved from monkeys our knees had to bend backwards to climb. So to get around this we have long feet and an ankle that serves as the fulcrum instead of knees like basically every other know bipedal species.

I could ramble on about this for a while but I'll spare you my nerdy excitement.

[–] Cheskaz@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I'm aware that a trait surviving doesn't necessarily mean it's the best and I'm not trying to say that everything from the natural world is something you'd put in a design (you truly cannot understand how much I hate the human musculoskeletal system).

With that said, there are also a lot of really cool adaptions that can be utilised in R&D. My point was more a general comment about biomimicry being rad. Also, I think I was considering evolution as something of a...database that can be good to use when doing R&D.

Sorry if this isn't very coherent...I'm meant to be asleep...

Also always happy to hear about weird quirks of evolution!

[–] Chriswild@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh I'm sorry. I'm not trying to make you feel like I think you're ignorant or something. I'm basically looking for an excuse to talk about a topic I enjoy.

Again, my apologies if I made you feel talked down to or anything negative.

[–] Cheskaz@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I didn't mean to come across defensively and I apologise that I did! Your comment was rad and meant I looked up the cool, weird U turn nerve! Apparently the Supersaurus is estimated to have a RLN of 28m!

I hope you keep finding reasons to talk about topics you like and I'll try to be mindful of how comments I make may not be coming across as I intend them to.

[–] MashedPotatoJeff@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

God damn crab people!

I'm going to go out of my way to make my solutions more crab-like now. Maybe they'll get better.