Archetype How

By RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR

It’s not that only human beings devise technologies. Some animals “invent” too -- to carve and manipulate environmental objects and improve their quality of life.

Chimps, for example, peel off twigs to make better termite traps. Beavers temper and arrange “logs” and “sticks” to make handy dams, just as much as a host of worms and insect larvae accumulate sand grains and “cement” them together to make their homes. However, one basic fact remains: each of these species has not more than a single miracle to sculpt.

This, therefore, calls for a true perception of what is, quite apparently, the most fundamental characteristic of the human species -- one that may have determined our origins itself. The spin-off: our technology, as a result, has always been a truly natural and inescapable progression of life -- as intelligent, thinking species, influenced by the many codes of the Universe.

Agreed that this may not always be a rational theory, all right, but what is important is a sequence of our own biological characteristics that have emerged over time. For example, take the fact that we human beings have an endoskeleton based on the “lever” principle, unlike large animals that may necessarily be viewed in the context of metazoans -- they are earthly, rather than marine.

Scholars acknowledge that an appropriate comparison for human technology exists: the evolved technology of living organisms. So, the big question: could we continue to characterise human biology as technology? Maybe, yes. However, the truth remains that biological technology has been shaped by natural selection, even if such an observation implies external constraints, or refined differences in our progress.

These disparities may also be enough grist for our own technology mill, when we move increasingly towards a position comparable to biological systems -- one that promptly guides genetic elements. What’s more, the biological world too includes an array of technologies -- call it mechanical, chemical and computational. Yet, the argument prevails: our technology of biological chemistry, in its totality, needs analyses, while the technology of biological computation still remains quite unfathomed.

Interestingly, the likeness of engineering with biomechanics is itself rich enough to supply extraordinary insights into both biological chemistry and bio-computation. Prokaryotes, for example, are biochemical geniuses, directing basic chemistry to make their living and also identifying their roles, although they do extraordinarily little orchestration with external mechanical forces.

Some scholars observe that the absence of structural metals, in biology, is proof enough that animals would be far better off if only they had them. You may not agree with such a hypothesis, though you’d be tempted to. Here’s another analogy. The pliability of metals explains for their elevated toughness, but organisms have found other routes to attain it. And, if “elasticity” also underlines the usage of metals in human technology, there’s nothing like a mechanism at work that would allow an animal to mend a deformed tooth.

The argument that the metals we use in our technology -- iron and aluminium -- were ignored by evolution, because of their poor presence in seawater, therefore, holds no weight when investigated from the geological standpoint. Three billion years ago, when free oxygen was a scarce commodity, iron and uranium were delicately soluble; the great iron deposits on our living planet are enough evidence too of the “crystallisation” of iron that helped oxidative photosynthesis to come of age.

The inference? As we come to grips with the rapidly-expanding fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology, cultivated comparisons of the duo will perpetually transform the way we look at either archetype.

For good reasons, too.