Natural Intelligence by Gorrisen

Ref: Leen Gorrisen (2020). NI: Building on the Future of Innovation on millions of years of natural intelligence. Studio Transitio.

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Summary

• While exponential technologies and radical disruption have gained a lot of air-play in the world of innovation, a tsunami of profound, new insights uncovered in the life sciences, many of which are real game changers for the ways we think about change, innovation, and evolution, has largely gone unnoticed.

• The focus of this book is to bridge the world of biology with the world of business.

• Our history shows there are two processes that lead to profound transformation: epiphanies or crises.

• Natural design represents a billion years of evolutionary design. Tapping into the oldest form of intelligence can help us (re) design products, manufacturing processes, business models, buildings, factories, cities, and landscapes to be supportive to life.

• The nature of the future and the future of nature are interdependent.

• Recent scientific evidence shows that ecotoxicity, like air pollution, impedes cognitive ability and while techno-economic progress has significantly extended both human wealth and life span, the number of healthy years is actually declining.

• The most promising fields for future-proofing innovation are biomimicry, permaculture, regenerative design and development, biophilic design and living systems thinking. These fields work to shift innovation from degradation to regeneration and from short-term profit to long-term benefit. And each improves efficiency, adaptability, and resilience.

• Natural Intelligence (NI): The combination of all success factors that have allowed life to endure despite millions of years of change, disruption and upheaval. The core principle of NI is ‘leave the world better than you found it.’

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Rules of Nature

• Network: Everything is part of an interconnected network. The stronger the network, the more resilient the network. Interdependency rules; nothing occurs in isolation.

  • The health of any individual or system is dependent on the health of its subsystems and on the health of the environment it is nested in.

  • It takes an Ecosystem to sustain an ecosystem.

  • Every component is important.

  • There is no taking from one component without giving to another. Never take all.

• Personal Responsibility: Change starts with the individual. Change may even drive evolution instead of evolution driving change.

• Cooperation: Cooperation is more natural than competition.

  • Mutually Beneficial Relationships (+/+), where the fitness of both ­, have a much better chance to last.

  • Innovation and evolution depend primarily on collaboration.

  • It is the avoidance of competition that drives evolution.

  • Invest in the health of others to ensure your own.

• Patterns: What happens on the micro level, happens on the micro level. Patterns repeat across scales.

  • Small changes can cascade into big changes in less than a decade.

  • Indirect effects are often more important that direct effects.

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Evolution

• Interaction Based Evolution: It is not mutations that invent new things, it’s the network-level learning which absorbs meaning from context that sparks evolution.

• In the short term, competition might decide who is successful and who is not. Because competition is always costly, biologists refer to it as a double negative relationship, one that lowers the fitness of both parties in terms of time and energy lost for more generative activities. Predation and parasitism on the other hand, are (+/-) because one wins and the other loses.

• The popular conviction that it is a dog-eat-dog world out there does not correspond with what we find in the natural world. The Natural world banks on cooperation and other strategies to avoid competition. It is the avoidance of competition that drives evolution, not competition itself.

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Networks

• Communities with rich biodiversity, meaning high genetic and species diversity, are better able to avert extinction cascades than simple communities with low species richness because in poor communities, the disappearance of one species can trigger a chain of events, or cascade, where one loss leads to another and another and another.

• Biodiversity inoculates against extinction cascades, because it increases resilience and robustness.

• Lack of diversity leads to tunnel visions, homogeneity, and exacerbations, and prevents balancing feedback loops, which are necessary to prevent runaway change.

• Species rich forests store twice as much C than single species plantations.

• Regenerative Value Creation: Processes where organisms add value to their local environment in a way that enhances the entire biosphere.

  • In nature, long-term evolutionary success is the result of regenerative value creation.

  • Regenerative thinking is therefore very different from sustainability thinking, because it starts not from a mindset of problem-solving but from a mindset of potential, not from a mindset of responsible consumerism (what can I extract sustainably), but from a mindset of stewardship (what value-adding processes can I enable). A regenerative practitioner therefore looks beyond self-actualization in order to live out a value-adding role in the wider system.

• Resiliency depends on three important features:

  • Diversity because it is uncertain what part will be disturbed.

  • Redundancy, because it is uncertain how many will be affected.

  • Decentralization, because it is uncertain where the disturbances will hit.

Ocean Networks

• Sunshine is taken by Plant Plankton which is eaten by Krill which are eaten by Fish which are eaten by Whale populations which emitWhale excrement which provides Scarce Ocean nutrients including Fe and N.

• Great whales (from orca predation) eat sea otters which eat­ sea urchins which eat kelp forests which provide C storage and a weaker buffer against costal storms.

• Phycobilisomes: A mass of light harvesting antennae that cover the surface of fluorescent microalgae and are responsible for converting light into energy at 95% efficiency.

• Photic Zone: Ocean zone where photosynthesis is possible.

• Marine organisms grow their exoskeletons by extracting C, Mg, and Ca from the seawater.

• Plant Plankton: Contributes >50% of all O to our atmosphere, sequestering ~37B tons of CO2 each year (IMF Study).

  • Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS): A chemical signal emitted by marine plankton when it experiences stress from predation or UV radiation. DMS is an important chemical involved in global climate regulation. When the sun burns too hot, the chemical filters into the air, where it acts as a nucleus for condensation.

  • Researchers calculated that even a 1% increase in phytoplankton productivity- thanks to whale activity- would sequester hundreds of millions of tons of additional C a year.

Land Networks

• Wolf Populations feed on Elk population which eat Vegetation which stops Erosion and provides habitats for Birds & Rodents which are fed on by Scavengers (beavers, weasels, hawks, foxes) which are eaten by Predators which decreases Beaver Dams, which stabilizes river banks and changes river systems.

  • Beaver Dams: Catalyze a number of important processes like GW recharge, gravel deposition, floodplain reconnection, wetland habitat formation, and riparian vegetation expansion.

• Fungi

  • Fungi are one of the oldest life forms on Earth; Fungi are several hundred million years older than plants.

  • Mycelium: The fungi living in the subsoil. Fungi and trees trade resources through Mycelium Networks.

  • In field tests, bee colonies that were fed fungi extracts, exhibited a 79x reduction in the deformed wing virus and a 45K reduction in the Lake Sinai virus compared to control colonies.

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Bio-technology

• Bio-Inspired: Learning to adapt to changing conditions by developing rootedness, relationality, dialogue, and responsiveness (like plants).

• Bio-Logical.

• Bio-Chemical: Nature’s chemistry achieves astounding performance and is nontoxic, biodegradable, and water-based. Nature’s life-friendly chemistry recipe starts from three basic rules. First, all chemicals break down into benign and reusable components. Second, nature uses water as a solvent for reactions. Third, she builds selectively with only a small subset of elements. While there are 118 elements in the periodic table, nature uses only 28 of them to create the billions of unique creatures that roam our planet.

  • The seeds of fire-prone N. American Jack Pine Trees can withstand temperatures of up to 370 C.

  • Hippos create their own sunscreen, which moisturizes and prevents infections.

  • Arctic wood frogs freeze solid and defrost without damage.

  • Spider silk is stronger than Kevlar, yet made at ambient temperature from dead flies and water. Nature’s chemistry achieves astounding performance and is nontoxic, biodegradable, and water-based.

• Bio-Fabrication: Nature optimizes functions while maximizing value. Minimum material for maximum effect; less material, more design. Building like nature leads to superior benefits in terms of design, strength, resource efficiency, environmental qualities, and it saves money.

  • Nature uses only proteins and polysaccharides to build all of life. Everything, from cell walls to muscles, from bones to trees, and from mice to elephants. These two basic polymers can be molded in the most versatile of ways. They can build soft tissues like skin or nerves, flexible materials like leaves or twigs, and strong materials like shells or horns. They can also build powerful part like wings, or hearts, or complex parts like brains, or eyes.

  • Termite mounds in Africa are exposed to roasting temperatures during the day and close to freezing temperatures at night. Yet the fungus grown inside for food, needs a stable climate of about 30 degrees. The termites achieve this via a smart design of ventilation tunnels that they open and close during the day. Australian compass termites create optimal thermoregulation by aligning the long axis of the mound north-south, hence the name. This way, then can capture the warmth of the morning sun after the cold night while exposing minimal mound surface area to the sun at midday.

  • Unlike man-made manufacturing and construction, where strength is derived from mass, nature derives strength from structure and shape. In nature, material is expensive and shape is cheap.

• Bio-Data: Distributed leadership, collective intelligence, and collective decision making (i.e., ants).

• Bio-Hacking: DNA influences our behavior and our behavior also influences our DNA.

  • Livnat empirically shows that new skills can be anchored into our genetic codes so that they become innate.

• Bio-Philia: How we design buildings and spaces to energize, restore, heal, and improve being.

  • The restorative impact of nature is so effective that merely looking at nature through a window, boosts mental energy.

  • Tests given in schools show that children in presence of plants scored much better than those without.

  • A study involving 3585 participants from four European cities, demonstrated that growing up without regular exposure to nature leads to higher levels of nervousness and feelings of depression in adult life.

  • A research overview by Jana Soderlund and Peter Newman shows that the socio-psychological benefits of biophilic design include improved mental health, reduced stress, attention restoration, increased wellbeing, decreased violence and crime, faster healing rates in hospitals, and greater altruistic behavior. The environmental benefits include improvements to water, air, biodiversity, and reduced energy consumption and urban heat island effects while the economic benefits from biophilic design include better workplace productivity, improved health, increased retail potential, increased property values and employee attraction, and increased livability in dense areas.

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Business

• The innovation challenge of the 21c for business is in how to shift the nature of innovation from the lower levels of existence (operate and maintain) to the higher levels of potential (improve and regenerate).

• There is a big role for business to lead this transition. Business has the resources, the brain power, the creativity, and the boldness to radically change the innovation for the better.

• Challenges

  • Most business create products and provide service without giving attention to the byproducts that arise in their processes.

  • Innovation as usual keeps organizations in the outdated take-make-waste model of improving production or in the sustaining operations (reduce negative impact) model inspired by the ambition to reduce harm. Both result in degeneration of the life support system on which we all depend.

  • Regenerative value creation is where current business innovations fall short.

• Solutions

  • Promote change not only from the top down but the bottom up, in order to address the intrinsic motivation of the employees needed for effective transformation.

  • Foster, hire, and promote the most tolerant, curious, and friendliest employees- because cleverness alone is not enough to build collective intelligence and the intelligence of the collective.

  • Shift from degenerative to regenerative, and quickly.

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Agriculture

• Land can provide far more services than just tons of grain. It can produce O and soil, purify air and water, cycle nutrients, detoxify pollutants, store C, and safeguard biodiversity. It can also support climate regulation, buffer floods, and cool heat waves. And it provides an aesthetic, therapeutic, recreational, educational, and spiritual value.

• Permaculture (Permanent Agriculture): A design philosophy and framework that draws inspiration from natural ecosystems to develop more ecologically sound and regenerative ways of living and feeding the world. One of the basic principles of permaculture, to design according to at least 7 different layers or dimensions: the overstory layer, the understory layer, the shrub layer, the herbaceous layer, the ground cover layer, the root layer, and the vine layer.

  • The first thing we need to do is to imitate the role of pioneer plants to improve the soil by adding organic matter, such as mulching, introducing green manure plants, and adding compost. Adding dung and organic matter makes the topsoil richer. More nutrients mean more plant growth, more photosynthesis and more C that is transported into the soils. Richer soils also mean a richer subsoil microbial life, which in turn promote the stabilization of C in the soil, which makes it an effective and stable C sink.

  • Permaculture farms can produce >80 different edibles, albeit in relatively small quantities.

  • Permaculture land also produces a wide range of ecosystem services, C storage, safeguarding and promoting biodiversity, and increasing food security.

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Solutions

• Shift individual responses from reactive to anticipative and from degenerative to regenerative.

• If you are really looking to move the world forward, begin by innovating on the inside.

• Renature cities.

• Banks can lower interest rates if they assess the land is getting healthier and better over time, or set higher interest rates when activities are lowering the health of the land through erosion.

• Problem-solve in terms of networks and ecosystems as opposed to isolated technologies.

• Focus on, even prioritize, resilience.

• Restore the oceans so that whales and sea otter populations (keystone species) can return to their original numbers.  

• Buy a heat pump to manage refrigerant emissions.  

• Focus on Regenerative Value Creation.

• Expand your (your organizations) thinking from what can I do, to what can I enable, and more importantly, who do I have to become to achieve a positive and generative impact.

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Terminology

• Bio-Utilization: Using nature for beneficial purposes such as integrating green roofs in buildings to promote energy efficiency, air quality, and water retention.

• Brain-Gut Axis: An extensive network of neurons, chemical transmitters, and hormones that enables constant communication between the two.

• Cancer: Cells inside our body forget that they are part of something bigger, that they have a specific role to play, and instead start operating on their own agenda.

• Cryptobiosis: Reversible metabolic state.

• DNA: The blueprint of genetic instructions laid out at conception.

  • RNA: Translates DNA instructions into manufacturing orders, turning information into proteins.

• Ecotone: Where two communities meet and integrate.

• Emergent Properties: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which arises from the collaborative functioning of a system but do not belong to any one part or individual of that system.

• Friendliness: The absence of fear and aggression and the presence of tolerance, interest, and curiosity.

• Guilding: Putting species together that are naturally inclined to engage in reciprocal relationships with each other.

• Keystone Species: Species that create favorable conditions, that enable regeneration from the bottom-up.

• Monoculture: A uniform system built out of one species.

• Natural Intelligence: The intelligence deeply embedded in all life forms that stood the test of time; the success factors that allowed life to endure despite major upheaval and millions of years of change and disruption.

• Nestedness: A pattern ingrained in natures designs and the interdependence of nested systems is based upon the principle of value adding.

• Polymer: A substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Common Natural Polymers:

  • Cellulose: Found in algae, plants, and trees.

  • Chitin: Found in fungi, crustaceans, and insects.

  • Keratin: Found in all vertebrates, including humans.

• Regenerate: A process of renewal that leads to a higher order of health, wealth, vitality, and viability.

• Regenerative: Tending to or characterized by action which leads to a better, higher or more worthy state than the existing one.

• Sheer, Total, Utter Neglect (STUN).

• Silvopasture: An ancient farming practice that integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock, is the highest ranked C mitigation solution in Agriculture.

• Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous, Interdependent, and Nested (VUCAIN).

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Resources

• Biomimicry 3.8 (https://biomimicry.net/): The first organization worldwide to translate natures pre-tested strategies into design principles for human innovation challenges.

• Biorock Tech (https://www.biorock-indonesia.com/): Business that uses methods based on mineral accretion to restore coral reefs, fishery habitats, and increase shoreline protection.

• Blue Planet (https://www.blueplanetsystems.com/): A CA company developing and commercializing scalable solutions for C drawdown that are both economically and technically sustainable. Blue Planet uses similar mineralization processes as marine ecosystems to create C negative building materials.

• Calera (https://forterausa.com/): CA business that makes cement by turning C into materials.

  • Flue gas from coal plants/steel plants or natural gas plants + seawater for Ca & Mg = Cement + Clean water + Cleaner Air

• Drawdown (https://drawdown.org/): Studies and provides solutions to myriad problems of Climate Change.

• Interface (https://www.interface.com/US/en-US.html): Business that designs resilient and sustainable products. Interface started off with product innovation (entropy carpet tile), then moved on to process innovation (tac-tiles), and then to system innovation (a factory like a forest).

  • Live Zero: Do business in ways that give back whatever is taken from the Earth.

  • Love Carbon: Stop seeing C as the enemy, and start using it as a resource.

  • Let Nature Cool: Support our biospheres ability to regulate the climate.

  • Lead Industrial Re-revolution: Transform industry into a force for climate progress.

• Mission Zero (https://www.missionzero.tech/): An initiative to eliminate all negative impacts from businesses on the environment.

• New Forest Farm (https://newforestfarm.us/): A 43 hA perennial agricultural system run by Mark Shepard in WI focused on agricultural design in natures image. 

• Regen Network (https://www.regen.network/): Provides the tools that are needed to regenerate our planet, and the networks current focus is on realigning the economics of agriculture with ecological health, with an aim to develop a global market space that rewards regenerative farming practices by combining modern remote sensing technology with blockchain distributed ledgers.

• Swarm Lab (https://www.theswarmlab.com/): UC Berkeley Lab that studies the mechanisms underlying the coordination of large animal groups and their applications to complex problems.

• Turbulent (https://www.turbulent.be/): Founded in 2015; develops efficient hydropower plants for rivers and canals with a low height difference (1.5-5m).

• USGBC (https://www.usgbc.org/): An interlaced system of shared information across the entire network, organized around important nodes (like keystone species) rather than hierarchical.

• Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry (https://www.warnerbabcock.com/): Develops environmentally benign chemicals and technologies to eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.

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Misc Quotes

• Attempting to preserve the form of things long after form no longer serves function, a certain formula for failure.

• The four beasts that devour their keeper- ego, envy, greed, and ambition.

• If you have ever slept with a mosquito in your room then you know that no one is too small to matter.

• The current burn-out epidemic is not a crisis of work overload, but one of meaning: people lack meaningfulness in their jobs.-Rogier De Langhe, Belgian Economic Philosopher.

• Instead of Control and Demand, nature banks on adapt and evolve.

• Sustainability is not an endpoint but rather a by-product of regenerative value creation.

• From the 80K man-made chemicals in use today, fewer than 500 have been evaluated for toxicity.

• While thinking creates new thoughts, thoughting only downloads old ones. Thinking is more energy-intensive, so the brain automatically goes to thoughting unless you train it to do the otherwise.

• Spending time in a forest can reduce symptoms of psychological stress, depression, and hostility while improving sleep, vigor, and vitality.-Selhuband & Logan.

• Since 1950, humans have made 8.3B tons of plastic.

• The immensity of data and information that assaults our lives is conditioned by an ever-declining ratio of social, economic, and spiritual value. Vast scientific, technological, and economic power is thus unleashed with inadequate understanding of its systemic propensity for destruction, or sufficient wisdom to creatively, constructively guide its evolution.-Hock.

• According to the recent circularity gap report, our entire industrial system operates at only 9% efficiency. That means >90% of resources end up as waste.

• In nature, sustainability is a byproduct, not a goal in and of itself.  

• Zero sum, the general goal of sustainability, namely, to eradicate negative or degenerative impacts. Does not lead to long term success.

• Cephalopods have developed the uncanny ability to edit and redirect their own brain genes by editing their own RNA to produce different proteins than the ones called for by the DNA.

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Chronology

• 1995: Wolves, a keystone species, are reintroduced to Yellowstone NP.-NI by Gorissen.  

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