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This article does have a point. Namely, nature is way better at building machines than humans are. Compare this bee stinger to a needle or the wings of a butte

This article does have a point. Namely, nature is way better at building machines than humans are. Compare this bee stinger to a needle or the wings of a butterfly to the iridescent materials we can create today. https://i.imgur.com/a7wMjlu.png https://i.imgur.com/a7wMjlu.png

gsatic 4y ago
Nature had a head start. If you give me 100 million years I can build an ant too.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  - snorrah 4y ago
  - manquer 4y ago
    There is no discussion possible with that line of reasoning. Invoking God is terminus for any discussion independent of your beliefs. In your frame of reference consider as though God is building it through the human. It still make no difference, whether we could still do it through conscious design than just evolutionary pressures which was what this discussion is really about.
  - l3uwin 4y ago
    Oh, which God?
- polishdude20 4y ago
  At that point it's not you, its nature. Because you are an extension of nature. In a way, needles built by humans are needles built by nature.
  - k__ 4y ago
    We need to be more specific here. It's both nature, but "evolution" took millions of years to build the ant, and "humans" could probably do it I a fraction of the time.
    - polishdude20 4y ago
      Yes but evolution took that many years to build humans. I'm zooming out here and recognizing we are just another outgrowth of nature doing its thing.
ketchuptomorrow 4y ago
Relevant reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/cfm1z8/microscopic_look_at_a_bee_stinger_vs_the_point_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/cfm1z... The picture is of a bee stinger compared to a sewing needle. Someone in the comment section posted another comparison https://i.imgur.com/m2m6SV2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/m2m6SV2.jpg
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  That is the post I was thinking of when I made the comparison.
- lozenge 4y ago
  My first reaction was "sewing needles are incredibly cheap, they're made to a budget" but actually, the same can be said for bee stingers.
bnralt 4y ago
That's the funny things about the article. Though it mocks the idea, in the end we can't create a machine that has the same functionality as birds. Of course, humans only use a sliver of that functionality for their own ends, but even then we still raise billions of birds for our own ends. Most people still find cats to be the best way to hunt vermin, insect the best way to pollinate plants, seeing eye dogs better guides than any robot, snails better at auto-cleaning fish tanks than any device, dogs better at tracking scents in public than any machine, etc.
- scaramanga 4y ago
  Dijkstra said the same thing. Why bother trying to make a computer think like a human? Why not make it do something better? I tend to agree. Or to borrow from Chomsky, why would we try to make a machine deadlift a box like a powerlifter when we can just make a fork-lift truck / front-end loader?
- pas 4y ago
  Well, function implies form in this universe to some degree. The more functions we want to put into a machine the more it's form is constrained. If we want something that does all what birds do .. we need to build a bird. That said we already have drones. We can add a charging station, an artificial beak, a speaker and it can do bird stuff pretty well :) What we suck at is building self-replicators. Cats are considered better vermin hunters than simple machines, like rat traps, because they have a lot of extra benefits of being household pets. (Which rat traps don't do well. Also usually dogs are used to hunt vermin. [I wanted to find that video where dogs hunt on the field as a tractor plows it, but only found this about minks :o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB1I7UixASY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB1I7UixASY ].) Fish tank cleaning is also a very specific problem. It's basically a niche. If we look at it as an engineering challenge it's a hard problem. Small space, hard to reach spaces, mostly mechanical work is needed (as fish tank life is very sensitive to water quality), etc. And there's also cost. It's very possible that if we were to spend a few billion dollars on the problem we could come up with a fish tank cleaner, but ... snails are provided by evolution for free.
qbrass 4y ago
Nature put a barbed stinger on bees, but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee. On the other hand, the risk of ripping your entrails out while using a sewing needle is quite low.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  > but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee. Nature didn't anticipate the hairless apes to get so numerous and infiltrate every environment where bees exist.
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  I'm guessing the stinger evolved in response to most insects, not humans. Here's a video explaining how they don't necessarily always lose their stinger, even when they sting humans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Nature put a barbed stinger on bees, but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee. In the sense that any natural development is intended, it's intended for the stinger to leave the bee. Compare wasps, which have reusable stingers.
- usrbinbash 4y ago
  The stinger of bees evolved as a defense/attack mechanism against other insects, covered by a chitineous exoskeleton. Sticking it into the elastic material that covers mammals is not it's intended use case.
- imhoguy 4y ago
  > but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee On swarm level it doesn't matter. But psychological effect on an attacker or even group of such is achieved after one event, sometimes even inherited.
- leobabauta 4y ago
  I love the idea that nature has intentions, and that if it did, we could know what they are. Deliciously magical!
unsupp0rted 4y ago
We can make a needle that’s much more svelte and efficient than a bee stinger. Perhaps not economically at mass scale though. But then again neither can bees.
sircastor 4y ago
I think the difference is though, that nature doesn’t intend to make something. A friend of mine once described evolution as not running toward something, but rather running away from something. And there are millions of years of wrong-turns, and vestigial remnants of things that didn’t work out.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Nature takes a long time to build and specialize things though. We humans for example took some time to get going. But now in the space of a few generations, we've gone from soldering together some transistors and other electronics to building software systems that can do a lot of things. Some of the people that did the soldering and early tinkering with software are still alive even. So, we're a bit impatient but overall things are moving really quickly. I'm only 48 years old, I expect to see some amazing things in the next few decades.

gsatic 4y ago

Nature had a head start. If you give me 100 million years I can build an ant too.

ARandomerDude 4y ago
- snorrah 4y ago
- manquer 4y ago
  There is no discussion possible with that line of reasoning. Invoking God is terminus for any discussion independent of your beliefs. In your frame of reference consider as though God is building it through the human. It still make no difference, whether we could still do it through conscious design than just evolutionary pressures which was what this discussion is really about.
- l3uwin 4y ago
  Oh, which God?
polishdude20 4y ago
At that point it's not you, its nature. Because you are an extension of nature. In a way, needles built by humans are needles built by nature.
- k__ 4y ago
  We need to be more specific here. It's both nature, but "evolution" took millions of years to build the ant, and "humans" could probably do it I a fraction of the time.
  - polishdude20 4y ago
    Yes but evolution took that many years to build humans. I'm zooming out here and recognizing we are just another outgrowth of nature doing its thing.

ketchuptomorrow 4y ago

Relevant reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/cfm1z8/microscopic_look_at_a_bee_stinger_vs_the_point_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/cfm1z... The picture is of a bee stinger compared to a sewing needle. Someone in the comment section posted another comparison https://i.imgur.com/m2m6SV2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/m2m6SV2.jpg

bobsmooth 4y ago
That is the post I was thinking of when I made the comparison.
lozenge 4y ago
My first reaction was "sewing needles are incredibly cheap, they're made to a budget" but actually, the same can be said for bee stingers.

bnralt 4y ago

That's the funny things about the article. Though it mocks the idea, in the end we can't create a machine that has the same functionality as birds. Of course, humans only use a sliver of that functionality for their own ends, but even then we still raise billions of birds for our own ends. Most people still find cats to be the best way to hunt vermin, insect the best way to pollinate plants, seeing eye dogs better guides than any robot, snails better at auto-cleaning fish tanks than any device, dogs better at tracking scents in public than any machine, etc.

scaramanga 4y ago
Dijkstra said the same thing. Why bother trying to make a computer think like a human? Why not make it do something better? I tend to agree. Or to borrow from Chomsky, why would we try to make a machine deadlift a box like a powerlifter when we can just make a fork-lift truck / front-end loader?
pas 4y ago
Well, function implies form in this universe to some degree. The more functions we want to put into a machine the more it's form is constrained. If we want something that does all what birds do .. we need to build a bird. That said we already have drones. We can add a charging station, an artificial beak, a speaker and it can do bird stuff pretty well :) What we suck at is building self-replicators. Cats are considered better vermin hunters than simple machines, like rat traps, because they have a lot of extra benefits of being household pets. (Which rat traps don't do well. Also usually dogs are used to hunt vermin. [I wanted to find that video where dogs hunt on the field as a tractor plows it, but only found this about minks :o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB1I7UixASY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB1I7UixASY ].) Fish tank cleaning is also a very specific problem. It's basically a niche. If we look at it as an engineering challenge it's a hard problem. Small space, hard to reach spaces, mostly mechanical work is needed (as fish tank life is very sensitive to water quality), etc. And there's also cost. It's very possible that if we were to spend a few billion dollars on the problem we could come up with a fish tank cleaner, but ... snails are provided by evolution for free.

qbrass 4y ago

Nature put a barbed stinger on bees, but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee. On the other hand, the risk of ripping your entrails out while using a sewing needle is quite low.

bobsmooth 4y ago
> but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee. Nature didn't anticipate the hairless apes to get so numerous and infiltrate every environment where bees exist.
crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
I'm guessing the stinger evolved in response to most insects, not humans. Here's a video explaining how they don't necessarily always lose their stinger, even when they sting humans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> Nature put a barbed stinger on bees, but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee. In the sense that any natural development is intended, it's intended for the stinger to leave the bee. Compare wasps, which have reusable stingers.
usrbinbash 4y ago
The stinger of bees evolved as a defense/attack mechanism against other insects, covered by a chitineous exoskeleton. Sticking it into the elastic material that covers mammals is not it's intended use case.
imhoguy 4y ago
> but didn't intend for the stinger to leave the bee On swarm level it doesn't matter. But psychological effect on an attacker or even group of such is achieved after one event, sometimes even inherited.
leobabauta 4y ago
I love the idea that nature has intentions, and that if it did, we could know what they are. Deliciously magical!

unsupp0rted 4y ago

We can make a needle that’s much more svelte and efficient than a bee stinger. Perhaps not economically at mass scale though. But then again neither can bees.

sircastor 4y ago

I think the difference is though, that nature doesn’t intend to make something. A friend of mine once described evolution as not running toward something, but rather running away from something. And there are millions of years of wrong-turns, and vestigial remnants of things that didn’t work out.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Nature takes a long time to build and specialize things though. We humans for example took some time to get going. But now in the space of a few generations, we've gone from soldering together some transistors and other electronics to building software systems that can do a lot of things. Some of the people that did the soldering and early tinkering with software are still alive even. So, we're a bit impatient but overall things are moving really quickly. I'm only 48 years old, I expect to see some amazing things in the next few decades.