This reminds me of the scene in The Wind Rises where Jiro says in passing "Hrm, looks like the Americans are looking at herring bones too." Many of the constrai

This reminds me of the scene in The Wind Rises where Jiro says in passing "Hrm, looks like the Americans are looking at herring bones too." Many of the constraints on biological systems over evolutionary time are purely mathematical, and even when the constraint is not, selection can push a phenotype into local minima whose definition are ultimately mathematical. If you can identify cases in nature that match what you need in engineering then you can take some very nice shortcuts.