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1 Nature and Naturoids

For a more detailed introduction to the theory of naturoids, see (Negrotti, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2008a, b, 2009, 2012).

The fundamental presupposition for a theory of naturoids is that it is reasonable to think of technology, and of its underlying theory, as a set comprising two basic classes: conventional technology and naturoid technology. The first of these proposes to design objects, machines, or processes with no intended similarity to anything existing in the natural world. The second, which is perhaps even older than the first, involves the design of technological objects or processes explicitly intended to imitate, or even reproduce, objects or processes observed in nature.

What follows is a brief summary of the main conceptual steps that characterize the design and construction of naturoids, including some simple methodological stages that appear to be inevitable in the ideation process, and which make inevitable, in turn, the final transfiguration of the naturoid with respect to its natural counterpart – a conclusion that will provide new elements for a reflection on what human design implies with respect to the status of things generated in nature.

The reasoning involves the selection of an observation level, an exemplar, and an essential performance, and the theory, which involves nonformalized methodological steps that need to be followed by anybody who intends to design a reproduction of a natural object or event by means of some technology, proceeds roughly as follows.

2 The Observation Level

The observation level is to be considered as a profile of a given object or process. The term observation level recalls, to some degree, T. Kuhn’s thesis concerning the ability of paradigms, during the phase of “normality” of a science, to orient the observer mainly toward that which is consistent with the dominant paradigm. It also has something in common with Husserl’s Abschattung, and even with Max Weber’s assertion that social science researchers always bring to the foreground those aspects that are worthy of consideration, while simultaneously letting all other aspects drift into the background. Finally, it recalls the concept of the perspectives introduced by Charles Morris, or the reality levels of Paul Oppenheim e Hilary Putnam (Oppenheim and Putnam, 1958).

If we prefer the term observation level, it is because of the selective, and sometimes constructive, character of the observation which characterizes not only scientific exploration but also any sensible interaction we may have with the empirical world, and, subsequently, any description of the observed object. We may describe an object at more than one observation level, but humans are able to adopt only one such level per unit of time. Simultaneity, indeed, would imply an inexpressible holistic synthesis, because every descriptive choice inevitably brings with itself a type of “qualification,” revealing, as a consequence, the priority assigned by us to some particular observation level. In this context, the sciences constitute a sort of institutionalization of the observation levels thus far discovered or constructed by scientific research.

The notion of an observation level reminds us, in turn, of the fact that when homo faber attempts to design a naturoid, he does not, as a rule, assume any philosophical premise regarding what an observation process is. Rather, he simply resorts to his natural senses and his previously acquired scientific and technological knowledge, in order to decide whether he will be able to rep­ro­duce the observed natural exemplar on the basis of a model that reduces its complexity.

On the other hand, whatever sensorial, technological, or cultural background a designer brings with himself, it will tend to condition his observation to privilege a profile, of the selected exemplar, that is consistent with that background. This is, after all, a quite universal constraint for human beings. For instance, in defining a tree as our exemplar, we assign boundaries to it, so that it can be described at a mechanical, chemical, electrical, physiological, or anatomical level, or, more simply, at an aesthetic or sensorial level. According to the chosen boundaries, certain parts or properties of the exemplar will either be included in, or excluded from, the final model we set up.

The complexity-reducing role of observation levels in our interaction with real things is easy to understand by resorting to a simple experiment: ask some people to speak at will about, say, the Sun. Unavoidably, right after the word Sun is introduced, the nouns, verbs, and adjectives that accompany it will clearly reveal what sort of observation level our interlocutor has chosen (be it astronomical, physical, chemical, aesthetic, religious, or whatever). As is easily understandable, nobody may properly claim to have a complete and conclusive definition of the Sun – its “ontology” – and this is true for any other empirical object, whose description always feels the effect of the dominating observation level at which is being observed and described.

The same is true of a finished naturoid, be it a painting or sculptural reproduction, a technological reproduction with little or no visual similarity to the natural object (such as an industrial robot or artificial kidneys), or an object characterized by the attempt to mix functionality and aesthetic resemblance (such as the famous fourteenth-century rooster on the clock of Strasbourg Cathedral or the many forms of artificial limb created over the ages). It is important to consider that when both functionality and appearance are pursued, the connection between them is always achieved by means of expedients, or tricks, that have little or no correspondence to the ways nature realizes its instances and the interactions between the various internal parts of such instances.

We could perhaps name this the “Daedalus’s glue syndrome.” Daedalus and his son, Icarus, so the legend has it, were imprisoned on an island. Daedalus, a skillful craftsman fascinated by the flight of birds, fashioned some birdlike wings with which they could both escape, but having no way to examine and reproduce the fine biological structures of the wings as integrated parts of the body, he recreated them “as he saw them.” As a result, he chose a bad way of gluing together his artificial wings – namely, with wax – with the well-known consequence that Icarus (admittedly failing to heed his father’s warning) “flew too near to the sun,” thus melting the wax and falling to his doom. So, while wax proved suitable as an expedient, it did not possess all of the qualities necessary to match nature’s glue, as it were.

3 The Exemplar

The exemplar is to be understood as the natural object, system, or process that one aims to reproduce (e.g., heart, muscles, intelligence, snow, flavors, and so on). In order to design something meaningful, one must start from some shared, or “objective,” definition and description of the exemplar. The human propensity to separate things induces us to see the world as a collection of distinct exemplars, but, as a matter of fact, a major constraint consists in the arbitrariness of any given “definition” (in the early Latin sense of “fixing the boundaries”). Therefore, fixing the boundaries of an exemplar – conceptually and, so to speak, anatomically – is a very crucial point. For instance, if an animal lives symbiotically with another, we cannot easily “define” it, just as intelligence cannot easily be separated from other mental faculties, nor an organ from its organism, nor even a pond from its surrounding ground. Activities, too, have boundaries and may thus be defined in this sense. The sciences, for example, are very carefully defined, and the boundary of each scientific discipline, though not formal, is usually strongly defended against intruders from other disciplines and from the generic common-sense environment.

To sum up, exemplars are static or dynamic portions of the empirical reality, more or less accurately conceptualized, which we isolate from their context, giving them a name, and attributing to them some set of features. Even here the designers of naturoids have to make serious decisions that largely depend upon the selected observation level. Furthermore, at a given observation level, every definition of an exemplar – be it topological, anatomical, functional, systemic, or whatever – may cut off structures or relations whose exclusion from the model will not only reduce the power of the naturoid in emulating the exemplar, but very probably, and perhaps more importantly, introduce qualities or behavior in the naturoid that are simply not present in the exemplar itself.

4 The Essential Performance

The design of a naturoid always requires that, when passing from a general description to the actual design, one has to indicate concretely what is to be reproduced – it being excluded, as we shall see, that one could reproduce the entire exemplar, even as described at just one observation level. For instance, if a designer says “in this lab we are trying to reproduce a rose,” the statement will be too generic to be understood clearly. Actually, what he will try to reproduce will be that performance – i.e., that quality, function, behavior, or appearance – which, at a selected observation level, and on the basis of a clear definition of the exemplar, will appear as essential in order to have a “rose.” Although here we adopt the adjective “essential” from a pragmatic perspective, we should not forget that the problem of essentiality of things, both natural and artificial, has long been, and still is, the subject of much philosophical debate (Elder, 2007). The importance of identifying a performance as the essential one is therefore quite apparent in the design of naturoids.

The most open-minded designers have always been explicitly aware of this design constraint. For example, J. de Vaucanson, in the eighteenth century, speaking of the digestion of his artificial duck, defined the essential performance he wanted to reproduce approximately as follows: “I do not claim that this should be perfect digestion, able to generate bloody and nutritional particles in order to allow the survival of the animal. I claim only to imitate the mechanics of this action in three points: in the swallowing of the wheat; in soaking, cooking or dissolving it; in allowing its going out, forcing it to visibly change its stuff” (de Vaucanson, in Losano, 1990).

Even today, this selection process is unavoidable in every project. Thus, for example, we find affirmations such as “In building a silicon retina, our purpose was not to reproduce the human retina to the last detail, but to get a simplified version of it which contains the minimum necessary structure required to accomplish the biological function” (Mahowald and Mead, 1991).

What is essential in an exemplar is always “decided” on the basis of several, often competing, criteria, such as scientific paradigms, cultural models, available technology, practical needs, and even just personal preferences. For instance, an artificial rose might be needed merely for embellishing a house, for teaching botanic anatomy, or as a means for completing some artificial landscape. To the different aims will correspond different selections, and therefore different reproductions, of the performances of the natural rose. The conceptual and real boundaries of the rose and its performances assumed to be essential will, in turn, be described and modeled according to the personal or culturally shared scientific, technical, or aesthetical observation levels to which the designer orients himself.

The history of biology and of medicine has shown continuously changing attributions to the various exemplars drawn from the human body. Humors and organs were once associated with different aspects of human character, mood, and state of health. Only later were organs, along with glands, nerves, blood, and so on, viewed as functionally distinct parts of the body. The discovery of cells changed the picture once more, as did the discoveries of chemical elements and compounds, salts, hormones, vitamins, etc. The shifts in establishing an essential performance depend on several circumstances, and will often be the result of previously unsatisfying attempts. Thus, for example, in the field of thyroid medicine, the problem of identifying the boundary of the exemplar led to initial misunderstandings and a failure to establish the exact functions of the thyroid gland, owing to the inadvertent removal, when performing experimental thyroidectomies, of not only the thyroid but also the parathyroid gland (Hamdy, 2002). Something similar could be said for the functions of the heart and of the blood, from Galen to Harvey, or for the functions of other parts of the body, such as skin or the nervous system, before and after the access to new observation levels rendered possible by such inventions as the microscope and x-ray photography.

5 The Inheritance Principle

Reality does not, so to speak, make discounts. By a sort of inexorable “inheritance principle,” the multilevel interactions among the adopted materials, and between the adopted materials and the context in which the naturoid will be placed, will give rise to unplanned performances. The performances and other features of the naturoid are not necessarily less numerous and powerful than those exhibited by the natural exemplar in its own context, but the two sets are not superimposable. In other words, the complexity of a naturoid is not necessarily lower than that of its natural exemplar: it is only different. This inevitable difference should not automatically be regarded as a failure, although unintended interactions may sometimes undermine the intended goal. The reduction of complexity to be found in the model that drives the design consists of a skeleton, as it were, to be filled out by the complexity of the materials and of the interactions which, by inheritance, will come into play.

In fact, something always emerges in any field of interactions, but, even in the area of naturoids, the probability that undesigned “natural” performances will emerge from the complexity of the device appears to be quite negligible.

This is also, as all designers in bioengineering know with regard to side effects and sudden events, a fact that concerns all naturoids: from robotic sensors, actuators, and supervising software, to artificial sweeteners and flavors; from artificial skin, limbs, joints, discs, or kidneys, to artificial grass, snow, flowers, nests, or landscapes; from artificial intelligence programs for translating, summarizing, learning, or recognizing (Teiling, 1988), to artificial hydration, nutrition, and ventilation pro­cesses; and from artificial vision, smell, or taste, to artificial climate manipulation or irrigation. A separate chapter might usefully be devoted to the vari­ous side effects of artificial pharmacological products. Anyway, the inheritance of materials is a very complex problem that explains why the so-called materials science has become one of the most strategic issues in current research.

6 Transfiguration

A naturoid is always ready to present some novelty with respect to its corresponding natural exemplar. That is to say, an unavoidable transfiguration occurs when a given essential performance is transferred to the naturoid. In brief, the transfiguration comes from the combined effects of (a) the subsequent selections of an observation level, a definition of the exemplar, and an essential performance; (b) the undesigned and unexpected interactions among the adopted materials, and between the materials and the host environment; and (c) the possible rearrangement of the naturoid’s behavior under the pressure of external phenomena. All this can give rise to good or bad novelties but, as a general rule, something unexpected will always occur.

The transfiguration can, in some cases, irreversibly modify the context in which the naturoid operates. If, for example, the joints of an artificial limb induce some physical deformation in the natural physiological parts of the organism to which it is attached, the whole project may be definitively compromised. Much the same thing can happen when the context is simply the natural environment, with which the naturoid may strike up unforeseen interactions – be they mechanical, chemical, biological, ecological, or whatever – which might make further adjustments impossible. In brief, the transfiguration may trigger irrecoverable recursive interaction phenomena.

7 Three Agents of Design

With regard to design, we may distinguish three principal agents which, through their autonomous capacity of elaboration, give rise to designs and realizations. These agents are Nature (NA), conventional designers (CDs), and naturoid designers (NDs). By Nature we mean the set of microscopic or macroscopic phenomena which together characterize sensible reality, including the human species regarded under a strictly biological profile. Conventional designers, for their part, are to be regarded as human beings observed in the activity of conceiving and designing artifacts or machines, based on available knowledge of the natural world, but not intended to imitate natural objects or phenomena. The aim, rather, is to produce things which, while being subject to the natural laws, generate some effects not found in nature.

Naturoid designers, by contrast, are designers who, as we have seen above, attempt to reproduce natural objects and phenomena. NDs, in their work, must obviously take account of available scientific knowledge regarding the given natural object or phenomenon in question, but, in trying to reproduce a part of nature – imitating, at various levels, its structure or dynamics, or perhaps both – they seek, in a sense, to enter into a more intimate relationship with nature.

8 Natural Design

It should not be forgotten that nature, too, produces and reproduces, although we still have much to learn about its underlying mechanisms. We cannot even be certain whether NA’s “designs” are somehow pre-established, or whether, instead, they are essentially the result of random processes. That which is certain, however, is that NA follows precise rules, both at the level of fundamental physical laws and at that of large-scale systemic phenomena. Any natural event, such as a rock falling down the side of a hill, unfolds inexorably, respecting physical norms and constraints as if the whole event were planned by somebody. In fact, gaining an understanding of an event such as this consists in the attempt to perform what Daniel Dennett has called “reverse engineering” (Dennett, 1998), on the supposition that a given phenomenon is decipherable by examining a succession of appropriately describable states correlated according to precise behavioral rules.

Within this framework, intellectual discussions regarding the nature of Nature, as it were, have perhaps not taken sufficient account of the principle of least action proposed in the eighteenth century by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who, having meticulously calculated the action associated with many types of movement, concluded that NA always chooses the movement that minimizes the total action (Israel, 1997). Whether or not NA is governed by an omnipresent finalism, it invariably demonstrates a high level of efficiency in its dynamics, just as if events were based on optimization calculations, and not just on the physical laws applicable to the circumstances.

The physical laws, which it is science’s task to reveal, seem to reflect an intrinsic natural rationality whose universality and persistence suggest, in turn, the potential for complete predictability. It is certain, at least, that a highly accurate knowledge of initial states can often give rise to similarly accurate predictions – as demonstrated in astronomy, for example, which enables predictions of periodic events over hundreds or even thousands of years. At other levels, however, such as the submicroscopic world of quantum physics, descriptions and predictions come face to face with an uncertain foundation of reality, dominated by an apparent randomness intrinsic to matter. Yet even here, beginning with the work of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, the introduction of probability calculations has allowed scientists to make highly accurate and reliable predictions of submicroscopic events, by incorporating the uncertainty, and its calculation, into a congruent rational vision.

9 Conventional or Creative Design

The work of a CD is often called “applied science,” precisely because it involves the creation of an artifact through the application (always subject to a greater or lesser degree of error) of scientifically discovered natural laws. CDs hope to create objects or events that nature has not (as yet) produced, but which it can nevertheless tolerate. We might say that man seeks to unite his rationality with the intrinsic rationality, if it may be so called, of Nature. However, a notable discontinuity exists between these two types of rationality because, while NA includes, in a given state, all that can potentially be done in accordance with that state, the rationality of a CD is not limited to the fixed set of materials, knowledge, and procedures available in the given moment of history in which he finds himself. The biologist Steven Vogel, interested in biomechanics, outlines this distinction succinctly when he writes “Nature is certainly marvelous, but let us not forget what we do that she doesn’t” (Vogel, 2001) taking a position already taken by Aristotle when he refers to technology as completing Nature. Indeed, even if it may seem a silly question, perhaps we should ask ourselves why evolution applies to biological species but not to structures that we call “inanimate.” We know that the universe has undergone various physicochemical evolutions since its origin, but, at a macroscopic level, we observe nothing akin to Darwinism as it applies to living beings – that is to say, without any growing and goal-oriented complexity.

Why, we may ask, has NA not generated machines, or wheels, or even regular plane and solid geometric forms, instead leaving such tasks, at various levels of sophistication, to the higher animals, and particularly to man? The extinction of countless animal and vegetable species has often been due to unfavorable climatic or environmental conditions that NA, notwithstanding the time and materials at her disposal, has never planned for specifically. Yet all the materials were already available, just waiting for somebody (or perhaps chance, so active in the biological sphere) to establish the right interactions among them – in accordance, of course, with the same universal laws that have always applied.

Thus, for example, while many species of bird certainly know how to construct, with care and patience, nests that are sufficiently elastic, resistant, and long-lasting for their purpose, they will nevertheless often willingly make use of man-made structures, from houses to barns to specially constructed nest boxes, seemingly appreciating the improvement proposed by man. A similar sort of cooperation could not reasonably be expected in “inanimate” nature. NA, in essence, has always provided a complex and dynamic background scenery with which the living species must cope, seemingly as irrelevant guests, substantially detached from the configuration and dynamics of the material world. Life as we know it on Earth arises from interactions within a rather limited region of matter: all the rest is extraneous and often hostile.

Yet nature provides us with many technological starting points. The primitive CD who invented the wheel, for example, presumably arrived at the idea through observing, by chance, natural phenomena that involved rolling. Likewise, the first person to construct a lever may well have done so only after having witnessed some natural phenomenon that suggested the underlying mechanism. We could imagine, for instance, a rock falling from a hillside onto one end of a fallen tree trunk resting by chance across another, thus lifting a second rock resting (again by chance) upon the other end of the trunk. Similarly, improvised shade from harsh, dehydrating sunlight must surely have saved various species which, grasping the advantage to be gained, constructed devices to protect themselves from the worst of its effects.

But no case is known in which NA has ever generated, by means of its own evolution, “ready-to-use” technological devices. The higher animals have had to provide these through simple stereotyped and repetitive constructions whose designs often seem to be transmitted genetically. Primitive man would presumably have developed early technology through direct imitation of natural phenomena, while the CDs of the last 2,000 or 3,000 years, above all since the advent of the natural sciences, have founded their projects on ever-more-reliable models and observations of Nature’s properties and regularities.

Finally, all this seems to lead us to the conclusion that conventional techno­logy, including its likely imitative prehistoric beginnings, arises precisely for the purpose of filling a sort of gap in NA – namely, its substantial lack of finalism, or at least its ineptitude in placing itself at the service of living beings, toward which, to use a rather anthropomorphic expression, it seems to show no interest. This, after all, is the true significance of the statement that life and survival constitute a highly improbable fact.

A modern-day CD, as we said at the beginning, generates projects that are highly creative, or at least innovative with respect to those found in nature, even if, at times, they seem to be inspired by already existing structures or processes, such as naturally evolved endowments of other species. Thus, for example, the form of a tuna, or perhaps of a shark, is a first step in the design of submarine or boat intended to be as fast as possible in the water. Both radar and sonar adopt the same basic functional principle as that observed in the naturally evolved echolocation of bats. Mechanical diggers are based, at least in part, on the specially adapted limbs of animals that are able to dig efficiently through wood or earth.

Yet in each of these cases, and in any number of others that we could mention, the CD applies radical modifications to nature’s designs, including many improvements. Aquadynamic calculations can lead to drag coefficients well below those found in fish; modern-day radar systems, unlike a bat’s ultrasonic echolocation, can scan beyond the horizon; mechanical diggers often rotate continuously rather than moving back and forth as animal limbs must do; and so on. In principle, therefore, most of the products created by modern-day CDs correspond minimally, if at all, to natural objects or phenomena. In nature, there is nothing akin to electronic microscopes, cathode-ray tubes, spectrographs, electric motors, computers, typewriters, screws, nuts and bolts, or pulleys.

10 Imitative Design

Reviving an age-old tradition and, as we have seen, presumably the very origin of primitive design, NDs today constitute a sort of link between NA and conventional, creative technology. In reality, we are faced with an inversion of the teleology, based on the difference in the kind of problem to resolve: if CDs seem to ask themselves “with which technology can we exploit the sunlight?,” NDs seem to ask “with which technology can we generate light similar to sunlight?”

A technology inspired by Nature should be, according to J. Benyus, the best way of designing devices and machines because, in this way, a greater amount of integration between humans and Nature may be reached (Benyus, 1997). Nevertheless, this can be revealed to be a new utopia since, as we said in the previous sections, all naturoids are destined, thanks to their unavoidable transfiguration of the exemplars, to enhance the heterogeneity – and, in some cases, variety – of the world rather than act as a miraculous link between technology and Nature. In fact, the limitless number of observation levels, interacting each other, at which we could design a device able to mimic a natural object or system, prevent us from discovering the “right” level at which the things have to be done. Not even a radical bottom-up strategy, as the one introduced, ideally, by the nanotechnologies, could take us away from various degrees of uncertainty (Bensaude-Vincent, 2004). In other words, technology always opens the door toward something which always contains something unexpected.

As we would expect, there are many classes of ND, but they can be grouped, on the basis of practical effects, into two main types: on the one hand, there are the radical NDs, who aim progressively toward the reproduction of a natural exemplar in every structural and dynamic detail; and on the other, there are the pragmatic NDs, who prefer, instead, to reproduce a certain functional aspect of the exemplar, ignoring any questions regarding the resemblance between the naturoid and its natural counterpart.

A typical example of a naturoid of the first type is an anthropomorphic robot, designed explicitly with the ambition of approximating, ever more closely with each generation, human appearance and behavior. By contrast, a typical example of a naturoid of the second type is an industrial robot, which in no way resembles a human being, but is eminently capable of matching a skilled factory worker’s essential performance – namely, the precise manipulation of tools and other objects in order to achieve certain predefined tasks. Both these types of robot have sensors, actuators, and computerized control systems, but their purposes are obviously very different. Nevertheless, in both these cases, efforts are directed toward the most faithful reproduction possible of some or all of the properties of an exemplar, and, moreover, they are often intended to improve upon the functional performance of the exemplar.

Thus, above and beyond the limited objectives of Vaucanson, which amounted to the construction of physical models of his exemplars, we find the more radical, bold, and at times rather utopian, predictions of A.I. designers such as Hans Moravec, who sees a future in which the capacities of robots will easily surpass those of human beings (Moravec, 1998). From a more pragmatic point of view, we should not forget the approach taken by advanced modern-day researchers in the field of artificial organs, who seem to be guided by the principle that the most realistic and practical objective is not the faithful reproduction of one or other human organ, but rather the rendering of such an organ both compatible with the natural organism with which it must interact, and able to carry out the same basic function as that which is lacking in the patient. Not by chance, the late Willem Kolff, one of the pioneers in the development of artificial organs, once said that “the objective of an artificial heart is fundamentally to ‘cheat the body,’ because the body has to be persuaded that blood comes from a natural heart” (Negrotti, 2009).

The strong inclination toward the production of naturoids that improve upon natural essential performances is demonstrated, for example, by the development of a rotating, rather than pulsating, artificial heart; by the various types of artificial skin now available; by the numerous solutions offered in the field of artificial limbs (among which is an artificial hand that can rotate through 360°); by the different types of sensors proposed, for various tasks, as substitutes for the natural senses; and, more generally, by the wide range of different products, sometimes mere gadgets, used in alimentation, or in sport, or even in interior or urban design to imitate natural structures and processes. These replacements for natural objects and substances are characterized, almost without exception, by the claim to offer, at preestablished observation levels, improvements, with respect to their natural counterparts, in hygiene, digestibility, weather resistance, durability, aesthetic effect, costs, and so on.

11 The Future: An Interactions Dilemma

Clearly, improvements arise through the design and production of systems or subsystems capable of enhancing the properties observed in the exemplar. That seems to contradict the view of many thinkers, beginning with Aristotle, who, with his concept of mīmēsis, maintained that the artificial, precisely because it is inspired by Nature, shares Nature’s goals. However, as we noted above, it is rather difficult to establish just what goals Nature might have, and we should not forget that a naturoid – a generalized version of the reproductive artificial – always ends up transfiguring the properties and dynamics of its exemplar, for reasons related not only to the logic of its very design and construction but also to the intentions of the designers.

Nowadays, the technological sector in which all this is perhaps more evident than ever is that of Artificial Intelligence, whose algorithms and software are able to provide highly useful, if still strictly circumscribed, design features, often more powerful than those exhibited in man.

The constraint of the “circumscribed features,” moreover, regards all naturoids. Thus, for example, artificial grass produced for sports fields is designed to reproduce just those properties or performances of the natural exemplar retained essential for a given activity and certainly not, for instance, to provide grazing for animals. In general, biomaterials and all other naturoids are planned with similarly circumscribed objectives. In this way, technology, by inserting various types of naturoid into the natural environment, is increasing, when biological matter is concerned, a sort of pseudo-variety of the world considerably – a fact which, in turn, can often provoke random interactions well beyond those of Darwinian evolution, and certainly less predictable than the set of interactions derived from conventional technology, which generates heterogeneity but not pseudo-natural variety.

To return to the case of birds, we can, with a shotgun – a product of conventional technology – kill enough of them to modify significantly the quantitative distribution of one or other species. Alternatively, with an artificial bird-call device – a product of naturoid technology – we can interfere with the behavior and communications of a given species, thus (less directly) generating quantitative variations, some of which may well be unpredictable. In a more human-centered context, psychosociological studies of the interactions and relations between people and robots – and especially anthropomorphic robots – are becoming ever more common. Such studies are intended to discover what cultural variations might arise with the proliferation of such robots (Kim et al., 2009).

Moving into the barely-begun age of nanotechnology – a discipline that seems highly likely to embrace, more and more, the design of micro- or nano-naturoids – we can already envisage the creation of tiny objects specially designed to intervene in, and collaborate with, the finest of Nature’s process, including those inside the human body. Even here, however, we can foresee the possibility – indeed, the likelihood – of transfiguration effects, as yet unfathomable in their subtlety, giving rise to interactions, both positive and negative. Some researchers assume drastic and rather pessimistic positions in this regard, suggesting that Nature’s best-kept secrets will forever remain her own: “…implantable materials with very fine mechanical and structural properties for host-cell migration and proliferation in order to create new hybrid artificial organs or tissue-engineered systems cannot be produced from synthetic materials. Biological materials have an extremely fine structure and unique properties that cannot be imitated with synthetic polymer materials” (Noishiki and Miyata, 2008). For a collection of various other examples in this field, see (Negrotti, 2010).

Whatever the case, the strategy summed up in the idea of “cheating the body,” or, more generally, “cheating Nature,” is sure to bring forth some big surprises.

In conclusion, it is evident that the reuniting of a part of technological design with NA through the activities of NDs is in no way a sort of resigned recognition that Nature’s wonders are superior to the designs of conventional technology. On the contrary, the tacit but unremitting general objective of NDs is the perfecting of Nature’s exemplars, sometimes for pragmatic reasons and sometimes for deeper, psychological, and anthropological reasons, perhaps connected to a deep-seated desire for omnipotence, through the reproduction and gradual surmounting of Nature. Such activity is perceived not only as cognitive dominion over Nature but also as the power to recreate Nature at will. Seen from one point of view, the design of naturoids seems to recall the ultimate folly of the alchemist’s dream, but from another, it resembles more the positive side of what I called Daedalus’s Glue Syndrome, which, notwithstanding all its potential dangers, may lead to considerable cognitive and practical advantages, tinged with the flavor of a complement to Nature, at times through imitation and at times through modification and even supersession – a combination whose virtues were amply extolled by Edgar Allan Poe in his short sketch The Landscape Garden. It is an inexorable process of redesign, and nobody knows where it will lead.