American jack knife clam on the beach at Wimereux, France. Photographed by Hans Hillewaert, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I ran across this article in an Australian publication, Business Insider, about the new “RoboClam, a digging robot inspired by the Atlantic razor clam (also known as the Atlantic jackknife clam), and noted this comment: “According to the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the razor clam shouldn’t be able to submerge itself 70 cm into the soil but it does.”
Yes. And the honey bee “shouldn’t be able” to keep aloft—but it does. In my experience, there are an endless number of things nature accomplishes with great success that engineers and scientists feel are somehow “impossible.”
Is nature continually pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Or is it possible—just possible—that human arrogance sometimes blinds us to what is truly possible, even when it’s happening right before our very eyes? And if we refuse to acknowledge it, even when we can see it happening, how then can we learn from it?
