Life's Principles

WHAT ARE LIFE’S PRINCIPLES AND WHY USE THEM?

Life on earth is made up of an ever-changing, incredibly complex network of interconnected, interdependent organisms—including everything from the amoeba to the zebra. Some form of life has managed to sustain itself on earth for the past 3.85 billion years, through ice ages, tsunamis, volcanoes, and asteroids. This means that life has survived 3.85 billion years of trial and error, 3.85 billion years of testing, and 3.85 billion years of rigorous selection that has resulted in a 99.9% failure rate. Only 1/10 of 1% of species that have ever lived on earth survive today.

 

 

 

Life's Principles

 

 

EVOLVE TO SURVIVE

  • replicate strategies that work
  • integrate the unexpected
  • reshuffle information

BE RESOURCE (MATERIAL AND ENERGY) EFFICIENT

  • use multi-functional design
  • use low-energy processes
  • recycle all materials
  • fit form to function

ADAPT TO CHANGING CONDITIONS

  • maintain integrity through self-renewal
  • embody resilience through variation, redundancy, and decentralization
  • incorporate diversity

INTEGRATE DEVELOPMENT WITH GROWTH

  • combine modular and nested components
  • build from the bottom-up
  • self-organize

BE LOCALLY ATTUNED AND RESPONSIVE

  • use readily available materials and energy
  • cultivate cooperative relationships
  • leverage cyclic processes
  • use feedback loops

USE LIFE-FRIENDLY CHEMISTRY

  • build selectively with a small subset of elements
  • break down products into benign constituents
  • do chemistry in water

 

    Nature has some pretty high quality control standards! What this tells us is that there must be some very powerful strategies for survival embedded in the 30 million species that exist on earth today. In other words, the species thriving today are the success stories. In trying to identify and emulate the strategies these successful creatures share, Life’s Principles provide us with important tools for strategic design. Life’s Principles are what biomimics use to both drive and evaluate the sustainability and appropriateness of our designs.

     

    Scientists have been working for centuries trying to identify how nature works, to unlock the secrets of survival, and to unravel life’s mysteries. With so many scientific papers being published, it may seem that every organism has a unique way of surviving and even thriving in its niche of the environment. Upon closer consideration though, patterns emerge. Many creatures have similarities; they may have a comparable shape or move liquid using the same mechanism or have a similar response to danger or employ the same chemical reaction.

     

    In biomimicry, these patterns are called deep principles. Not every organism employs capillary action, using the physical property of surface tension to control the movement of a liquid, but plants and a few animals do move liquid in this manner. Because of its frequent appearance in nature, capillary action is considered a deep principle. Some principles, such as being locally attuned and responsive, are even more common across species than the deep principles and are found uniformly across almost all organisms.

    The Biomimicry Guild and The Biomimicry Institute (both now Biomimicry 3.8) along with many partners, have studied, compiled, and distilled scientific research to create a collection of these more fundamental principles now known in biomimicry as Life’s Principles. Life’s Principles are intended to represent nature’s strategies for sustainability, that is, how life has sustained on earth for 3.85 billion years.