Where Does Our Technology Come From?
The bacterial flagellar motor and the jet turbine: natural technology inadvertently mirrored in human design.
When we speak of “technology,” we usually mean the machines and systems we design. Yet what we invent is not separate from the world around us. The roots of our technology are nourished by something deeper than human creativity. It grows from the natural technology built into us and from the natural technology that surrounds us.
Human breakthroughs almost always mirror what has always existed in nature. Our best cameras align with the design of the eye. Velcro came from burrs clinging to fur. Airplane design follows the wings of birds. Sonar borrows from bats. Robotics and prosthetics echo muscles, joints, and reflexes. Invention, in most cases, is re-creation. Yet all of these so-called ingenuities of ours still fall short of what they mirror. Nature’s originals remain more efficient, more refined, and more enduring than the copies we build.
This is why good technology feels intuitive. It resonates with patterns already embedded in life. Poor design crumbles because it doesn’t align with those patterns. Good design best aligns with them, and we recognize it as familiar.
Some might object that not every invention comes from nature — that some things appear completely original. Fields far removed from biology seem to fit that description. For example, quantum physics describes matter in terms of probabilities, yet the natural world has always worked with dispersed possibilities that resolve into definite outcomes. Cloud computing may seem like a modern metaphor, but it reflects the same principle: resources spread across a network until a request “collapses” into action at one physical point. Nature works the same way—distributed causes resolving into concrete results.
A computer’s binary logic reflects the on–off firing of neurons. Programming mirrors DNA, where instructions are stored and executed in sequences. Algorithms follow step-by-step order much like chemical reactions. Vast computer networks resemble nervous systems and ecosystems that transmit signals across distance.
Transportation networks follow the same logic as blood vessels and rivers, moving resources through branching pathways. Filters mirror the work of kidneys and the blood–brain barrier, separating what can pass from what must be blocked. Satellites also depend on natural order. Their orbits work only because they follow the same gravitational laws that guide planets and moons. Their timing and communication depend on patterns of motion already written into the heavens. In essence, satellites are miniature participants in a system that existed long before we launched them.
Sensors reinforce the same truth. Light sensors align with the eye. Sound sensors align with the ear. Pressure and motion sensors copy the skin and the balance system of the inner ear. Chemical sensors retrace the work of taste buds and olfactory receptors, though less precisely than nature.
This pattern is not only visible in single inventions but also in the progression of technology itself. Each stage of human development has followed steps already present in nature. Navigation came first, guided by the sun, stars, and currents that were always there. Printing extended replication, which life performs in every cell. Machines of the industrial age echoed muscles, joints, and circulation. The digital revolution reflected neurons and DNA in binary code and storage. The information age mirrored nervous systems and ecosystems through vast networks of communication. And now artificial intelligence imitates pattern recognition, learning, and adaptation —capabilities already at work in brains, immune systems, and ecological webs. The story of technology follows the same staircase creation had already laid down.
What once looked like pure human genius often proves, in hindsight, to be rediscovery. Our breakthroughs carry prototypes already present in the natural world.
Technology, then, is not a human conquest over nature but a continuation of it. We may speak of mastery and progress, but we work within a framework we did not establish. Our role is more humble. We rearrange, extend, and uncover what was already possible. We are not inventors in the pure sense. We are imitators, children borrowing tools from a world already filled with technology.
Seen this way, the story of technology is not about creating from nothing. It is about recognizing, borrowing, and copying. The highest mark of intelligence may not be invention itself, but the ability to recognize the invention that has been here from the beginning.
This article sketches a piece of what I develop in full in my book Natural Technology: The Theory of Everything, a theory of technology where I argue that every invention, every system, and even the laws of physics themselves are better understood as manifestations of technology embedded in creation. What we build points back to what was already built.
