Dhe yellowfin tuna is one of the fastest fish ever, reaching speeds of up to seventy kilometers per hour. No wonder he serves as an inspiration for the development of diving robots. The University of Virginia’s tuna robot Tunabot, which is based on it, has so far only managed nine kilometers per hour, but the researchers appreciate it for bringing them new ideas. The philosopher and historian of science Marco Tamborini calls this project “tuna robotics” and presents it as an example of how technology and biology inspire each other to the point of blurring the boundaries between what at first glance seem so contradictory fields.

The tuna robotics show what he means by that: The tuna is nature’s solution to a technical problem, namely fast, energy-efficient swimming. So it makes sense for technicians to use this solution as a guide. But that is easier said than done. After all, the fish cannot be recreated molecule by molecule, but at best in a greatly simplified version. And to do that, you first have to understand what is important and what you can leave out. Looking and thinking is not enough, you quickly overlook the many little devils in the details. So you have to try it, build a robot fish and see if it swims as expected. Tamborini quotes the researchers as saying that the Tunabot brought them to “non-intuitive and novel movement biomechanics”. In other words, without replicating it, you wouldn’t have figured out how the fish can swim so fast.

Orientation towards nature can easily be framed in terms of ideology

Nature provides possible solutions to technical problems and technology always offers new ways of exploring nature: from the magnifying glass to the microscope to computer simulation and robot technology. Marco Tamborini reconstructs this interplay in philosophy, biology and architecture. His book includes case studies from early twentieth-century morphology to biotechnology, biomimetics, bionics and Morphospace, a graphic representation developed in the 1960s using an analog computer that was intended to generate all theoretically possible shapes of snail shells – with the perspective that this could also be used for the planning of completely new building forms. Tamborini notes a renaissance of morphology, the analysis of complex forms, and traces its history to current excellence clusters that explicitly deal not only with the change of forms, but with the “physics of life” (Dresden) or “living, adaptive and energy-autonomous material systems” (Freiburg).

In the first phase of the mutual inspiration of biology and technology, as described by Tamborini, the metaphor of the book of nature is central. With her, the question arose whether one could copy from this book, as advocated by the biologist Ernst Haeckel, or whether it should rather be a translation. The mechanists, vitalists, and gestalt psychologists of the early twentieth century agreed, Tamborini argues, that one must try above all to understand how nature solves problems and to orientate oneself to its strategies rather than to imitate them. They looked for the basic forms of nature and argued about whether these were unchangeable or dynamic and whether they could also be combined differently than they are found in nature. They found that bones have a structure very similar to that of some bridge constructions and algae with flagellum propulsion reminiscent of turbines. The solutions to certain problems seemed to have a specific form, regardless of the material, a form that can be understood, copied and varied. Just like you could learn the shape of a bird’s wings and still realize that it’s better for an airplane not to flap.