Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things My friend Geoff Cohen turned me on to a book called "Cat's Paws and Catapaults," which examines the historical failure of mechanical designs based on nature -- for example, the ornithopter. There are rare exceptions, like Velcro, but for the most part, nature's designs suggest mechanical dead-ends when applied to human engineering.

It seems that this is not the case in networking. Eric Bonabeau's Ant Colony Optimization research (which I've written about here on several occassions) has been used to solve real-life networking problems and to approach optimal solutions to the Travelling Salesman problem inherent in Southwest Airlines' routing. The Santa Fe Institute has also used cellular automata research to solve complex traffic and urban-planning problems