If you remember nothing else from biology class, you probably recall the "survival of the fittest" theory, which generally refers to how organisms adapt and change with their environment in order to reproduce and survive.
It's one of history's most enduring scientific theories, and continues to permeate our culture more than 150 years after it was first suggested. While that's all well and good, Adrian Bejan, J.A. Jones professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, says that he's come up with an evolutionary theory that goes far beyond survival of the fittest, and encompasses not just living organisms, but every animate and inanimate object on the planet.
"My theory is similar to the survival of the fittest, but it's so much more than that," he says.
It's called Constructal Law, which Bejan details, along with co-author J. Peder Zane, in "Design In Nature" (Doubleday, $27.95) published last month.
Bejan says the theory challenges many bedrock beliefs held by his scientific colleagues. In fact, it was an instinctual and oppositional gut reaction to another scientist's theory that prompted the Constructal Law light bulb to go off in his head.
It was 1995, and Bejan was in Nancy, France, for an international conference on thermodynamics. He was listening to Belgian physical chemist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine give a speech asserting a common scientific belief that the tree- and branch-shaped structures found in nature - from river basins and lighting patterns to a lung's air passages - were all just cosmic coincidences.
"I knew that Prigogine, and everyone else, was wrong," Bejan writes in his book.
Bejan says this epiphany sent him down a path that ultimately led to the concept behind Constructal Law. It states that everything that moves - animate or inanimate - generates shapes and structures that facilitate movement. The same principles that govern biological creatures also guide the inanimate world, such as winds and rivers, as well as the engineered world, like airplanes, ships and automobiles.
And this evolutionary drive to facilitate movement is closely linked to the treelike structures and designs that reappear throughout the natural word: a flash of lighting creates a blinding structure of roots and limbs to discharge electricity; river basins branch into smaller tree-shaped streams to help water flow into a main channel; the cardiovascular system branches out into arteries and capillaries in order to pump blood throughout the body.
"The body is a jungle of trees - the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the urinary system," Bejan says. "Look at a sample of human tissue under the microscope and you'll see what looks like a world map of river basins."
The law even extends to our culture's basic infrastructure, such as traffic patterns on highways and urban design, both of which resemble the human circulatory system, which in turn resembles how lava flows down a volcano, which in turn resembles hierarchal corporate flowcharts, and so on and so on.
