For the last few millennia, we humans have thought of our species as being the sole species capable of intelligence, the only species to study the world around us and devising methods of exploiting physics to achieve our end goals. We always assumed that being the most successful species, there was nothing we could learn from the natural world, that all we could do was to be the benevolent caretaker of the lesser species in the wild.
While older religions revered the natural world and considered themselves a part of the natural order. Animals and other life was considered to be at least as sacred as human life, and feared for the horrors nature could inflict on the unprepared populace. However, most religions which originated in the last few millennia placed humans front and center, as being the sole beings on whom the weight of the world is placed, either as beings made in the image of god, or as the only beings with a soul and a divine right to rule. This was reflected in the gross overuse of natural resources and the mistreatment and abuse of animals for human gain. Human superiority over other life was taken for granted and science was focused on the study of the abstract, the knowledge of the functioning of the universe, and the self. Natural forces were tamed and electricity was used to empower civilization before the gaze turned once again at the natural world. The study of animals was limited to finding better ways of exploiting them.
However, over the last few decades, there has been a remarkable transition in our approach to studying animals, and science in general. New ideas are being developed, not based on the abstract thoughts of man, but by observing animals and insects in nature. Scientists see things in nature that they wouldn't imagine possible in their wildest dreams, and try mimicking this behavior only to discover a previously unknown niche in the laws they thought they'd already fully understood. Animals are no longer studied just to better methods of exploiting them but to better understand them and how amazing they are at using physics, and how numerous are the forms of intelligence that can exist in the natural world.
A Lotus leaf in nature doesn't allow water drops to settle on its surface, this is because of the natural irregularity of the surface, which traps air under the drop and prevents it from settling. Scientists had earlier known that certain surfaces prevented drops from staying on the surface and called them hydrophobic surfaces ( water -hating ) but they had never considered the possibility of roughening up the surface to force a hydrophilic (water -loving) surface to trap air and make it super hydrophobic like a lotus leaf. Attempting to mimic this nature of a lotus leaf has led us to an entire new field of material sciences where people attempt to make super hydro and oleo phobic surfaces to prevent undesirable wetting of the surface. Imagine an airplane that wont need to be de-iced or surgical instruments that prevent blood from sticking to it, and you can think of the various applications that come with this domain.
Similarly, when studying a woodpecker, scientists realized that the head of a woodpecker's head faced massive forces when trying to drill a hole. The force on the head of a woodpecker was about 10 times that of that on a human in a severe car crash, 22 times a second. (pause, just read that again). The reason the woodpecker doesn't have its brain falling out of its head 22 times a second, is because of extremely well designed spongy bones that slow down the motion of its head compared to its head, so the brain faces far lower forces. Replicating this allows the flight data recorders in new planes to survive their crashes, so we can prevent in flight accidents from happening. Modern cars are also much safer because of certain advancements in car construction originating from these studies.
Octapii have 9 brains, one in each tentacle and one in the central sac, scientists have only begun to question how intelligent they are, and how consciousness could exist in such a distributed network. Its existence is as alien to us as any life on a different planet, and we are finally beginning to comprehend how complex life on earth is.
Planes fly faster, wind turbines run more efficiently, bullet trains run at much higher speeds, our very definition of consciousness is changing, all due to our acceptance that maybe, humans are not the more advanced beings in the universe, and that evolution which has been ongoing on our planet for atleast 3.9 million years (compared to the oldest homo sapien at 0.3 million years) has evolved adaptations in life that utilize physical forces in ways we are yet to comprehend or try. Consciousness is recently being thought of as being an unnecessary artifact of intelligence, which is itself just finding the most optimum solution to a problem. In a way, evolution and natural ecosystem is intelligent, and probably the most intelligent entity on the planet, and we've only recently started looking at it as a resource to learn from. It is a dramatic shift in human thought and one that promises to revolutionize our understanding of everything.
