Look To Nature

by | Oct 12, 2005

From the comments to a post on Dave Pollard’s blog, “How to Save the World”:

Leonardo da Vinci was not a genius because of his imagination. His genius lay in his ability to OBSERVE nature and THEN create. It was this humility that was the doorway into his inventions. He did not invent anything that hadn’t already been created in nature. He simply looked more closely at how nature did things and then tried to do the best he could with human tools to copy it. This power of observation came through his initial interest in painting and sculpting, which taught him, more than anything else, to observe. Why does the human species today believe that they no longer have anything to learn from nature and that the human imagination can somehow go beyond nature? We have but scratched the tip of the iceberg in our observations. Reality is far more complex than anything we could possibly imagine. Human arrogance has grown to such an extent that we believe we are no longer operating within the laws of nature! Of course disaster will result from that assumption. –Kerry Somers