{"id":1007,"date":"2023-05-04T11:39:53","date_gmt":"2023-05-04T10:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/?post_type=seminar&#038;p=1007"},"modified":"2023-05-04T11:41:35","modified_gmt":"2023-05-04T10:41:35","slug":"two-kinds-of-emergence-in-animal-engineering","status":"publish","type":"seminar","link":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/?seminar=two-kinds-of-emergence-in-animal-engineering","title":{"rendered":"Two kinds of emergence in animal engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Analytical thought has allowed humans to become master manipulators of their material environments. &nbsp;Our construction behavior typically involves intelligently combining elements with distinct roles toward a functioning whole. &nbsp;Some other animals, such as birds and termites, have evolved the ability to build physical structures with surprisingly complex functionality, without apparent aptitude for abstraction. &nbsp;I will argue that the genius of their evolved behaviors lies in harnessing emergent phenomena, and try to extract engineering lessons from two examples. &nbsp;The bird nest will be seen as disordered mechanical metamaterial with tuned, rich bulk properties, and the termite mound as a swarm-assembled, colonial, abiotic organ which harnesses external forces for selective metabolic exchange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":1008,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-1007","seminar","type-seminar","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"speaker":"Dr Hunter King","speakers_institution":"Rutgers University","host":"St Andrews","date_and_time":"2023-05-09 13:00:50","location":"Dyers Brae Seminar Room and Teams","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/seminar\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/seminar"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/seminar"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}