First posted in the Guardian, January 22, 2014

“Although human subtlety makes a variety of inventions by different means to the same end, it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”

– Leonardo da Vinci

When sharks, honeybees and other animals forage for food, they move in a pattern of short movements in one area combined with a few longer treks to more distant areas. This pattern is called Lévy walks (or flights).

A National Academy of Sciences study released last month, “Evidence of Lévy walk foraging patterns in human hunter–gatherers”, also found that the Hadza, hunter-gatherers from northern Tanzania, perform Lévy walks when foraging for a wide variety of food items.

The authors suggest that this type of movement profile is a “fundamental feature of human landscape use, regardless of the physical or cultural environment, and may have played an important role in the evolution of human mobility”.

We can see the same kind of pattern closer to home: in Saturday Night Fever and HBO’s Girls, young people seek their mates in their local Brooklyn neighborhoods, with an occasional jaunt to Manhattan. And in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, brilliant detective Robert Goren often solves the crime by identifying the movement patterns of serial murderers.

Nature, our subconscious master, is very, very powerful. Nature’s intricate web is the genius embedded in every breath we take and every morsel we eat. It’s incumbent upon us to start looking more closely at its patterns and constraints.

Many scientists and investors are already doing this. Janine Benyus, who named the emerging discipline of biomimicry, describes “seeking sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s designs and processes (for instance, solar