Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.
Rodin picks a mushroom delighted, and shows it to Madame Rodin... "Look," he says excitedly, "and that takes but a single night! In one night all these are made, all these lamellas. That is good work."
Nature is a brilliant engineer and builder. It knows how to create seashells that are twice as strong as the most resistant ceramics human beings can manufacture, and it produces silk fibers five times stronger than steel. Nature also knows how to create multipurpose forms.
Every action done by nature is done in the shortest way.
Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ.
Nature is economical. She puts her lights and darks only where she needs them.
Nature does nothing in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
Human subtlety 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.
