The Epistemology of Bioinspiration: From Analogy to Abstraction

The article analyzes nature as a cognitive partner in the process of creating technology, challenging the dichotomy between biology and engineering. The author rejects an infantile approach to biomimetics as mechanical copying of shapes, pointing to the necessity of moving from form imitation to functional abstraction. A key element here is the analysis of relationships and functional dependencies instead of visual similarity, which is reflected in the ISO 18458:2015 standard. Nature is presented not as an infallible designer, but as a vast archive of solutions and evolutionary compromises. True bioinspiration consists of extracting the operating principles of biological systems and translating them into technical models, allowing one to avoid the trap of superficial imitation in favor of effective innovation.