For many, the thought of nature being intelligent is laughable. I guess the word “intelligent” can be a bit tricky.
However, the more you understand nature the more amazing it gets.
Here are a few things that may give you a glimpse at what I’m talking about.
Gears.
When you hear the word gears you think of a machine parts right? Earliest man made gears were found to be in 4th century BC China.
It turns out however, insects are the true inventors of the gear.
A magnified image of the gear mechanism found on Issus coleoptratus
Aka planthopper
This video explains how the gears function.
The internet
A 100yrs ago an invisible network of sharing information might have seemed like an outrageous tale. The World Wide Web was born in 1990. But the Wood Wide Web has been around for millions of years. Natures internet is a fungal system of complex relationships between plants, fungi, and even bacteria. In fact the largest organism on earth is a mushroom species called armillaria ostoyae aka honey mushrooms cover an area of 2.4 miles (3.8 km) across. These underground networks of mycelium play an critical role in nature. These fungal networks develop relationships with plants and trade things like water and nutrients in exchange for sugars. They also allow the plants to communicate.
https://www.earj.com.br/news/museon-exhibition-wood-wide-web-understanding-how-plants-talk/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?
v=breDQqrkikM
Farming
About 13,000 years ago human started planting crops and domesticating animals. This is thought to be a big step forward leading to the modern human.
You wouldn’t typically think of insects as farmers but they are and yet again they beat us by doing it first. A lot of people know about how ants will milk aphids but that’s not the weirdest thing they do. Leaf cutter ants farm fungus for food. They take plant material down to a large underground area where a fungus lives and feeds off the dead plant material. The fungus serves as food since the ants cannot digest the plants they allow the fungus to do it for them.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/working-ant-farm
Nature is simply amazing and we should be looking at it more closely. Who knows what other concepts it has mastered that we have yet to stumble upon.