What we — and AI — can learn from nature's intelligence

This message comes from NPR sponsor, Capella University. With Capella's FlexPath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your schedule. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. MANOUSH ZOMORODI We truly have to ask ourself, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, natural intelligence. And we're going to kick things off by going back in time to the 1750s and a marshy, swampy, subtropical wetland in North Carolina, where a man named Arthur Dobbs lived. Yeah. No, I like Arthur Dobbs. This is our tour guide, Greg Gage. He was the governor of North Carolina. This is back in the 1750s, still under British rule. And Arthur, he says, was a curious man, a bit of a gentleman scientist. So when Arthur started to hear a rumor about a very unusual plant growing not that far away, he decided to go check it out. And he heard these stories about this plant. He says, well, I'm the governor of this land. I should go investigate. He went out to the swamps, and so there's a little small area, I think it's about six square miles. And then there, low to the ground, are these little tiny plants, and that if you watch them long enough, a bug will eventually fall into its little or walk across its little leaves, and it snapshots and it eats this bug. And so, of course, he's pretty fascinated by this. Understandable because, well, no Europeans had ever documented a plant like this before. So He does what, scientists do at the time. They take out a letter, and they write to their colleagues in Europe. The great wonder of the vegetable kingdom is a very curious unknown species of sensitive. He writes, it's a dwarf plant. Leaves are like a narrow segment of a sphere consisting of two parts, like the cap of a spring purse. Upon anything touching the leaves or falling between them, they instantly close like a spring trap. To this surprising plant, I've given the name of flytrap sensitive. ZOMORODI The flytrap sensitive, or as we call it today, the Venus flytrap. The news of this remarkable animal eating plant took off across Europe. And a hundred years later, Charles Darwin would write an entire book called Insectivorous Plants. Eventually, the great Charles Darwin got to study this plant, and this plant absolutely blew him away. He called it …