Our human technology has emerged from ten thousand years of design, trial, and error. Nature's mechanical designs,
the function of plants and animals are billions of years older. Both "technologies" share the same physical
environment - the same materials, atmosphere, and temperature range - and both are subject to the same gravitational
pull. But they've turned out to be wildly dissimilar. Steven Vogel examines the many questions that arise from
these differences. Cats' Paws and Catapults is about the ways living things work - and walk, run, jump, and fly
- and how they grow. It introduces the reader to the field of biomechanics and explains how the nexus of physical
law and historical accident determine the designs of both people and nature. It asks, in the end, how looking at
nonhuman - natural - technology might enrich our understanding of what we do and have done.
Table of Contents
1. Noncoincident Worlds
2. Two Schools of Design
3. The Matter of Magnitude
4. Surfaces, Angles, and Corners
5. The Stiff and the Soft
6. Two Routes to Rigidity
7. Pulling versus Pushing
8. Engines for the Mechanical Worlds
9. Putting Engines to Work
10. About Pumps, Jets, and Ships
11. Making Widgets
12. Copying, in Retrospect
13. Copying, Present and Prospective
14. Contrasts, Convergences, and Consequences
