If necessity is mother to invention, then analogy is father. Many new insights are generated by learning something from the structure or behavior of one entity, which is well understood, about another entity of which we have less knowledge. Leonardo da Vinci's observations of the forms and function of bones, tendons and muscles of the human body, illustrated in his anatomical drawings, is analogous to the beam-bending device with supports and levers that he invented. Newton's discovery of the law of gravity is thought to have been spurred by the realization that the apple and the moon are victims of the same forces, each within a different situation. Charles Babbage's invention of the "difference engine" that ultimately gave rise to the computer evoked images of a thinking machine. Observations of the microscopic hierarchies of biological materials, ranging from the architecture of minerals and proteins in rat's teeth to the layers in chitin fibers in beetles are now used as biological analogues in the development of new, biomimicked materials. Recent attempts to generate artificial intelligence, using insight about the workings of the human brain, could be seen as still another extension of the human-machine analogy, this time in the realm of information processing rather than the purely material world.

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