In the same way, you can run ICA on human speech, and what you get back are gammatone filters, [2] which are commonly used to model the auditory system!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_cell [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_component_analysis [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammatone_filter
That we rediscover biological mechanisms present in our own designs, we should not be surprised.
Abstract: "The genome has often been called the operating system (OS) for a living organism. A computer OS is described by a regulatory control network termed the call graph, which is analogous to the transcriptional regulatory network in a cell. To apply our firsthand knowledge of the architecture of software systems to understand cellular design principles, we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (Escherichia coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. We show that both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions."
dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914771107 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1e5a/bf57c88ad060046c5b2adc...
Yes, I agree with the idea, but the sense of "use ... similar to ..." implies intent and temporal order in many contexts. If I use language similar to Ernest Hemingway, am I justified in expressing it in the reverse order?
More realistically, in copyright and patent disputes, saying a person has "used ... (a method) similar to" that of a presumed originator matters a great deal, and a defendant in such an action may well reverse the order of the words in his own defense -- "I didn't use a method similar to Mr. Smith's, he used a method similar to mine." Clearly there's a temporal order implied in this particular context.
> And if the biological knowledge is a more recent discovery that the engineering knowledge...
Good point. One might assume biology is farther along in its grasp of the intellectual terrain than engineering, but that's not necessarily true.
I think the feeling about comparing yourself with Hemingway, or Hemingway with yourself (note: comparison does have an asymmetric feeling for me) may arise from the fact that you don't really believe your (hypothetical, putative) writing is similar to Hemingway's on the crucial dimension of quality. So it naturally jars to think of Hemingway's writing defined as similar to it.
The words of the defendant in your example actually read to me more like a Groucho Marx gag than a credible defense, but I'm in Ireland where usage may differ.
