The wheel and axle is an often cited example. It was a big surprise when a bacterium was discovered with a wheel-like connection to its flagellum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_...
Re:The Alien Space of Science
by AnimalMuppet on Friday October 23, 2026 @05:10PM
(#50215382)
True. That mechanism is there.
And yet, whoever invented the wheel and axle, I'm pretty sure they didn't do so based on the bacterium's flagellum.
So, yes, the concept existed in nature. But it wasn't the inspiration for the human invention in any way.
The best counterexample I could come up with was lasers. Yeah, all the pieces are there in quantum mechanics, but so far as I know, nothing in nature lases.
Semiconductor chips. Again, yes, all the physics is there, but you're going to be reaching pretty far to find something in nature that's like a CPU chip.
Dyson spheres.
Interrupt vector tables.
Riemannian geometry.
Databases.
I'm sure that people can poke holes in some of these (with varying degrees of far-fetchedness as to how directly the same concept is in nature). But I think there are enough counterexamples, where nature's "prior art" is indirect enough, to make the absolute version of the statement false.
"Humans rarely discover something that doesn't already exist somewhere in nature"? Yeah, that's probably true.