The Paradox of Porosity: Purity and Pace
A deliberately provocative reflection, not prescriptive, but invitational)
This piece, the second in a two-part series written with Michaela Emch, does not offer a clear set of answers. Rather, it is an invitation to sit with discomfort, gradients, and unfinished thoughts. It borrows freely from nature. Not to moralise or to claim that biology should dictate society, but to see what happens when we let living systems trouble our certainties. Consider it a thought experiment, not a manifesto.
We tend to imagine separation as clean and decisive. Lines drawn. Boxes closed. Yet nature, inconveniently, rarely works that way. It favours sequences over switches, gradients over absolutes, and timing over mere force.
Take ricin, one of the most potent plant toxins known. It is not a single, blunt instrument. It is a molecule made of two protein chains bound together. One chain is almost benign: it enables the molecule to bind to a cell and pass through its membrane. Only once inside does the bond break, releasing the second chain, which then disrupts the cell’s internal machinery. Harm does not arrive all at once. It unfolds. Entry precedes impact. Access precedes disruption.
This is a familiar pattern in living systems. Many toxins and venoms work sequentially, preparing the terrain before acting. Nature, it turns out, understands pacing remarkably well.
The same logic applies on the regenerative side. After an avalanche scrapes a mountainside bare, a forest does not reappear by decree. Pioneer species arrive first. Soil slowly forms. Mosses, grasses, shrubs, and eventually trees follow… sometimes over centuries. Skip a phase, accelerate the process, impose the end state too early, and the system may fail to stabilise at all. From a biomimicry perspective, this matters: nature teaches us that fertility is rarely about speed, and almost never about shortcuts. Adaptation is not a switch; it is a progression.
Classification is one of our most powerful filtering tools. To name is to separate. Species, breeds, races, roles. Each label filters reality, amplifying certain differences while flattening others. Yet biology itself resists these clean cuts. When ricin has crossed the membrane but has not yet released its second strand, is it still ricin in the same sense? When do scattered pioneer species become a forest? At what point does a thing stop being what it was and become something else?
Even the definition of species is less stable than we often assume. Linnaeus drew boundaries from the outside: animal, plant, later fungi. For a long time, reproductive compatibility was the defining criterion. The application of genetics then complicated the picture. With finer tools came both greater precision and greater ambiguity. Recently, giraffes were reclassified from one species into four. What once counted as a subspecies now stands alone. The boundary moved; not because nature changed, but because our understanding did.
From a biomimetic standpoint, this is instructive. Nature is full of thresholds, but few of them are absolute. Everything exists on a gradient. This unsettles our human longing for purity.
When we do speak of purity in nature, it is often through the lens of breeds. Yet breeds are not species. A dog remains a dog whether it has longer legs, an extra toe, or a differently shaped neck. “Pure breeds” are human constructions, selected toward an ideal and evaluated through visible traits. Swiss horse breeds, for example, are carefully curated categories, not natural separations. They remain fully interbreedable. Purity here is aesthetic, cultural, aspirational, not biological.
Things become far more charged when these logics are applied to human groups. Systems of classification (“black”, “white”, “coloured”), have shaped laws, hierarchies, and power structures. Some societies, like Brazil, historically allowed a wide palette of categories, encouraging mixing; others enforced rigid separations. Naming again acts as filtration.
And yet, human populations have always been mixtures. There is no “original” Swiss identity, just as there is no singular origin for Zambians, whose histories reflect multiple waves of migration and displacement. Still, the impulse to label persists. Elizabeth Warren’s claim of fractional Indigenous ancestry was mocked, even as millions eagerly continue to submit their saliva to genetic testing companies in search of named origins. The desire to classify is also a desire to define belonging.
From a biomimicry lens, this brings us back to filtration and timing. Living systems constantly regulate what passes through their boundaries and at what rate. A membrane that is too open collapses the system. One that is too closed starves it. The intelligence lies not in openness or closure, but in modulation.
Many of our social anxieties mirror this dynamic. How much change can a system absorb? At what pace? Over what span of space and time? Sudden influx can overwhelm where gradual integration allows adaptation. Identity is not necessarily erased by flow but it can be destabilised by shock.
Pace, here, is everything. Given time, inclusion often becomes banal. Compressed into a short window, it can feel intolerable. Cells behave the same way: gradual change can be absorbed and adapted to; sudden surges can prove fatal. Human movement follows similar patterns. Roman legions once stationed African soldiers in Alpine valleys. Two thousand years later, traces remain in local features. More recent migration waves follow familiar labour paths. Those who arrived decades ago become “part of us”; those arriving now are framed as disruption. Time changes perception but the underlying tension persists.
Another layer complicates things further: the question of the goal. We often speak of resilience, which subtly implies return to what was before. Adaptation, by contrast, implies becoming something else. Nature overwhelmingly favours the latter.
Lions offer a useful example. Across different ecosystems, they adapt their hunting strategies to local conditions: stalking prey in floodplains, ambushing from trees in forests. In some regions, male lions lack manes altogether. These variations do not threaten the species. They are expressions of its plasticity. From a biomimicry perspective, adaptability (not sameness) is what allows continuity over time.
This raises an uncomfortable question: what, exactly, are we trying to preserve? Many political narratives appeal to a mythical past, an identity imagined as original and intact. Serbia’s claim to Kosovo rests on such a story. In Switzerland, the idea of Celtic ancestry persists despite millennia of migration and mixing. How far back must an identity reach to remain legitimate? And how distant can it be before the claim dissolves?
So the question returns, insistently: where is the threshold at which identity holds, and beyond which it transforms? How long is Switzerland “Switzerland”? What gradient of change makes continuity feel acceptable?
These are not abstract musings. They sit at the heart of how we design borders, integration policies, organisations, technologies, even innovation processes. We are very good at drawing boundaries in a world that is fundamentally continuous. We are far less skilled at designing transitions.
Nature offers a final clue in ecotones: the transitional zones between ecosystems. These edges, neither one thing nor the other, are often the most diverse, resilient, and generative spaces. They are not weak points. They are hotspots of life.
Porosity, then, is not the absence of boundaries. It is their intelligent design. It is the capacity to allow entry without collapse, transformation without loss of coherence. Whether we are thinking about cells, ecosystems, organisations, or societies, the challenge is the same: not whether to separate, but how, when, and at what pace.
Questions to sit with:
Where, in our systems, are we confusing purity with stability?
What would it mean to design social or organisational “membranes” rather than walls?
Which transitions are failing because we are accelerating them, and which because we are resisting them entirely?
Are we aiming for resilience as return, or adaptation as becoming?
And finally: what identities might actually become stronger (not weaker) through well-paced porosity?
No answers offered. Only gradients to explore.