I was just perusing AskNature.org, an open source website dedicated to organizing the scientific literature and synthesizing it for engineers who wish to mimic nature's principles to design more efficient systems. It occurred to me that this is exactly what permaculture aims to do in an agricultural setting. Below is a link to the Biomimicry Taxonomy page. It is organized by function, i.e. how do various organisms solve problems via their own design. AS you can see, each of the main topics sounds very similar to questions we ask ourselves in permaculture. How can we best "get, store, and distribute resources"? What is the best way to "Maintain community" or "Maintain Physical Integrity".
etc, etc:
http://www.asknature.org/aof/browse
I hope this is a good starting point if you are engaged in solving a particular problem in your own paradise.
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