Biomimetic Principles in Distributed and AI Systems: A Perspective on Nature-Inspired Architectures for Resilience and Efficiency

v0.2.0. Adds reference [16] — the author's companion LinkedIn essay "Biomimicry & the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence" — cited inline in the introduction, and rebuilds the typeset PDF to match. No changes to results or argument. Perspective and narrative survey (preprint). Not peer reviewed. Most bio-inspired computing is presented as a catalog of metaphors. This paper argues the durable value is structural. It introduces the Biomimetic Systems Map (BSM), a five-column taxonomy (mechanism, invariant, systems property, engineering analogue, open gap), applies it to five well-grounded mechanism families (stigmergy, spiking computation, adaptive immunity, homeostasis, quorum sensing), and extracts four transferable design invariants: locality, redundancy, feedback, degeneracy. It is deliberately explicit that analogy is a source of hypotheses, not proofs, and closes with five falsifiable propositions rather than claims. Source, figures, and BibTeX: https://github.com/itguruhaseeb/biomimetic-systems-paper