This two-volume set (CCIS 1565 and CCIS 1566) constitutes selected and revised papers from the 16th International Conference on Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories and Applications, BIC-TA 2021, held in Taiyuan, China, in December 2021. The 67 papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 211 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence; DNA and molecular computing; machine learning and computer vision.