In the 1960’s, Rachel Carson, in her book “Silent Spring”, sounded a warning siren that was heard around the world. She told the story of a chemical death caused by man’s ignorance as he attempted to control his environment, free himself from pests, artificially enhance the growth of his food supply, and “manage” the ecology of other living creatures on this planet.

By describing relationships between various living species and their environment, she started a campaign to abolish the use of harmful chemicals in agriculture and by the consumer. Her book became a harbinger of change to come which included the modern environmental movement.

Carson provided a second, and equally powerful, message. It was a precursor to a major paradigm shift in Western science. Through many examples she showed that everything is connected. In the course of making her case for the harmful effects of DDT and other insecticides, Carson skillfully defined the connections between various living creatures and their environment. Some 50 years later, this idea has begun to take hold in the form of Systems Biology.  

Typically, the subject of "patterns in nature" addresses only the physical structure or architecture of a given natural object. This view is incomplete. A pattern does not live in isolation. It is highly connected to it's world -- usually in many ways. All patterns in nature are collections of smaller interconnected patterns and part of a larger set of patterns. To "know" a pattern means observing and understanding its context - the relationship with other patterns and the surrounding environment. For it is this systematic context that defines a pattern and how it successfully resides in its environment.

Every pattern is part of a hierarchy of physical structures (form) connected to each other in some way. That hierarchy also contains dynamic processes (function) that take place over time. By definition, a process is a set or series of actions directed to some end or a natural series of changes.

Patterns do not magically appear. They are formed using some process that involves directed energy. That energy typically comes in the form of physical and/or chemically driven conduits. Some of these processes are internal to a pattern. But other processes reach out to an environment of other patterns where they affect and are affected by their surrounding environment. The processes themselves are patterns with their own internal structure and processes.

Because dynamic processes are part of a pattern's definition, patterns are not just static structures. They are temporal and dynamic. Changes are always underway. A fish school (certainly a pattern in nature) lives within the hierarchal grand pattern we call an ecosystem. Here many forms of pattern architectures and processes come into play and are intertwined with each other. The school consists of individuals who swim according to a fixed set of swimming rules and the dynamic information gained by eyes and pressure sensors. Using this combination of sensory conduits, each fish makes regular swimming corrections in order to maintain separation distance and speed. The result is a dynamic organism we call a "school". In turn, the school is a super-organism connected in numerous ways to the larger patterned super-organism that we call an ecosystem.

Because a pattern in nature is really an interconnected hierarchy of BOTH structures and processes, one must understand both the interconnected processes and the structure manifested from these processes.

The subject of connectivity as part of patterns in nature is so important and so little emphasized in other texts, that an entire section on connectivity is devoted to this topic where there are discussions on systemsand networks. In addition, pattern connectivity is emphasized in the section on engaging nature.

This document is a draft of work in progress. Please post your comments, thoughts, and suggestions:

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