Good News !!

There is that aesthetic voice that speaks as we absorb the beauty of the moment. The wonder and awe of the color, the form, and the pattern. And there is the spiritual voice that speaks with sanctity as appreciate the interrelationship of an object with ourselves and our surroundings. That awe of knowing that everything somehow fits together.

But at some moment, we may yearn for another kind of understanding. Our left brain kicks in as it attempts to explain how and why an object is formed. We want to dig into the logical aspects of the beauty we are experiencing. Nature’s analytical and factual  voice provides tangible labels, judgments, facts, and opinions about a pattern in nature. It is a voice that speaks with lists, numbers and computer simulations. It asks about such things as size, habitat, movements, and chemical makeup.

So far, this book has explored the aesthetic and the the spiritual aspects of pattern in nature. By addressing these subjects first, we emphasize interrelationships among all of nature. This idea of connectedness serves us well as we now move on to gain more insight through analytical and synthetic methods of investigation and discovery.

Nature’s logical voice communicates patterns such as the center a sunflower where the florets are laid out in a definite geometric order.  As one follows the floret pattern from the center to the periphery, it is easy to see both left and right spiral patterns. If you were to magnify the photo and measure the angle between one floret and its outbound neighbor along a spiral, you’d find that there is a constant angle of 137.51 degrees. These empirical observations lead to questions (and further research) about why this arrangement exists. In fact, we find that this and other spiral arrangements are ubiquitous in nature. We see spirals in sea shells, sheep horns, strawberries, and pine cones – to name a few. This process of exploration and discovery can become a stunning synthesis of the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the ideas of modern science.

But, Nature's logical voice also has a strangely aesthetic component as it defines factual unities amongst seemingly diverse patterns in nature. These unities include the ideas of order, symmetry, self similarity, self organization, Fibonacci numbers, scaling patterns, and networks of all kinds. Each displays similar patterns across widely diverse natural objects. Almost always, these logical sequences produce patterns that have a strong aesthetic appeal as well. Fractal images, for example.

What is quite surprising is that many of these unities work in harmony with each other. They are interrelated. Most patterns in nature are highly complex systems that exhibit the unities of order, symmetry, self similarity, self organization, scaling, and networks. Self organized systems such as bird flocks and fish schools all exhibit order, self similarity, scaling, and can be described in the language of networks. So, nature’s logical voice can express, in analytical terms, the harmony that is communicated by nature’s spiritual voice.

Formally, one might say that patterns in nature are relationships manifested as both structure (form) and as dynamic process (function). Patterns work in the context of larger patterns called “environment”.

Because patterns in nature are a series of connected relationships, they tend to be highly complex. The reasons for this complexity, according to Geoffrey West, are:

• Patterns are highly complex systems, based on historical contingencies, that can usually be described only as "course grain" behavior.
• There is a huge number of sub-agents exhibiting self-organization that produce emergent properties at a system level.

Despite this complexity and the huge variety of patterns in nature, they all share certain common characteristics that are described in the following sections:

• Patterns are manifestations of an underlying order of both form and function.
• Each pattern is part of a connected system.
• Patterns contain symmetry.

In addition to having these common characteristics, it now appears that patterns in nature operate under a unifying principle. The characteristics of pattern connectivity can be modeled by a power law.