As part of my research about how to animate various forms in nature, I am looking at different kinds of naturally occurring patterns like symmetries, branching, spirals, waves, tessellations, cracks, and stripes. It is difficult to try to animate a tree or a plant if you don’t know very much about how their patterns occur.
As background, I read an article in Smithsonian magazine, “The Science Behind Nature’s Patterns,” that brought up an interesting debate between biologists about why these patterns occur. The author Fessenden wrote that while “natural selection might explain the why of a tiger’s stripes—a strategy to blend in with shadows in grasslands and forest— the way that chemicals diffuse through developing tissue can explain how pigment ends up in bands of dark and light, as well as why similar patterns can crop up on a sea anemone.” Apparently this debate involved examining Darwin’s ideas about evolutionary causes of pattern versus a more chemical and mathematical model of explanation. I am going to research more about that debate and the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
The rest of the article introduced Phillip Ball, who worked as an editor for Nature for over twenty years, and reviewed his book called Patterns in Nature. I bought this book and will be using it as background for understanding more about forms in nature.
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