An artist once said how dull it must be to see things with a scientists eyes. Knowing all about how something works takes the mystery out of it which, he thought is essential and sufficient for the artistic view.
It isn’t that way at all. I see the beauty in the forest, the light playing on the endless patterns made by growing things, rocks, the earth and the clouds. But knowing the structure of these things, far from detracting from their beauty enhances it.
Ferns have a beautiful fractal symmetry, shown in these pictures. But the beauty of that idea goes much further – nature makes incredible complexity out of an elegantly simple idea. The idea is to make something – perhaps a simple structure, but include a place in that structure where the structure itself can be repeated. So the ferns use the same shape as their leaves get smaller. Steven Wolfram, Buchannan, and many others, have explored this and shown that much of what we see in nature is built on simplicity, not complexity.
And this extends to a more powerful idea – allow the basic shapes to modify the underlying structure as needed. Whereas these ferns repeat the same shape, as do the bronchi in the lungs and the blood vessels of a mammal; the arms, legs and spine are shaped differently for all species of mammals – and dinosaurs for that matter. But the back legs are essentially the same as the front ones. The pelvis is similar to the shoulder girdle – and, for that matter, one half of the body is pretty well identical to the other. So, once nature has got the idea of how to make a foreleg, it can make a hindleg, and a leg on the opposite side too. And once it can modify that basic shape, it can make pretty well any body it likes.
It has always staggered me that I can go to a museum and look at a creature’s skeleton living hundreds of millions of years ago, and recognise the same bones, in the same order, doing more or less the same job as the ones keeping me together. It’s the incredible, staggering simplicity of that which adds to the beauty of the objects. The same staggering simplicity that makes these ferns beautiful.
