Stunning Videos Show Fibonacci-Type Natural Growth; Why Fibonacci Series?

What can humans learn from nature's growth patterns?

Do you know how scientists can tell if a structure, like the genomic sequences of a virus or molecular structure of a chemical, is naturally-evolved or human (lab)-made? Let’s start with snapshots of two of my earlier popular video tweets, followed by the simple scientific explanation:

Stunning Videos of Natural Growth Patterns

1) An amazing 16-hour time lapse of a Zebrafish embryo growing its sensory nervous system (a participant in Nikon Small World in Motion contest).

Ray Armat, Ph.D. @RayArmat

Amazing 16-hour time lapse of a Zebrafish embryo growing its sensory nervous system In my book, I will share how neurons, like #trees, use a fractal-type arborization strategy to maximize synaptic networking & data exchange in a small space #neuroscience

In my upcoming book, I will explain how neurons, including those in our brain, adopt a growth pattern similar to tree branches and use a fractal-type arborization strategy to maximize synaptic networking and data exchange in a small space.

I will explain what that fractals are shortly.

2) Ink injection into yolk sac artery of 72 hour-old chick embryo visualizes the beating heart and the vasculature (Winner of 2011 Nikon Small World in Motion):

Ray Armat, Ph.D. @RayArmat

Ink injection into yolk sac artery of 72 hour-old chick embryo to visualize the beating heart and the vasculature Winner of 2011 Nikon Small World in Motion #Biology #chicken #NaturePhotography

Here again, blood vessels adopt a growth pattern similar to tree branches and use a fractal-type arborization strategy based on mathematical series (like Fibonacci series, explained below).

Fractal patterns are scale-free, which means order and structural dimensional ratios are replicated from small to large scale. Such a pattern seems to be nature’s preferred (metabolically-efficient) way to scale up order and resilience from small local scales to larger (organism) scales.

What is the Nature’s Wisdom in Using Fractal Patterns?

Here is an excerpt from my upcoming book:

“What do fractal patterns in nature teach us? That evolution, even in complex organisms and seemingly chaotic patterns, acts wise by starting with simple local rules of metabolic efficiency, conservation and balance, followed by propagation of the rule (wisdom/pattern) over space and time. Start small, be patient, perfect the evolution, scale up. If you have not seen images of fractal patterns, I highly suggest you look online for stunning images and videos of natural fractals, Mandelbrot sets and Koch curves.”

The growth patterns in human-made structures, driven by factors other than symbiotic metabolic efficiency and resilience, rarely follow these intelligent fractal patterns seen in nature. In fact, biomathematicians like Jean-Claude Perez apply Fibonacci series and fractal pattern rules to see if virus strains are naturally evolved or possibly altered by humans (see example of their work about SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant here).

What is Fibonacci Series?

Here is an excerpt from my book:

“The series, inspired by Indian Sanskrit Vedic studies, starts with 0 and 1, then followed by numbers that are the sum of their two preceding numbers, so it would be 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,..., growing by the Golden Ratio of 1.62. In 1754, Charles Bonnet discovered that the spiral phyllotaxis of plants (arrangement of leaves on a plant stem) were frequently expressible in Fibonacci number series. In 1917, biologist mathematician D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson demonstrated that the Fibonacci sequence could also describe the spiral growth patterns of animal horns and molluscs’ shells (Fermat’s spiral). There are many other natural patterns that more or less follow the Fibonacci series such as florets, fruitlets and flowers in sunflowers, pineapples and the artichoke[1].

But what does the Fibonacci series tell us about the local, bottom-up and metabolically efficient nature of evolution? There is still much we do not understand. We know mathematically and evolutionarily speaking, random walks…”

The first 10 Annual (paid) subscribers will receive a copy of my upcoming book (expected in March 2022) about The Science of our Self-Delusional Addictive Homo economicus Brain.

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[1] The series has been used to explain all types of phenomena, from the ancestral tree of male honey bees to the number of possible ancestors on the human X chromosome, and in planning poker and the Scrum software development methodology. There is even a quarterly publication just dedicated to the series: https://www.fq.math.ca/