Endless forms most beautiful: Why evolution favors symmetry

Endless forms most beautiful: Why evolution favors symmetry

2 years ago
Anonymous $jukOC22bR_

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220314095742.htm

An international team of researchers believe so, and have combined ideas from biology, computer science and mathematics to explain why. As they report in PNAS, symmetric and other simple structures emerge so commonly because evolution has an overwhelming preference for simple "algorithms" -- that is, simple instruction sets or recipes for producing a given structure.

"Imagine having to tell a friend how to tile a floor using as few words as possible," says Iain Johnston, a professor at the University of Bergen and author on the study. "You wouldn't say: put diamonds here, long rectangles here, wide rectangles here. You'd say something like: put square tiles everywhere. And that simple, easy recipe gives a highly symmetric outcome."