Form and Function

I've come back to an entry I had thought about but never posted back when we were working on the digestive system. In my previous life as a grad student I was introduced to the idea of fractals, or shapes that appear similar at many different scales. These can be computed mathematically but I don't "do" math so I'll ignore that direction entirely. But what is interesting to me is the natural objects that display this same type of self-similarity. Coastlines are what got me interested because I was doing digital mapping and the generally, but not entirely, irregular shape of a coastline makes it pretty darn difficult to know what scale map you're looking at if there are no other identifying features. Snowflakes and clouds are other common examples of natural objects that display features of being fractal-like. But the best example I think, and one that I've not seen mentioned, is the multi-scale folding in the digestive system that creates all that surface area. If you had only the outline of a cross-section of plicae circularis, villi, and microvilli, I think they'd look pretty much the same. And because the human brain likes patterns, that makes me happy.