November 2nd, 2007

By Darren Barefoot

Filed under:
Science
10 Comments »

Bronchioles, Trees or Coastline?

I’m agnostic. But if I wanted to find evidence of a Intelligent Designer in nature, I’d look at more images like this:

Bronchial Tubes, Trees or Coast Lines?

I made this image by rotating, blurrying and greyscaling this satellite photo of the coast of Greenland. I saw it on this recently-Dugg blog post, and was immediately struck by how tree-like the fjords and inlets looked.

I showed it to Julie, and she immediately thought of bronchioles, the tubes in your lungs.

I know I sound like a New Age hippie, but this sort of thing kind of blows my mind. It’s amazing and profound that we humans can recognize these recurring micro and macro patterns in nature.

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Comments: 10 Responses so far

Gar Fisher
November 2nd, 2007
12:42 pm

Check out fractals and the Mandelbrot set, that’ll blow your mind too.

bz
November 2nd, 2007
1:37 pm

check this out:

http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/2007/11/breathe.html

Derek K. Miller
November 2nd, 2007
3:09 pm

Oh, and if you can get similar results out of pure math (as Gar notes), who needs a designer?

The Other Heather
November 2nd, 2007
8:55 pm

It is quite stunning.

Donna
November 3rd, 2007
8:11 am

Slartibartfast would be proud. :)

gillian
November 3rd, 2007
9:33 am

I agree with Gar and Derek: it’s fractals, ergo mathematical. How does this suggest there is a god when it can be described by logic and equations?

darren
November 3rd, 2007
9:47 am

“How does this suggest there is a god when it can be described by logic and equations?”

I’m not sure I follow your logic here. I only took one philosophy of religion course at UVic, but I’m pretty sure that ‘described by logic and equations’ and ‘higher power’ aren’t mutually exclusive. At least, plenty of philosophers have applied logic in arguing in favour of the existences of a higher being.

That, however, is not what I care to do (despite, I suspect, any number of atheists chomping at the bit).

My point was that if one were looking for it, repeated similar patterns at radically different scales might seem like good evidence of intelligent design.

Derek K. Miller
November 3rd, 2007
12:48 pm

I guess my logic just goes in the opposite direction. :)

Hamish M
November 4th, 2007
9:03 pm

Love it. Some really cool stuff here. If we look around we can see patterns all over the place. E.g., the golden ratio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

Mike
November 6th, 2007
6:55 am

Intelligent design, my ass. That’s just laziness.