Fujiko Suda: Worklife

The same kind of bottom-up, pop­u­la­tion think­ing was respon­si­ble for the graph­i­cal plants pre­sented by Aris­tid Lin­den­mayer of the Uni­ver­sity of Utrecht and Preze­mys­law Prusinkiewcz of the Uni­ver­sity of Regina in Saskatchewan. These plants weren’t just drawn on the com­puter screen. They were grown. They started from a sin­gle stem, and then used a hand­ful of sim­ple rules to tell each branch how to make leaves, flow­ers, and more branches. Once again, the rules said noth­ing about the over­all shape of the final plant. They were meant to model how a mul­ti­tude of cells dif­fer­en­ti­ate and inter­act with one another dur­ing the course of the plan’ts devel­op­ment. .… (And if those rules wee then changed even slightly, they might pro­duce a read­i­cally dif­fer­ent plant, thus illus­trat­ing how easy it is for evo­lu­tion to make large leaps in out­ward appear­ances by mak­ing only tiny changes in the course of development.)