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.)