What is a 'Natural' Pattern?

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(c) Ian Alexander 1996-2002

Natural is a term with many overlapping meanings and shades of definition. The Cambridge philosopher Mary Hesse is said to have identified over 60 distinct uses of the term, and Collingwood wrote a whole book about The Idea of Nature. Clearly one's view of nature depends on one's own situation, viewpoint, or perspective -- notice that these words refer to a place in a physical and visual world. Nature was rightly seen as dangerous and threatening, until Man became so recklessly powerful that nature became threatened in its turn -- and the human race along with it.

We can therefore say definitely some things that Natural is not: a synonym for healthy, wholesome, good for you, gentle, delicate, safe -- as the marketing men would like us to believe. It's true that many fine things are natural, but that is not the whole story. Nature is both generous and 'red in tooth and claw' (Tennyson's version of Darwin's view of Nature with ruthless Natural Selection). For example:

• Natural substances include Curare, the tree-frog skin toxin used quite naturally by forest people as an arrow poison; Belladonna / Atropine, the Deadly Nightshade toxin used both to dilate the pupils of the eye (hence, a bella donna could make herself look more beautiful by applying the poison to her eyes!) and of course as the powerful murder-weapon of the renaissance Medici family with a few drops in a victim's wine-cup; and indeed some substances as deadly as any that technologists have been able to devise: Aflatoxin from fungus-rotted seeds and nuts; Botulinum toxin from anaerobic Clostridium soil bacteria; Ricin from the castor oil plant.
   
• Natural processes include volcanic eruption, earthquake, storm, avalanche, mud-flow and tsunami; and in a different style -- often slower, but no more gentle -- disease, parasitism, predation, death and decay.

Pattern, too, is overwhelmingly a term with visual connotations, a repeat in a wallpaper or fabric, a seen repetitive structure; and it too is a term with a cloud of related meanings. The simplest interpretation is perhaps the wallpaper tiling, where a rectangular region tiles the plane infinitely without change. Such patterns are of course never really found in nature; the repetition is always approximate and finite -- no matter how carefully the bees shape their honeycomb, and no matter how many cells they construct, the cells vary in size and their rows come to an end. Ripples in a pond are all alike -- and all different. Their colours and brightnesses vary, sometimes in smooth gradients, sometimes in complex ways. Other natural patterns can only be understood using the mathematics of chaos and fractals: repetition is present at a deep level, but all the visible parts of the pattern are unique.

Here are some of the ways, then, that this site tries to treat the natural pattern.

Natural
1. Unaffected by human action (Anthony Giddens). e.g. leaf skeletons, crystal forms, clouds.
2. Shaped by forces of the world (Nature with capital N) such as erosion by wind or water. e.g. limestone pavement, wave-cut platforms.
3. Made of found materials. e.g. stone walls, wicker baskets.
4. Made in any physical way, especially not the virtual creation of a computer. e.g. paintings, batik, ikat, weavings.
5. Occurring according to inevitable laws of construction. e.g. spirally arranged flowerheads, pinecones, seashells.
6. Directly described by mathematical laws. e.g. regular tessellations, Penrose tilings, turbulent flow, splashes.
7. Made without human intention, found in the world, collected or observed. e.g. people in a piazza, scooters lined up in a street, bottles arranged on a shelf.
8. Made in a regular way by following a physical procedure. e.g. knitted, woven, embroidered, or printed materials.
9. Made in a not perfect, non-mechanised way by hand, homespun, human, creative, artisanal. e.g. weaving, basketmaking, walling, roofing, ironwork, masonry.
10. Shaped by living things other than man. e.g. snakeskin, seastars, leaves, fruit, honeycomb.

The whole of human scientific and artistic endeavour can be seen as the attempt to discover Pattern in Nature.