Endless Forms Are Most Beautiful: Why Evolution Loves Symmetry

Symmetry is ubiquitous in biology, from sunflowers to starfish

"Imagine you have to tell a friend how to lay the floor with as little text as possible," said Iain Johnston, a professor at the University of Bergen and author of the study

"You wouldn't say: put diamonds here, long rectangles here, wide rectangles here

The team used computational modeling to explore how this preference arises in biology

The scientists then linked this evolutionary picture to the deep consequences of algorithmic information theory theory

The key theoretical ideas of this study can be illustrated by a well-known thought experiment in evolutionary biology, which depicted a roomful of monkeys trying to write a book by typing haphazardly on a keyboard

The scientists showed that many biological structures and systems, from proteins to RNA and signaling networks, employ algorithmically simple structures with probabilities consistent with what the theory predicts

article title

Symmetry and simplicity spontaneously emerge from the algorithmic nature of evolution