[FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

[Jochen Fromm]

For the development of organisms I would rather look at Lindenmayer Systems and self-similar fractals. They describe how a complex organism can grow out of simple rules. The human body has a self-similar structure: the body has 4 limbs, and each limb has five toes or fingers. There are plenty of L-Systems generators onlinehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-systemLindenmayer himself has written a book named "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" which can be found by a Google search. Philip Ball has also written a nice book about self-similar patterns and fractals named "The Self-made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature".-J.
-------- Original message --------From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com Date: 10/19/21  20:15  (GMT+01:00) To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development Friends,  Beware.  As usual, I am trying to get you to think for me.  My grandson is working on a regeneration project in his freshman biolab  (Planaria) and his sources and texts are replete with cognitive language like “signal” and “memory” etc., which implies that as the worm regenerates it is influenced by a guiding idea of what it is producing.  My basic intuition, as you know, that this doesn’t happen in human cognition, let alone worm regeneration and that processes that produce a functional head from a slice of the rear end of a flatworm have no idea what they are doing even when they are done.  Thus I imagine an advancing edge of structure with each new bit influencing the rules by which the next bit .  Which, of course, puts me in mind both of stygmergy and of Cellular Automata.  So to my questions: Are Cellular Automata a good model for Stygmergy?Is Stygmergy a good model for organismic development?  Why? Or Why not?  Discuss.  Also, is there a good website, citizen-friendly, steep learning curve, where my grandson and I could explore the relation between developmental processes and ca’s.  I looked at  NewLogo Library and did not find there any models of regeneration, but may not have known where to look.  I did find THIS  which deep down in the Table of Contents seemed to have three regeneration models including one named “Planaria”, but I could no see how to go further with it.  If somebody could have a look at it and give me some tips for how to use it, I would be ever so grateful.  Good to be back.  Nick   Nick ThompsonThompNickSon2 at gmail.comhttps://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
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