The Fibonacci series and intelligent design: Returning to grass roots...and stems

(Editor's note: Robert Deyes offers this reflection on intelligent design and natural occurrences of the Fibonnaci series.)

The mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci series has in recent years become a focus for research primarily because it occurs frequently throughout nature. Named after the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who first discovered the progression in the 13th century, each number is the sum of the previous two numbers in the series. Thus the first ten numbers of the Fibonacci series are

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55……

Biologist Amar Klar has written one review outlining how this numerical sequence is found in the arrangement of seeds on the top of a sunflower (Ref 1).

As my father and I have seen on recent walks through fields in southern Wisconsin, pine cones are similarly ordered in clockwise and anti-clockwise spiral arrangements in which the number of spirals conforms to the same Fibonacci progression. Likewise for the arrangements of plant shoots on the stem of a plant (Ref 1). Such well-defined patterns are examples of phylotaxis (from the Greek 'phyllon' meaning leaf and 'taxis' meaning order). The question that arises is why should the Fibonacci progression be so ubiquitous throughout nature?

According to Klar, for plants at least the answer lies simply in the way that cells divide at the tips of plant shoots (Ref 1). A mass of cells form a structure called the primordium and these divide extensively as new plant organs and tissues are formed. Somehow, either through biochemical fields or tissue mechanics, phylotaxic patterns, such as the Fibonacci progression are formed.

Klar proposed an explanation based on what he refers to as asymmetric cell division (Ref 1). In his view, cell division might result in a mature cell that can further divide and a juvenile cell that must go through a further round of the cell cycle before it can divide. According to Klar, each event of cell division would thus eventually result in a number of cells that steadily increases through the Fibonacci progression via successive divisions (Ref 1).

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that the presence of the Fibonacci pattern,"emerges automatically in any system of radiating spirals built by adding new elements at the apex" (Ref 2). Yet as philosopher William Dembski points out, while we might have a viable explanation for the purely naturalistic origin of a mathematical pattern such as the Fibonacci series, we are still left wondering how the cells from which these patterns arise came into existence (Ref 3).

As we have seen, Klar explained the origin of the Fibonacci pattern in nature through a process he called asymmetric cell division. And yet it is with the discovery of the cellular world that we have unraveled the hallmarks not of purposeless naturalism but of intelligent design. Indeed, our emerging knowledge of cellular biology and biochemistry has opened up a realm of very small, contrived machines that give every indication of having been designed with a purpose in mind (Ref 4).

REFERENCES

1. Amar J. S. Klar (2002), Fibonacci's flowers: Plant mathematics, Nature Volume 417 p595

2. Stephen Jay Gould (1992), The Panda's Thumb- More Reflections In Natural History, Published by W.W Norton and Company, New York, p.41

3. William Dembski (2002), The Emergence Of Irreducibly Complex Systems in No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, Lanham, Maryland pp. 12-14

4. Unlocking the Mystery of Life- The scientific case for intelligent design, Produced by Illustra Media, 2002

Copyright ©, Robert Deyes, 2008