7 Repeated Patterns in Behavior and Other Biological Phenomena

Human environments consist to a large extent of repeated spatiotemporal patterns which are typically composed of simpler patterns. Most humans are thus surrounded by houses, streets, cars, shops, and omnipresent behavior patterns composed of verbal and nonverbal elements. Human individuals are, of course, themselves patterns of parts, such as trunk, head, arms, and legs, that again are composed of simpler parts, and so on, recursively, down to the infinitesimally small. The human individual thus appears as a particular type of repeated pattern immersed in endless numbers of types and instances of other patterns, some man-made and visible, but most neither. This view of human existence is thus in accordance with the words of Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA: “Another key feature of biology is the existence of many identical examples of complex structures” (Crick, 1989, p. 138). Regarding behavior, the word identical above might preferably be replaced by the word similar, but molecules also have elasticity (Grosberg and Khokhlov, 1997).