Pollocks paintings with fractal dimensions...

[symbioidlj]

According to James Wise, an adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Washington State University and one of Taylor's collaborators, those preferences may date back to our earliest ancestors. On the African savanna they could tell whether the grass was ruffled by the wind or by a stalking lion by tuning in to variations in fractal dimensions. But in settings with high fractal dimensions (a densely branching rain forest, for instance), early humans would have been more vulnerable—and thus more uneasy. "Perhaps our appreciation of lower-dimension fractal patterns isn't so much about beauty," Taylor says, "but more a survival instinct."

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