[MD] Confirming the existence of God?

[David Thomas]

On 1/24/10 9:15 AM, "Mary" <marysonthego at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dave, why do you think it is that everyone, everywhere feels correctness or
> satisfaction in the Golden Ratio?

My take is "Man is the measure" and the measurer. All life evolved within
the physical and biological constraints of nature. Man is a product of and
integral part of life, nature.  As we evolved over millions on years our
eyes habituated to the natural world. Because of that the nature that is
also just "looks right." As we first start to build and just accommodate our
own physical proportions, ie enough height and width of a doorway to
accommodate our passage, we are building in the proportions of nature. Later
as we formalize this process measuring nature, intellectualize these
measurement into theory we come up with the Golden Ratio. If we move forward
to the last 10,000 years, our big build period, all kinds of other human
motives influence our building practices but our eyes have changed very
little.  So everything else being equal, built objects that follow this
proportion are still more visually pleasing than those that don't.

This is just one of these ratios we find in nature. My recent reading of
Dawkins The Ancestor's Tale introduced me Klielber's Law which holds
generally  true over 20 magnitude of size from the smallest organism to
largest. It says that brain size to body size ratio on a log scale is a
proportion of 3 to 4. Metabolic rate also follows this proportion.

Wikepedia
"Adolf Zeising, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy, found
the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of
plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of
animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of
chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of
proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio
operating as a universal law.[42] In connection with his scheme for
golden-ratio-based human body proportions, Zeising wrote in 1854 of a
universal law "in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative
striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art,
and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms
and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic,
acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the
human form."

Dave