Nature is interesting and beautiful, of course, and in all the many and diverse ways an environmental context and integrated system expresses itself in its bounded instances. I often do this and by inverse approach to either and both aesthetic or functional appraisal, consider the instance of embodied phenotype as being a mezzanine artefact and adaptive entity between two antipodean polar, encoding mechanisms.
The genotype as one pole is nodal, specific, syntactical and electrochemical. The environmental system as antithetical (yet dependent) pole is networked, distributed, alliterative and dynamical. It is quite difficult to articulate the structure and flow of such complex gestalts, perhaps because language bounds us so much in and as the linear causalities with which we think and communicate.
Studying cybernetics has led me to believe, perhaps to reaffirm, as Nietzsche once remarked of the redundancy of metaphysics to embodied experience as being analogous of a knowledge of the chemical properties of water to a boatman facing a storm, that if and when (but really if) we were to ever be able to articulate the astonishing efficiencies in symmetry and information abstraction of which we are all unique instances, it might not actually change our world.
Daedelus Kite 