Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed by Douglas Axe

Author:Douglas Axe [Axe, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

MAKING SENSE WITH PIXELS

For this we return briefly to the subject of digital images, this time focusing on photographs. The pattern of hierarchical functional coherence is present here as well. Just above the bottom level of pixels, digital photographs show coherence analogous to a painter’s brushstrokes, where colors are extended and blended. Above that is a level where boundaries and shapes are defined. Still higher is the level where features and objects are recognized, and above that comes the level where the principal subject takes full form, along with the setting in which it was photographed. Noteworthy photographs exhibit an even higher level, where the way in which the subject was photographed evokes an impression that goes well beyond mere recognition.

The universal design intuition assures us that none of this happens by accident, and again we can use the principle of reciprocal scale to confirm this. Using a collection of low-resolution photos (400 pixels by 300 pixels), I wrote a program that repeatedly picks one at random and copies a 2-by-2 pixel square from a randomly chosen spot. Sample set 1 of Plate 1 (which can be found at the back of the book) shows a hundred examples of these 2-by-2 squares taken from a collection of fifty-nine photos. For comparison, sample set 2 shows a hundred 2-by-2 squares taken from a completely random image. The difference between the two sets is visually striking. As eye-catching as the random squares are, they clearly don’t extend or blend colors the way the photographic squares do.4 For example, about half of the photographic squares give the first impression of being one solid color, whereas none of the random squares do. Also, the 4 pixels making up a square are immediately discernible for only a few of the photographic squares, and in those cases the shade variations tend to be pleasantly subtle. For the random squares the opposite tends to be the case.

Notice the parallels between this comparison of pixel squares and our previous comparison of letter combinations. Just as we were able to spot incoherent letter combinations in small fragments taken from random typing (Figure 9.4), so too we’re able to spot incoherent color blending in small fragments taken from a random image. In both cases coherence at this low level is a necessary start for building a fully coherent functional hierarchy of the kind represented in Figure 9.3, but it’s a very meager start. Much more challenging levels of coherence must be built upon this low level if anything of significance is to come of it.

To see how hard it would be for a blind search to stumble upon coherence at any of the higher levels, all we have to do is build in the lower-level coherence. We didn’t bother to demonstrate this for written instructions because the incoherence of those random seven-letter words convinced us that accidental word choice is as problematic as accidental letter choice. To do the demonstration for digital images, I used two of Mathematica’s5 image-processing commands to transform the random image on the left side of Plate 2 into the one on the right.

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