Does it have to do with something that involves cell/DNA formation, or other topics in biology/chemistry? Or is this based on coincidence?
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The fibonacci sequence is a very logical way for a process to proceed. It makes sense that things may only be produced from things you already have, right? The fibonacci sequence is essentially exponential growth with inherent delay.
Let’s talk pairs of immortal bunnies. They are pregnant for 1 year and take 1 year to reach adulthood, and will always birth a male and female bunny as adults. (We shall ignore the practical implications of a bunny society like this for now)
So if we start in year 1 with 1 pair of baby bunnies.
Year 2 they’re grown up, we still have 1 pair of bunnies.
Year 3 the old bunnies had a pair of bunnies, so we now have 2 pairs.
Year 4 the first pair had babies, and the second pair is now grown up, so:
Year 5 2 pairs of new babies and 1 new adult.
You start to see the pattern here, every year we get as many new pairs of bunnies as we had in total the year before.
Regular exponential growth would give you just as many as you have times a particular number, but due to the delay incurred by the bunnies growing up, the effective growth factor decreases somewhat.
From this point on I’m not entirely certain anymore, so please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll edit the comment accordingly: the golden ratio is this effective growth factor. The process described above is of course not how bunnies reproduce. You know how they are. Instead of having X kids every year in a very orderly fashion, it will be more of a continuous process, with one pair having kids now, another in a month, etc.
The golden ratio – as is my understanding – should be the growth factor of such a more realistic process.
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