Phyllotaxis
the spirals are counted, not admired
Generator

the-cut

The last 34 organs of a stem at a rise of 0.005, unrolled. The open circle is the organ removed — eight places before the tip. The ring at the top is where the rule puts the next organ with every organ present; the filled mark beside it is where the rule puts it with that one missing. The two are 16.4° apart, against a local spacing of 25°, and the vacancy itself is 22.7° from the undisturbed answer. Nothing else differs between the two runs: same rise, same history, same rule.
Take away the organ eight places back, and the next one goes into the holeThe last 34 organs of a stem at a rise of 0.005, unrolled. The open circle is the organ removed — eight places before the tip. The ring at the top is where the rule puts the next organ with every organ present; the filled mark beside it is where the rule puts it with that one missing. The two are 16.4° apart, against a local spacing of 25°, and the vacancy itself is 22.7° from the undisturbed answer. Nothing else differs between the two runs: same rise, same history, same rule.moved 56.7°open ring: where the next organ was going · filled: where it goes · large open circle: the organ removedrise 0.005 · cut 10 back · height ×6generated from a stated rule, not drawn to look right

Drawn at its defaults, in take an organ away, and watch. It carries a slider over back, so the claim in its caption strip is restated at every stop rather than at one. It takes no options at all, so every essay calling it gets this exact drawing.

Called by 4 essays

the blast radius of changing it

What a plant might be doing

The organ that was taken away

Every observable this site has is read off an arrangement that was finished before the reading began, and the last phase showed what that costs. So remove one primordium from a settled stem and place the next one against what is left. The rule has to answer. The rival account cannot, because in it no organ's position was ever computed from its neighbours.

 What a plant might be doing

The ratio was never about the rule

One phase ago the comb was retracted as evidence that a plant computes its pattern, and one quantity was exempted from the retraction: the ratio of the two combs, which a placement rule and a transported disturbance divide differently. Drive seven disturbances through the same rule and the ratio spans 0.45 to 1.09. The exemption does not hold, and the angle sequence has nothing left.

 Where the angle comes from

A rule that cannot heal a hole

The placement rule corrects itself against a displacement — that is what the lag-one correlation of −0.6 has been saying for three phases. It does not correct itself against a deletion. Which organ is removed decides whether the stem is back on its lattice in twenty-four organs or never, and the boundary between the two is sharp, reproducible and in the middle of the front.

 Where the angle comes from

The pattern the cut leaves behind

A stem that never recovers from a removal is not disordered. Its divergences settle into a cycle of eight angles and repeat it exactly for the rest of the run, and a counter reading the positions calls the result 8/16 — a two-jugate lattice. The rule has a second attractor at the same growth parameter, and an ablation is how you get to it.

All 144 generators