Synthetic Forms Most Beautiful: Engineering Insights into Self-Organization

Reflecting on the diversity of the natural world, Darwin famously observed that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” However, the examples that we are able to observe in nature are a consequence of chance, constrained by selection, drift, and epistasis. Here we explore how the efforts of synthetic biology to build new living systems can expand our understanding of the fundamental design principles that allow life to self-organize biological form, from cellular to organismal levels. We suggest that the ability to impose a length or timescale onto a biological activity is an essential strategy for self-organization in evolved systems and a key design target that is now being realized synthetically at all scales. By learning to integrate these strategies together, we are poised to expand on evolution’s success and realize a space of synthetic forms not only beautiful but with diverse applications and transformative potential.