At http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/roger-highfield/9019760/Life-is-like-Lego-only-better.html

Life is like Lego - only better

The natural world is constructed of blocks, and, like the building kit, relies on a small variety of pieces to make complex objects. Roger Highfield explains.

Coming together: traditional Lego has become more elaborate yet stacks up badly compared with nature

By Roger Highfield

8:52AM GMT 17 Jan 2012

I'm a big Lego fan. I've visited the original theme park in Denmark. There's even a Lego Star Wars Stormtrooper key-ring lurking in my coat pocket. Appropriately enough, it's missing a leg. Leg-go.

But there's something that has troubled me over the years: why has Lego moved away from the idea of a universal construction set based on simple plastic bricks? Purists like me hark back to the old days when a Lego set consisted of basic units, from cuboids to sheets. And it seems we may have a point: with Lego, less is not necessarily more, but more is also not necessarily better.

Today, the company makes hundreds of sets – kits, really – on a variety of themes, from city to space to robots. And it makes hundreds of elaborate bricks in all shapes and sizes. Yet with enough imagination, even the simplest building blocks can be used to make structures of amazing complexity. And what is true of Lego is also true of the natural world.

Our world is a gigantic construction set – which, like old-fashioned Lego, relies on a surprisingly small variety of building blocks out of which the most amazingly complex structures can be made. In the past few days I have seen one scientist talk about proteins with a Lego-like, modular quality that are ideal for gene therapy, and another about polymer rings created with molecular Lego blocks.

So does the more complex modern Lego mean that you can build even more complex models? It turns out that the answer is: "A bit, but not as much as you'd think."

In a paper with the arcane title: Scaling of Differentiation in Networks: Nervous Systems, Organisms, Ant Colonies, Ecosystems, Businesses, Universities, Cities, Electronic Circuits, and Legos, Mark Changizi and colleagues at Duke University, North Carolina, looked at networks under economic or natural selective pressure, such as electronic circuits (networks of electronic components), Lego ("networks" of pieces), businesses (networks of employees), universities (networks of academics), organisms (networks of cells), ant colonies (networks of ants), and nervous systems (networks of neurons).

They found that for these other networks, as you might expect, there was an increase in the number of types of components - or in the case of animate systems, the division of labour - as the total number of pieces increases. And because the components are used combinatorially, as sets becomes larger, they use progressively fewer additional piece types. "But in the new Lego world, the number of piece types in a Lego-set grows nearly as fast as the size/complexity of the set, which means they're barely using their pieces combinatorially any longer," says Changizi who, now puts his Lego theory into practice with his own... ( more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/roger-highfield/9019760/Life-is-like-Lego-only-better.html )

• Roger Highfield is director of external affairs at the National Museum of Science and Industry