For the antelope scanning the horizon, danger primarily comes from the sides or from behind, not from below or above, so the scope of its vision evolved accordingly. Many artists since the Renaissance have proportioned their work in accordance with the golden ratio or “divine proportion”, particularly in the form of the golden rectangle, which has informed Leonardo’s work. Works most usually associated with it are the Mona Lisa and the Parthenon in Athens, although Swiss architect Le Corbusier relied on it for his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion and Dali explicitly used it in The Sacrament of the Last Supper. Bejan, an award-winning engineer who developed a new law of physics governing the design of matter as it moves through air and water in 1996, believes this “constructal law” governs systems that evolve in time, from cars in traffic to blood in the circulation, to how vision develops. Earlier this year, in a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Bejan demonstrated how this law was behind his theory of how elite athletes had got taller, bigger and thus faster in the past 100 years .

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