"The laws of movement and of rest deduced from this principle [the principle of least action] being precisely the same as those observed in nature, we can admire the application of it to all phenomena. The movement of animals, the vegetative growth of plants...are only its consequences; and the spectacle of the universe becomes so much the grander, so much more beautiful, the worthier of its Author, when one knows that a small number of laws, most wisely established, suffice for all movements."

Maupertuis

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been origionally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a begining endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

Charles Darwin

"No kind of magic will do. We have to establish a unitary sense of the human situation, of the fact that cognitive knowledge is the one thing that human beings have been endowed with...'

Jacob Bronowski

"As to the alive organisms, we have not for them such theory, which could answer the question what kinds of symmetry are compatible or incompatible to the existence of living material. But we can note here that remarkable fact that among the representatives of the alive nature the pentagonal symmetry meets more often."

Shubnikov

comment: and among the the inorganic, non living things we more frequently meet up with hexagonal, or six fold symmetry, as in snowflakes and crystals.

"The equilateral triangle is the primary of all shapes in nature formed of straight lines, and of equal sides and angles, and it has the least radius, the least area, and the greatest circumference of any possible shape of equal sides and angles."

John Ernst Worrell Keely

In other words, the equilateral triangle uses the most perimeter to enclose the least area, the exact inverse property of the sphere, which maximizes volume. Nature no doubt makes use of both extremes.