[nonbel]

You may be interested in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20700495

They take basic neuronal growth "laws" inferred by Ramon y Cajal just by looking at a crapload of stained neurons in the late 19th to early 20th century and apply modern computational techniques to grow realistic neurons based on randomly placed "growth signals" and an extremely simple rule.

Of course the next step is to grow groups of these "neurons" together with non-randomly placed signals based on some sort of input and allowing one to input on the other. I haven't followed up on it for a few years so maybe they've gotten into that.

To me this looks like successful science in action. Something that looks very complex (dendritic arbors) turns out to be explainable by a very simple to understand process/rule/principle.