[mturmon]

Seconded. It's really fascinating for anyone who is interested in the relationships between mechanistic generation and biological/natural artifacts.

For me, this book fits in the same family as Benoit Mandelbrot's "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", and Ulf Grenander's work on stochastic models for the generation of shapes like hands. And see also, cellular automata.

[pastrami_panda]

I'm not familiar with Ulf's work, but it sounds very interesting. I tried finding his work on stochastic models for shape generation but didn't find it. Mind pointing me in the right direction?

[mturmon]

I like the approachable monograph —

https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387973869

But there is also the magisterial —

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pattern-theory-97801...

There is a lot of published work from this school, including the seminal Geman and Geman paper from 1984, one of the most cited works in engineering.