USATODAY.com - Were letters inspired by nature?

Carrying on from the investigations into the possible origins fo writing http://silverwolf.batcave.net/Ogham/Phosphenes.html I have found the above article about the possible origins of letter shapes from the natural shapes found in nature.

Natural shapes, contours found outdoors, appear to be the inspiration for
letters in most alphabets, concludes a study in The American Naturalist
journal.

In the study, essentially a computer analysis of letter shapes led by
theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, Calif., the researchers sorted letters by their
"topology," not their basic shape. Topology is the branch of math that
classifies and characterizes shapes.

Although this theory has a lot going for it, I think that there is a basic flaw which may be more a matter of perspective than of error. The evidence for a correspondence between the shapes in nature and the shapes of early writing is probably quite strong, but this does not address the issue of why choose to write in the first place. What prompted the evolution of a complete system of linguistic representation using geometric patterns (or natural patterns, come to that)?

In the study then, a letter like X equals any character written as two-slashes
that meet anywhere, like a "+" sign. And an "L" is the same as a "V". The team
concentrated its study on 36 two or three-segment shapes ("N" is an example of a
three-segment shape) across 97 writing systems. Looking at 1,442 letters, the
team checked the frequency of each shape, and measured how well they matched
4,759 Chinese characters and 3,538 "nonlinguistic" symbols, such as musical
notation or traffic symbols. They ran the same analysis against random scratches
and children's scribbles as a test of the method.

This may relate to the fact that whatever culture developed a particular writing system still has the same physiological construction as any other culture. This may be closer in explanation to the Phosphene theory.

Worth watching this researcg, I feel.

Slán