Each plant will develop various discernable differences in form during growth with specific adaptations to its setting.
While a plant will grow through each of these stages successively, we currently build buildings by jumping directly to a fixed and final stage. Therefore our first step to imitate a plant’s ability for adaptation in genetic design is to select a range of variation in form, bracketed around a single stage, and design for it. In other words, the genetic design would be capable of outputing many unique buildings at a particular stage, rather than show the growth of a single building accross stages.
In order to focus on the most practical next steps for coding a genetic design, we should imitate the middle stage for genetic buildings. At this stage we have enough variation between buildings that it merits the effort to design the genetic code and the number of environmental factors are also more digestible. If we imitated the first stage, designs would have minimal expressed variation and the genetic code would have no merit for development as we could just use the same building plans over and over. At the latter stage, the plant differentiations represent such unique adaptations to a setting over a prolonged period of time that our control over such a genetic code is still far too cumbersome at the outset. For instance, it is more likely that we will want to use a genetic code to propogate solutions for simpler multistory residential buildings than it would be to build multiple burj khalifas.