5 ms·

It really is beautifully amazing how one cell can keep dividing and even the blood vessels end up roughly the same in everyone.

TheJoeMan 2y ago
It is awe-inspiring. However, from another angle you could say “It really is beautifully amazing how the same source code compiles roughly the same on everyone’s computer”.
- imoverclocked 2y ago
  Kinda. There is far more going on in biology than in our computer systems though. Code compiling is generally done without much of the world changing concurrently around it. Also, with repeatable compilation you can get exactly the same output every time. Change the output just a little and potentially the whole thing fails. Meanwhile, in biology, people/creatures are born with quite different attributes and can still thrive. The success of a species often relies on the fact that there is mutation over time. Even just the insane interconnectedness within single biological organisms dwarves the complexity of any computer system on earth.
DonHopkins 2y ago
Alan Turing was fascinated with morphogenesis, and wrote an article by the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". He modeled cell growth as a reaction-diffusion systems, now known as Turing Patterns. And he was firmly against and intended to defeat the religious claptrap pseudoscience we now call "Intelligent Design". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_sys... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing.pdf https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1701864.Morphogenesis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1701864.Morphogenesis I typed in the preface to "Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing", and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow: https://imgur.com/AX6Bg9q https://imgur.com/AX6Bg9q http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt If for some irrational reason you choose to believe in the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design, then you might not like to hear what Turing thought about that, which P. T. Saunders mentions in the foreword to Turing's collected works, citing what Hodges wrote about and quoted Robin Gandy saying in his "excellent biography": For Turing, however, the fundamental problem of biology had always been to account for pattern and form, and the dramatic progress that was being made at that time in genetics did not alter his view. And because he believed that the solution was to be found in physics and chemistry it was to these subjects and the sort of mathematics that could be applied to them that he turned. In my view, he was right, but even someone who disagrees must be impressed by the way in which he went directly to what he saw as the most important problem and set out to attack it with the tools that he judged appropriate to the task, rather than those which were easiest to hand or which others were already using. What is more, he understood the full significance of the problem in a way that many biologists did not and still do not. We can see this in the joint manuscript with Wardlaw which is included in this volume, but it is clear just from the comment he made to Robin Gandy (Hodges 1983, p. 431) that his new ideas were "intended to defeat the argument from design". This single remark sums up one of the most crucial issues in contemporary biology. The argument from design was originally put forward as a scientific proof of the existence of God. The best known statement of it is William Paley's (1802) famous metaphor of a watchmaker. If we see a stone on some waste ground we do not wonder about it. If, on the other hand, we were to find a watch, with all its many parts combining so beautifully to achieve its purpose of keeping accurate time, we would be bound to infer that it had been designed and constructed by an intelligent being. Similarly, so the argument runs, when we look at an organism, and above all at a human being, how can we not believe that there must be an intelligent Creator? Turing was not, of course, trying to refute Paley; that has been done almost a century earlier by Charles Darwin. But the argument from design had survived, and was, and indeed remains, still a potent force in biology. For the essence of Darwin's theory is that organisms are created by natural selection out of random variations. Almost any small variation can occur; whether it persists and so features in evolution depends on whether it is selected. Consequently we explain how a certain feature has evolved by saying what advantage it gives to the organism, i.e. what purpose it serves, just as if we were explaining why the Creator has designed the organism in that way. Natural selection thus takes over the role of the Creator, and becomes "The Blind Watchmaker" (Dawkins 1986).
- srean 2y ago
  If you would permit me changing/hijacking topics temporarily, please do consider compiling all your comments like these (including history and anecdotes on all things Postscript), spread over different forums, hackernews through usenet. I think I will not be far off, speaking for the community, that many would love to own a copy. If that costs and an arm and a leg, so be it. Another sidenote, any chance of seeing the usenet archives back ? Was very happy when Google purchased it. Thought we would get a better UI, better indexed presentation ... then it disappeared
  - nyankosensei 2y ago
    You can still access Usenet posts: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Web-to-news_gateways https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Web-to-news_gateways
    - srean 2y ago
      Thanks.

TheJoeMan 2y ago

It is awe-inspiring. However, from another angle you could say “It really is beautifully amazing how the same source code compiles roughly the same on everyone’s computer”.

imoverclocked 2y ago
Kinda. There is far more going on in biology than in our computer systems though. Code compiling is generally done without much of the world changing concurrently around it. Also, with repeatable compilation you can get exactly the same output every time. Change the output just a little and potentially the whole thing fails. Meanwhile, in biology, people/creatures are born with quite different attributes and can still thrive. The success of a species often relies on the fact that there is mutation over time. Even just the insane interconnectedness within single biological organisms dwarves the complexity of any computer system on earth.

DonHopkins 2y ago

Alan Turing was fascinated with morphogenesis, and wrote an article by the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". He modeled cell growth as a reaction-diffusion systems, now known as Turing Patterns. And he was firmly against and intended to defeat the religious claptrap pseudoscience we now call "Intelligent Design". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_sys... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing.pdf https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1701864.Morphogenesis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1701864.Morphogenesis I typed in the preface to "Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing", and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow: https://imgur.com/AX6Bg9q https://imgur.com/AX6Bg9q http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt If for some irrational reason you choose to believe in the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design, then you might not like to hear what Turing thought about that, which P. T. Saunders mentions in the foreword to Turing's collected works, citing what Hodges wrote about and quoted Robin Gandy saying in his "excellent biography": For Turing, however, the fundamental problem of biology had always been to account for pattern and form, and the dramatic progress that was being made at that time in genetics did not alter his view. And because he believed that the solution was to be found in physics and chemistry it was to these subjects and the sort of mathematics that could be applied to them that he turned. In my view, he was right, but even someone who disagrees must be impressed by the way in which he went directly to what he saw as the most important problem and set out to attack it with the tools that he judged appropriate to the task, rather than those which were easiest to hand or which others were already using. What is more, he understood the full significance of the problem in a way that many biologists did not and still do not. We can see this in the joint manuscript with Wardlaw which is included in this volume, but it is clear just from the comment he made to Robin Gandy (Hodges 1983, p. 431) that his new ideas were "intended to defeat the argument from design". This single remark sums up one of the most crucial issues in contemporary biology. The argument from design was originally put forward as a scientific proof of the existence of God. The best known statement of it is William Paley's (1802) famous metaphor of a watchmaker. If we see a stone on some waste ground we do not wonder about it. If, on the other hand, we were to find a watch, with all its many parts combining so beautifully to achieve its purpose of keeping accurate time, we would be bound to infer that it had been designed and constructed by an intelligent being. Similarly, so the argument runs, when we look at an organism, and above all at a human being, how can we not believe that there must be an intelligent Creator? Turing was not, of course, trying to refute Paley; that has been done almost a century earlier by Charles Darwin. But the argument from design had survived, and was, and indeed remains, still a potent force in biology. For the essence of Darwin's theory is that organisms are created by natural selection out of random variations. Almost any small variation can occur; whether it persists and so features in evolution depends on whether it is selected. Consequently we explain how a certain feature has evolved by saying what advantage it gives to the organism, i.e. what purpose it serves, just as if we were explaining why the Creator has designed the organism in that way. Natural selection thus takes over the role of the Creator, and becomes "The Blind Watchmaker" (Dawkins 1986).

srean 2y ago
If you would permit me changing/hijacking topics temporarily, please do consider compiling all your comments like these (including history and anecdotes on all things Postscript), spread over different forums, hackernews through usenet. I think I will not be far off, speaking for the community, that many would love to own a copy. If that costs and an arm and a leg, so be it. Another sidenote, any chance of seeing the usenet archives back ? Was very happy when Google purchased it. Thought we would get a better UI, better indexed presentation ... then it disappeared
- nyankosensei 2y ago
  You can still access Usenet posts: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Web-to-news_gateways https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Web-to-news_gateways
  - srean 2y ago
    Thanks.