Know about Alan Turing's mathematical explanation of morphogenesis
Learn about Alan Turing's explanation of morphogenesis.
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Transcript
Patterns of Life. Number Four: Morphogenesis. The tiger, with it's elegant stripes is the undoubted real king of the jungle. But what makes tigers striped and cheetahs spotty? Genetics? Rival gang colors? World War II codebreaker and father of computer science, Alan Turing, has a much simpler explanation.
After spending a presumably rainy spell pondering the blotches on cows, he came up with a mathematical explanation for skin patterns. Imagine two chemicals spreading out over an animal-- one changing skin pigment and the other stopping it. Turing used simple equations to show how the two chemicals interact as they spread to create stripes. When there are two sets of these reactions, crisscrossing each other, they make spots.
Size matters too. If the reaction takes place when the embryo is very small, the patterns will come out bigger-- like the blotchy islands on the common cow. Turing's ideas have been developed to simulate the markings on shells, fish, and butterflies. He called the chemicals, morphogens, though he couldn't prove they existed.
60 years later, biochemists have found chemical morphogens working just as Turing predicted. So we can add oracle to his already rather impressive CV.
After spending a presumably rainy spell pondering the blotches on cows, he came up with a mathematical explanation for skin patterns. Imagine two chemicals spreading out over an animal-- one changing skin pigment and the other stopping it. Turing used simple equations to show how the two chemicals interact as they spread to create stripes. When there are two sets of these reactions, crisscrossing each other, they make spots.
Size matters too. If the reaction takes place when the embryo is very small, the patterns will come out bigger-- like the blotchy islands on the common cow. Turing's ideas have been developed to simulate the markings on shells, fish, and butterflies. He called the chemicals, morphogens, though he couldn't prove they existed.
60 years later, biochemists have found chemical morphogens working just as Turing predicted. So we can add oracle to his already rather impressive CV.
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