I read about about this paper earlier in the Digital Image and Culture module I am currently doing when I was looking at the history of writing. There is a great BBC documentary series with Professor Jim Al-Khalili (which I think I watched on Netflix or Amazon) in which he explains that information contained inside symbols (marks of any description) are the basis for code. Seems obvious! Al-Khalili talks about Turing in some detail and I have been contemplating this paper as a result for a good few months. Basically it descries the way patterns, which we recognise on the backs of zebras and cows, but which form all deviations we see in nature, so everything, using mathematical equations.
A couple of days ago I sat down and tried to go through the paper to see if there would be anything useful for me. Mr. Turing very kindly urges people without maths – and I am certainly one of those – to skip the vast majority of it and tells us where we will find the nub of the paper. Even so it is challenging!
I have identified key words and phrases which I think will be useful in some way (although not sure yet how…)
- mathematical model of the growing embryo
- In this section a mathematical model of the growing embryo will be described. This model will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification
- the state of the system
- diffusibility
- One cannot at present hope to make any progress with the understanding of such systems except in very simplified cases. The interdependence of the chemical and mechanical data adds enormously to the difficulty, and attention will therefore be confined, so far as is possible, to cases where these can be separated
- masses of tissues
- reacting chemically
- These substances will be called morphogens, the word being intended to convey the idea of a form producer.
- The function of genes is presumed to be purely catalytic. They catalyze the production of other morphogens, which in turn may only be catalysts.
- An embryo in its spherical blastula stage has spherical symmetry, or if there are any deviations from perfect symmetry, they cannot be regarded as of any particular importance, for the deviations vary greatly from embryo to embryo within a species, though the organisms developed from them are barely distin- guishable.
- irregularities
- random disturbances
- present in the circuit
- a drift away from equilibrium
- displacement
- invariable
- disturbed slightly
- irregularities
- out of the stable state
- unstable
- deviation
I have bolded the final words as they are the critical words for me I think – without disturbances and displacement nothing would grow or form. We need deviation, we need displacement, we need irregularities. We need these things to make life possible.
Finally – Morph(o) & Genesis, change/transformation = life instigated, without it, it can’t be.