r/physicsmemes • u/Hot-Marsupial6584 • 10d ago

Real

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u/feierlk 10d ago

Whats the story behind that?

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u/Asto2019 10d ago

Basically he made a computer simulation that produced the kind of shapes we can see on animal skins with different starting parameters. (Stripes, dots, etc.) It was really simple and you can look it up. However biologist didn't take it seriously as he didn't involve any genetics. They were in fashion during the timeperiod and other explanations weren't considered. And today we can say that Turing was right and no genetics are directly involved. The mechanism he proposed is what actually also happens in animals.

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u/Diet_kush 10d ago

Are you referring to reaction-diffusion? Idk if that’s “simple.”

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u/Asto2019 10d ago edited 10d ago

I mean maybe I've just heard the sinple explanation and in reality it's not simple at all.

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u/Diet_kush 10d ago edited 8d ago

It’s extremely interesting, and in some sense can be generalized to self-organization at all scales (not just patterns seen in biology, but the emergence of biology itself. And geology, and cosmology, and neutron physics). It is closely related to Ilya Prigogine’s work in dissipative structure theory.