Posts Tagged ‘James Watson’
“Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder”*…
After two days of posts on the state of our civil society, a palette-cleanser: Jordana Cepelewicz with a possibly-consoling reminder…
When he died in 1930 at just 26 years old, Frank Ramsey [see here] had already made transformative contributions to philosophy, economics and mathematics. John Maynard Keynes sought his insights; Ludwig Wittgenstein admired him and considered him a close friend. In his lifetime, Ramsey published only eight pages on pure math: the beginning of a paper about a problem in logic. But in that work, he proved a theorem that ultimately led to a whole new branch of mathematics — what would later be called Ramsey theory.
His theorem stated that if a system is large enough, then no matter how disordered it might be, it’s always bound to exhibit some sort of regular structure. Order inevitably emerges from chaos; patterns are unavoidable. Ramsey theory is the study of when this happens — in sets of numbers, in collections of vertices and edges called graphs, and in other systems. The mathematicians Ronald Graham and Joel Spencer likened it to how you can always pick out patterns among the stars in the night sky…
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… In fact, Ramsey theory isn’t just about inevitable patterns found in graphs. Hidden structure emerges in lists of numbers, strings of beads and even card games. In 2019, for example, mathematicians studied collections of sets that can always be arranged to resemble the petals of a sunflower. That same year, Quanta reported on research into sets of numbers that are guaranteed to contain numerical patterns called polynomial progressions. And last year, mathematicians proved a similar result, about sets of integers that must always include three evenly spaced numbers, called arithmetic progressions.
In its hunt for patterns, Ramsey theory gets to the core of what mathematics is all about: finding beauty and order in the most unexpected places…
Finding order in chaos: “Why Complete Disorder Is Mathematically Impossible,” from @jordanacep in @QuantaMagazine.
* Paul Valery
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As we ponder patterns, we might send paradigm-shaping birthday greetings to a woman who found order and pattern of a different– and world-changing– sort: Rosalind Franklin; she was born on this date in 1920. A biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer, Franklin captured the X-ray diffraction images of DNA that were, in the words of Francis Crick, “the data we actually used” when he and James Watson developed their “double helix” hypothesis for the structure of DNA. Indeed, it was Franklin who argued to Crick and Watson that the backbones of the molecule had to be on the outside (something that neither they nor their competitor in the race to understand DNA, Linus Pauling, had understood). Franklin never received the recognition she deserved for her independent work– her paper was published in Nature after Crick and Watson’s, which barely mentioned her– and she died of cancer four years before Crick, Watson, and their lab director Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for the discovery.
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change”*…
In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.
Unfortunately, the first of our two tasks, the nurture of a brotherhood of man, has been made possible only by the dominant role of cultural evolution in recent centuries. The cultural evolution that damages and endangers natural diversity is the same force that drives human brotherhood through the mutual understanding of diverse societies. Wells’s vision of human history as an accumulation of cultures, Dawkins’s vision of memes bringing us together by sharing our arts and sciences, Pääbo’s vision of our cousins in the cave sharing our language and our genes, show us how cultural evolution has made us what we are. Cultural evolution will be the main force driving our future…
An important essay by Freeman Dyson, emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: “Biological and Cultural Evolution– Six Characters in Search of an Author.”
* Leon C. Megginson (often misattributed to Darwin, on whose observations Megginson based his own)
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As we agonize over the anthropocene, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that James Watson’s The Double Helix was published. A memoir, it describes– with manifest hubris– “perhaps the most famous event in biology since Darwin’s book,” the 1953 discovery, published by Watson and Francis Crick, of the now-famous double helix structure of the DNA molecule.
Crick, however, viewed Watson’s book as “far too much gossip,” and believed it gave short shrift to Rosalind Franklin’s vital contribution via clues from her X-ray crystallography results. It was originally slated to be published by Harvard University Press, Watson’s home university, Harvard dropped the arrangement after protests from Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins (their supervisor, who shared the Nobel Prize); it was published instead by Atheneum in the United States and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK.
In any case, the book opens a window into the competitiveness, struggles, doubts, and human foibles that were baked into this landmark in science.
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry”*…
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
—Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Benoit Mandelbrot, Sterling Professor of Mathematics at Yale and the father of fractal geometry, died last Thursday at age 85. As Heinz-Otto Peitgen, professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen, observed, “if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.”
“I decided to go into fields where mathematicians would never go because the problems were badly stated,” Dr. Mandelbrot once said. “I have played a strange role…” Indeed, one hopes that Mandelbrot had the consolation of his own fascination as he contemplated the diffusion pattern of the pancreatic cancer that killed him.
At TED2010, mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 — the extreme complexity of roughness, and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated.
* Richard Feynman
In other sad news, Barbara Billingsley, the avatar of American motherhood in her role as Mrs. Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver, passed away on Saturday.
As we marvel at patterns nested within themselves, we might recall that it was on this date in in 1962 that In 1962, Dr. James D. Watson, Dr. Francis Crick, and Dr. Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their work in determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
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