The Trail Of History ... Book

“One thing that may happen in all of developmental—or life cycle—biology is the increasing role of mathematics. At the moment we keep burrowing and finding more and more key genes and follow their often tortuous pathways to discrete developmental events. In other words, we can expect more and more details and an accumulation of concrete facts. This is absolutely necessary and definitely should be cheered forward, but it is not enough. These are the bricks that compose the mansion, but a far more profound question is, what is the nature of the architect and how are the vast assembly of genes and the substances they spawn orchestrated. There must be some sort of master plan that has been carefully built up over millions of years, for otherwise all the facts we are accumulating would not produce a slime mold, but only chaos.
We must turn that jungle into the simplicity that gives us the feeling that we are making scientific progress. And clearly one way—perhaps the only way—we can achieve this is through mathematical insight. The example we might look to for the future to understand the causal mechanisms in the development and evolution of cellular slime molds might be found in ecology.
There too, in earlier days, was an overabundance of facts that needed to be put into some sort of order. Demystifying that (literal) jungle has been one of the great successes of modern biology. This was in large part achieved through the genius of Robert MacArthur, who, with simple mathematics, was able to bring to light underlying principles that unify all the overwhelming details. To give one example among his many successes he, with E. O. Wilson, illuminated the principles of island biogeography in a big flash by showing that a finite set of key factors—such as island size, distance from the mainland, rates of immigration and emigration, and so forth—were sufficient to account for what is actually found on islands.

The day may come (if it is not already here) where we may hail Turing, along with his other claims to fame, as the MacArthur of developmental biology.”