“a lesson about uncertainty”
“At pattern boundaries, scales of different colors intermingle. Transitions and shading are achieved by varying the proportions of the mix. It’s beautiful. It is also, in the language of molecular biology, a model for a stochastic mechanism of gene expression.”
“What determines the color of each butterfly scale is, in a word, chance. A molecule hits a piece of cellular machinery at just the right moment, in just the right place, and a gene produces a certain pigment. There’s no guarantee it will happen. It’s a matter of probability and moment-to-moment randomness.”
“In biology, there’s a tendency to conceive of randomness as noise, an accidental factor, a product of error—random genetic mutations, for example, are mistakes in a chromosome-duplicating system that’s supposed to make perfect copies. Random mutations might be harmful, or insignificant, or beneficial, but they’re fundamentally mistakes, a disorderly deviation from an orderly system.”
“What makes a butterfly’s wings so remarkable isn’t just that unpredictabilities underlie their colors, but that they’ve harnessed the probabilities.1 Randomness and uncertainty are translated into the ordered, functional patterns of a monarch or checkerspot. And in this, the butterfly’s wing is not unique, but a manifestation of principles ubiquitous in biology.”
“The cellular world is an ever-fluctuating place. It’s full of randomness and, when things aren’t narrowly random, with uncertainty.”
“What’s extraordinary, again, is that from all this uncertainty, form arises.”
““Life is a study in contrasts between randomness and determinism,” wrote biochemists Arjun Raj and Alexander van Oudenaarden in an article entitled, “Nature, Nurture or Chance,” in the journal Cell. “From the chaos of biomolecular interactions to the precise coordination of development, living organisms are able to resolve these two seemingly contradictory aspects of their internal workings.””
“There, perhaps, from the perspective of God or some alien cosmologist or deep time or whatever you use to imagine inconceivable vastness, we might find order yet again. Who knows for certain; we likely never will. But we can look at a butterfly’s wing and wonder.”