The Full Geometric Case
Scaffold for the author's reading and rewriting. Established science throughout; the framing and the leaps are the author's.
Through all my writings so far dealing with aspects of the quantum paradigm I have been obsessed with geometric patterns, and the math which accompanies them.
Everywhere we look we see patterns and patterns within patterns – the geometry a familiar companion, one which helps align our consciousness, the natural world, and our cosmos as if it were woven into being from a familiar architecture.
From math, which includes the golden mean, fractals, and a whole pantheon of equations with which to recognize familiar territory, science seeks to explain our perception of reality.
Even the pesky Riemann may be used, often, and tangentially, to help us recognize geometric patterns
One argument at five scales
The previous chapters walked the chain one link at a time. Gathered, the pattern is the same at every scale. The double helix carries information in its twist, its grooves, and its supercoiling, not only in its letter order. The genome inside the nucleus is folded into loops and domains whose contacts decide which genes meet which switches [1]. The messenger folds as it is made. The ribosome walks. The protein finds its working shape along a path through a landscape of possible shapes [2]. And the tissue holds the whole in a tensioned scaffolding that transmits force from the outside of the cell to the inside of the nucleus [3].
What recurs
Three features repeat at every scale. Topology: what is linked, looped, or knotted, and what can only change by cutting. Tension: structures held in balance between pull and push, so that a change at one point is felt across the whole. Time: shape that is reached along a path, where the order of events is part of the result. None of these fits on a line of letters. Each is lost the moment the living process is written down as text.
Patterns within patterns, indicating that no matter how persistently we seek to define the biological living process - that geometric patterns serve as foundations.
We begin with the spiral geometric as best visualized in a nautilus shell.
The quantum process in the nautilus shell demonstrates that nature frequently uses a spiral. Not just any spiral but a repeating pattern in which the pattern never collapses in on itself.
A hint into why nature does not use parallel lines – which never converge into form but just remain separated. The nautilus spiral brings convergence without collapse of the form
Learning to recognize form in function and function in form – as it is geometry which carries the foundation, the scaffolding, for living tissue.
We move onto other forms, which form from different biophysics, and thus are derived from different geometric patterns.
What the geometric case does not claim
It does not claim the sequence is unimportant. The letters matter; they are the constraint the shapes must satisfy. The case is narrower and stronger: the sequence underdetermines the living object. Between the letters and the working tissue lies everything this Part has described, and that territory is geometric.
There are other critical forms waiting. Branching, segmentation, the folded sheet, the network of leaf and lung — each is geometry carrying a different biophysics, patterns within patterns, and none of them is exhausted by the forms gathered here. But the family is already named, and the recurrence is not an accident: no matter how persistently we seek to define the biological living process, geometric patterns serve as foundations. The shapes have been shown; now the charge that moves through them.
References (to be checked against the originals)
- Lieberman-Aiden, E. et al. (2009). Comprehensive mapping of long-range interactions reveals folding principles of the human genome. Science 326, 289–293. doi:10.1126/science.1181369
- Dill, K. A. & MacCallum, J. L. (2012). The protein-folding problem, 50 years on. Science 338, 1042–1046. doi:10.1126/science.1219021
- Ingber, D. E. (2003). Tensegrity I. Cell structure and hierarchical systems biology. Journal of Cell Science 116, 1157–1173. doi:10.1242/jcs.00359