A couple of years ago, we published a little blog in which we dared to suggest that the recurrence of certain numbers, such as pi and Euler‘s might hint at deeper universal phenomena that are not yet fully understood.(LSS 14 3 22) So we were more than gratified to come across an intriguing article by Steven Pappas for Live Science which further confirms our suspicions.
A team led by Vaibhev Mohanty at MIT has been trying to answer a simple but profound question. “How many mutations do you need in a genome before it changes the phenotype( i.e. proteins, etc) of the carrying organism? Now, we will confess at this point that our grasp of mathematics is appalling. However:
Scientists have discovered that a key function from a “pure” branch of mathematics can predict how often genetic mutations lead to changes in function. These rules, laid out by the so-called sum-of-digits function, also govern some aspects of protein folding, computer coding and certain magnetic states in physics.
The report explains, in verbal form, some more about how the team arrived at these conclusions. But for us the key is that the same mathematics applies across several fields of science, as though something much deeper is going on. Well, that’s what we speculate. But we were not the first. As educated readers will recall, Plato speculated that the universe was formed of deep underlying structures, which he termed “forms”. And in his view a single Divine mind had created the universe through these same forms. So we pose this question: have these scientists, and others, had a tiny glimpse of the Mind of God?
[2] https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/41754/chapter-abstract/354205224?redirectedFrom=fulltext
#genes #proteins #mathematics #plato #theology #mutation
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