Mathematics Of Life

The invention of the microscope led to the discovery that individual organisms have an amazing internal complexity

So, while the telescope revealed deep simplicities in the cosmos, the microscope revealed previously unseen complexities in life.

The pace of change in the world is accelerating

The gaps between them, allowing (in Mendel’s case) for the time it took before anyone noticed, are roughly 50, 100, 50 and 50 years. The fifth happened just over 50 years ago.

The basic idea here is simple: the sequence of bases on just one of the two strands determines the entire structure. On the other strand, the sequence is given by the complementary bases to those on the first strand – swap A and T, and swap C and G. If you could pull DNA apart into its two strands, each of them would contain the necessary ‘information’ to reconstruct the other. So all you have to do is make two complementary strands, and fit the pairs back together to get two perfect copies of the original.

five great revolutions have changed the way scientists think about life.
A sixth is on its way.
The first five revolutions were the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of the planet’s living creatures, the theory of evolution, the discovery of the gene, and the discovery of the structure of DNA.