Wolfram Quote

If you see a pattern like this on a mollusc shell, you might imagine that it was somehow difficult to get, and difficult to model. [See A New Kind of Science, page 423.]

That perhaps it was the result of some long and complicated optimization by natural selection.

Well, one of the things one realizes from rule 30 and so on is that it's actually easy to make complicated stuff like this. It just takes a simple program to do it. And actually that's how I think biology does it most of the time.

Biology often just seems to sample lots of simple programs. Like here are the patterns one gets from all possible cellular automata of the simplest kind. [See A New Kind of Science, page 424.]

And here are patterns from a bunch of different kinds of molluscs. [See A New Kind of Science, page 423.]

There's an amazing similarity. And it really seems like the molluscs of the Earth are just sampling different possible cellular automata--and we're getting to see the results output on their shells.

Usually we imagine that there can't be much of a fundamental theory in biology, because what we see must depend on all the accidents in the history of biological evolution. But things like the mollusc shell example suggest something different: that by understanding abstractly what happens with simple programs, we might be able to begin to make a genuine predictive theory of biology.

- Wolfram (http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/atanasoff/)