After I listened to a BBC podcast about Poincaré and bifurcation in dynamic systems, I had an interesting question. A key point of dynamic systems is the so-called butterfly effect - small changes in initial conditions can lead to large changes in the future. I thought about the identical twins in biology. They always look physically similar, presumably because structural development has a lot of constraints, its layout was set during the early stages of development, and there was not enough time for changes (noises) to propagate. The personality differences between the identical twins could be understood by the butterfly effect because neurological and emotional development took decades and allow environmental input signals to be amplified in the systems. I do not have expert understanding of both developmental biology and dynamics systems, and I wonder what other factors and principles are behind this. This could be an interesting story for discussion in an introductory course on systems biology or developmental biology.
After I posted the initial paragraph, a friend reminded me of Stuart Kauffman's argument that complex systems ought to adapt to the border between chaos and order during evolution. Kauffman's argument indeed makes sense. In fact, if I can speak freely, bio-diversity might have root in the butterfly effect. Although many species have similar sets of orthologous genes, their phenotypic diversity could be explained by the different trajectories caused by the changes in the initial conditions such as the divergent genotypes. A good example maybe chimpanzees and humans: Small genotypic differences (initial conditions) are amplified to drastically different phenotypes in non-structural traits.
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