{"id":171346,"date":"2020-11-09T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=171346"},"modified":"2020-10-26T05:06:41","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T05:06:41","slug":"the-science-of-how-alive-you-really-are-alan-turing-trees-and-the-wonder-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/11\/the-science-of-how-alive-you-really-are-alan-turing-trees-and-the-wonder-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Science of How Alive You Really Are: Alan Turing, Trees, and the Wonder of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThe more a creature\u2019s life is worth, the less of it is alive.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the young Alan Turing<\/strong> (June 23, 1912\u2013June 7, 1954) lost the love of his life, Christopher, to a bacterium contracted from cow\u2019s milk, the grief-savaged future father of computing comforted his beloved\u2019s grief-savaged mother by telling her that \u201cthe body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.\u201d For the remainder of his life, he never ceased contemplating this binary code of body and spirit<\/a> \u2014 a preoccupation fanned by this leveling loss in young adulthood, but ignited in childhood, by a book he had been given at age ten, a book he later told his own mother was what opened his mind and heart to science.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Alan Turing (far left) with classmates at Waterloo Station on the way to the school carriage. <\/strong>(Turing Digital Archive)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Published the year Turing was born, impishly described by its author as being \u201cmostly about things that you do not learn in school,\u201d Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) by Edwin Tinney Brewster invited young minds to step through the portal of science and contemplate not why life is \u2014 the domain of Sunday school theology \u2014 but what life is and how it came to be that way. Before there were scientists, it fell on the \u201cnatural philosophers\u201d \u2014 men (for they were only men) typically trained in theology \u2014 to make sense of nature\u2019s phenomena and processes. Born in the middle of the nineteenth century, only a generation after the person for whom the word scientist<\/em> was coined<\/a> \u2014 the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville \u2014 Brewster devoted his life to aiding humanity\u2019s great migration from the epoch of religion to the epoch of reality.<\/p>\n

The young Turing was captivated by Brewster\u2019s playful analogies and his elegantly reasoned expositions of biological realities, worded so simply as to border on the poetic. How the chicken gets inside the egg, why we grow and grow old, what plants know \u2014 these wonders of life impressed the boy\u2019s imagination with a lifelong passion: Unbeknownst to most, the father of modern computing devoted a substantial portion of his mind to an obscure branch of the biology of life known as morphogenesis \u2014 the process by which living organisms take their shape \u2014 which he illustrated in a series of hauntingly beautiful hand-drawn diagrams<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Alan Turing\u2019s little-known diagrams of morphogenesis.(Turing Digital Archive)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The book\u2019s most captivating chapter, titled \u201cHow Much of Us Is Alive,\u201d explores not the existential puzzlement of the question \u2014 that is best left to the poets<\/a> and the artists of life<\/a> \u2014 but the science, the staggering and counterintuitive reality, of aliveness. Brewster writes:<\/p>\n

How much of a tree is alive? Certainly not the outer bark. That falls off in dry scales, or can be scraped off down to the white layers within, and the tree be none the worse. Certainly not the wood. One often comes across old trees that have lost limbs or been carelessly pruned, which are entirely decayed out on the inside, so that nothing is left but a thin shell next the bark. Yet these trees grow as vigorously as ever, and bear leaves and fruit like a solid tree. The bark is dead; and the wood is dead. Between the two is a thin layer, perhaps a quarter inch thru, which is alive. On one side, it is changing into dead wood. On the other side, it is changing into dead bark. The new wood is alive, and the new bark. Between them is something neither wood nor bark, but just living tree-stuff. The green leaves also are alive, and the green twigs, and the blossoms, and the growing buds. But at least half of every living tree is already dead; while the larger and longer lived a tree is, the smaller proportion of it is alive at one time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is true of trees, Brewster observes, is true of us. (And not only because we see so much of ourselves in trees<\/a>.) We exert vast portions of our anxious creative energy on devising antidotes to our elemental fear of death \u2014 some mightier than others<\/a> \u2014 and yet much of the bodies we live in is not, strictly speaking, alive at all:<\/p>\n

Our hair and nails are not alive at all, and that our outer skin, the thin skin, that is, which we tear off when we bark our shins, is fully alive only on the inside. Our \u201cbark\u201d in fact, is very like a tree\u2019s. Each has a soft, thin, living layer on the inside, which grows, hardens, dies, forms a water-tight layer over the rest of the body, cracks into scales, and drops off. Where one forms cork, the other forms horn. Indeed the cork stoppers of our bottles are made from nothing more than an especially thick corky bark of a certain kind of oak, like the especially thick and homy soles of all bare-footed savages and some bare-footed little boys.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With an eye to the biological fallacy at the heart of the famous biblical teaching that the life of every creature is its blood \u2014 refashioned in Bram Stoker\u2019s iconic line from Dracula<\/em>, \u201cThe blood is the life!\u201d \u2014 Brewster counters:<\/p>\n

The blood itself is dead. The watery part is just soup; water and salt and fat and jelly. The minute, coin-like, red blood corpuscles carry the oxygen of the air from the lungs all over the body. But there are similar oxygen-carriers, likewise dead, in bottles in the drug-stores. The corpuscles are dead cells alive once, and like the hard skin cells, a great deal more useful dead than alive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After delineating how the same holds true of our teeth and the rest of our bones, Brewster draws out his analogy of cells as \u201cliving bricks\u201d \u2014 with the caveat that even living cells are not fully alive, for the jelly of water and salt coursing through them is \u201cjust water and salt\u201d \u2014 and adds:<\/p>\n

We are, then, built of living bricks, but of living bricks set in dead mortar. We saw that the great trees, complex and long lived, have more wood and bark and other dead substances in them than the shrubs, herbs, and grass. These in turn are less alive than the lowly water plants and yeasts and molds which have no wood or bark at all. The same is true of animals. The jelly-fishes and infusoria have neither skin, hair, bones, nails, nor blood, and are pretty much all alive. So the more a creature\u2019s life is worth, the less of it is alive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The image of the \u201cliving bricks\u201d particularly fascinated the young Turing, but it also struck him as somehow incomplete. Something was missing there, something didn\u2019t add up to the mystery of consciousness, the wonder of what we are. In the mortar of his uncommon imagination, this incompleteness leavened the rise of modern computing. It is impossible to conceive of a Turing machine \u2014 that revolutionary mathematical progenitor of artificial intelligence \u2014 without brushing up against such elemental questions about the nature of aliveness, as Turing himself did when he gently threw his famous and formidable gauntlet of a test<\/a>, asking whether a computer could ever \u201cenjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought [or] do something really new.\u201d The triumph of history is tracing the roots \u2014 ancient and alive \u2014 of our present condition in the world. The triumph of self-understanding is tracing the roots of the formative influences that make us who we are, that shape the people who shape the world.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Young Alan Turing<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired UK and<\/em> The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are, then, built of living bricks, but of living bricks set in dead mortar. We saw that the great trees, complex and long lived, have more wood and bark and other dead substances in them than the shrubs, herbs, and grass. These in turn are less alive than the lowly water plants and yeasts and molds which have no wood or bark at all. The same is true of animals. The jelly-fishes and infusoria have neither skin, hair, bones, nails, nor blood, and are pretty much all alive. So the more a creature\u2019s life is worth, the less of it is alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":154902,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1771,1177],"class_list":["post-171346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-alan-turing","tag-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}