How the Zebra got its stripes.

[old man emu]

We all know about the English mathematician, Alan Turing. He's the bloke who was very instrumental in developing a machine to decode German military messages created using Enigma machines. But what did he do after the war ended? Well he want back to being a mathematician working on developing computers. However, he must have got bored with that field of study. When Turing was 39 years old in 1951, he turned to mathematical biology, finally publishing his masterpiece "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" in January 1952.  "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", which describes how patterns in nature, such as stripes and spots, can arise naturally and autonomously from a homogeneous, uniform state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern

 

Turing proposed a model wherein two homogeneously distributed substances (P and S) interact to produce stable patterns during morphogenesis. These patterns represent regional differences in the concentrations of the two substances. Their interactions would produce an ordered structure out of random chaos. There's an explanation of this process in the attached video. Go to timestamp 3:18

 

It is interesting that the stripes of an individual zebra are unique to that zebra, in the same way as your fingerprints are unique to you. This individuality is also the basis of eye pattern recognition used in security systems.

[facthunter]

Is it  white Horse with Black stripes or Vise versa? Nev

[red750]

I read a thing the other day where twin brothers had identical fingerprints and eye patterns.

[Litespeed]

As a identical twin- No, the eyes and prints are different.

[red750]

I didn't say you, there was a report.

[rgmwa]

3 hours ago, facthunter said:

Is it  white Horse with Black stripes or Vise versa? Nev

It's not a horse Nev. Please stick to the facts. 😊

Edited 38 minutes ago by rgmwa

[facthunter]

It's as close to a horse as you're ever going to get. I was leading up to something but now it  won't go well. Nev