As featured in the Guardian...really
Whoops. I now seem to be in the paper paper as well as the, um, nonpaper paper. It wasn't really meant to happen. I had sent an email to the journalist involved, mainly out of sheer gratitude at being linked to, but it got routed to the letters section instead and they told me they were going to publish it at quarter to five (when I do real work) and I didn't get a chance to think about whether it was wise or not.
The letter 1) it doesn't make any sense if you don't know about the way people use jargon like 'emergent', 2) it doesn't make much sense if you haven't spent hours thinking about Turing and phyllotaxis (and I know no one else in the world who gives a toss)
3) on reflection I think it's maybe also wrong, so its good that it's incomprehensible. One function of the original letter was self-advertisement, so there was a result.
The spark was that someone said that the study of 'emergent' phenomena goes back to Turing's work in the 50s on the development of plant structure. It's true that he developed a model of how things like stripes could apparently 'emerge' from homogenous tissue. But the way people use words like 'emergent', particularly the Santa Fe complexity theory types is more to do with the notion of a self-organising complexity that arises as a feedback between the state of the system and the response of individual agents to that state (traffic jams, termite mounds, tipping points, blah), and that you can't analyse in terms of that individual response. The point of the letter was that Turing was doing 'good old fashioned applied mathematics': ie exactly doing that kind of analysis you're not meant to be able to do for emergent systems. And if that counts as analysing emergent phenomena then like that man in Moliere, applied mathematicians have been doing complexity theory all along.
Why I think I might be wrong is that there might, after all be a qualitative difference between, say, using Maxwell's equations to predict radio waves, which is a very domain specific, experimentally-bound kind of applied mathematics, and the Turing approach which is much more an approach asking how in principle certain kinds of structure can come from certain kinds of inputs. Turing's is perhaps much closer to the complexity theory viewpoint. I'm just in the middle of reading an interesting book by Evelyn Fox Keller on why biologists loathe this latter view.
But I am now the sort of person that writes letters to the Guardian.
