Watching our baby grow is a truly amazing experience. Everyday you feed him lots of food and a small amount of the provided molecules are going to be used to grow his bones, brain and and other body parts. It makes you wonder how these molecules actually know their way to insert themselves into the right place. And it happens over and over again, baby after baby. And while science has very detailed understanding of many parts of our body, nobody really understands how this amazing process of growing a human being really works. We can only sit and watch in awe this wonder unfolding in front of our eyes every day. Have you ever wondered how this wound you got from falling on your knee actually knows how to heal?

This reminds me of some work I’ve done in the past when I worked on fractal compression algorithms. There, a picture is decompressed by using similar puzzle parts from a domain pool over and over again to build the final image by iterating on a recursive function. This function is defined to converge towards the original image. So the longer you iterate, the closer you reconstruct the original image. Could it be that our DNA encodes such a converging recursive function of the human being, that if we feed these puzzle parts to it (the molecules we consume), it ends up building the same organism again and again – not identically, but approximately the same?

It’s an intriguing thought.