Lessons from the Dinosaurs

Today I read an interesting blurb from an interview from a scientist working at the American Museum of Natural History museum's new exhibit on dinosaurs. (Gothamist, as always, is excited about the exhibit). He was asked, as I am sure he is in every interview, about the recent recovery of dinosaur DNA, and whether this could lead to "a Jurassic Park-type scenario" (see note below). Anyway, the scientist used an excellent metaphor to explain the possibility of recreating a dinosaur from its DNA. He said something to this effect:

Imagine if someone chopped up one hundred copies of War and Peace, and you had to try to recreate a single copy from the pieces. If the novel was chopped up into individual letters, it would be impossible. If it was chopped up into paragraphs, you have a chance to recreate the novel, using the overlaps.

I thought this was a good, simple metaphor to think about DNA as the physical set of instructions for all life. This also got me to thinking: if we chopped up a city, what would be the code to put it back together again?

I've been putting off writing about cities as systems for awhile now, if only because cities form systems of so many different things, including and not limited to: humans, animals, diseases, plants, water, social structures, trade, economic systems, religion, migration..... the list is almost infinite, and the set of things I know about is decidedly finite. However, one has to start somewhere and some time. I think I'll finish my list of environmental challenges first.

Until then, I suggest you all read The Complete's Idiot Guide to Decoding Your Genes.

[Note: Dinosaur scientists -- or, as they're properly known, paleontologists -- must get sick of hearing about that crappy book written by Michael Crichton. No, I mean the one about dinosaurs. On the other hand, in the movie they got to see their life's work animated in mind-boggling detail, devouring Jeff Goldblum no less. That's a pretty fair trade-off, if you ask me. Not all paleontologists can be that bothered, either, since one of them wrote the inevitable book, titled The Science of Jurassic Park, or How to Build a Dinosaur.]