Magnus S Magnusson
University of Iceland, Iceland
Title: T-patterns and self-similarity from protein cities to the only large-brain mass-societies: From naked apes to string-controlled citizens
Biography
Biography: Magnus S Magnusson
Abstract
This presentation concerns spatial and temporal self-similarity across >9 orders of magnitude, implicating a particular type of hierarchical self-similar pattern, called T-pattern, a natural (pseudo) fractal, recurring with statistically significant translation symmetry. While the self-similarity in question must have evolved from simpler to more complex, it is presented in the order discovered within a primarily ethological (biology of behavior) project concerning social interaction and organization in social insects and primates, including humans. Beginning in the 1970’s, it was partly inspired by the work of Lorenz, Von Frisch and Tinbergen for which they shared a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973. The smallest animals concerned were social insects and there was no implication of self-similarity. The main methodological focus of the present project has been on developing pattern definitions and detection tools. This resulted in the T-pattern, with corresponding detection algorithms and software, and their abundant detection, among others, in different kinds of human (inter-brain) interactions and later in neuronal interactions in living brains, thus showing T-patterned self-similarity of temporal interaction structure within
and between brains. Finally, unexpected spatial T-patterning in the molecular strings of DNA and proteins was noticed and consequently the realization of self-similarity in social organization, based on T-patterned (external memory) strings, more durable than the citizens, in the mass-societies of proteins and of humans – the only large-brain mass-societies. Different from the mass-societies of insects (hives) and of cells (bodies), those of, respectively, protein and human mass-societies relying extensively on external T-patterned strings, respectively, DNA and the very recent strings, called texts, including those thoroughly standardized, copied, distributed, promoted and enforced, called legal or holy texts. With human and protein citizens specialized on the basis of durable external T-patterned strings and with some citizens, for example, moving (even walking) along tracks and doing meaningful work, a new definition of what is alive seems justified. Thus, proteomics may provide new insights and ideas for a bio-social science and vice-versa.