But when it comes to messy gene expression networks, we’ve already found the hidden beauty—the stable level of underlying physics. Because we’ve already found the master order, we can guess that we won’t find any additional secret patterns that will make biology as easy as a sequence of cubes. Knowing the rules of the game, we know that the game is hard. We don’t have enough computing power to do protein chemistry from physics (the second source of uncertainty) and evolutionary pathways may have gone different ways on different planets (the third source of uncertainty). New discoveries in basic physics won’t help us here.
If you were an ancient Greek staring at the raw data from a biology experiment, you would be much wiser to look for some hidden structure of Pythagorean elegance, all the proteins lining up in a perfect icosahedron. But in biology we already know where the Pythagorean elegance is, and we know it’s too far down to help us overcome our indexical and logical uncertainty.
I’m a little confused about this account—in physics it seems like there are multiple levels of hidden beauty, e.g., the wave equation and Newtonian mechanics. What’s the reasoning for expecting only one level of “Pythagorean elegance” for a given phenomena? Or to put it differently: if the first physical law that humanity had discovered was the wave equation, would you have predicted the existence of Newtonian laws of motion?
I’m a little confused about this account—in physics it seems like there are multiple levels of hidden beauty, e.g., the wave equation and Newtonian mechanics. What’s the reasoning for expecting only one level of “Pythagorean elegance” for a given phenomena? Or to put it differently: if the first physical law that humanity had discovered was the wave equation, would you have predicted the existence of Newtonian laws of motion?