2. See the graph “Growth in Genbank DNA Sequence Data” in chapter 10.
3. Cheng Zhang and Jianpeng Ma, “Enhanced Sampling and Applications in Protein Folding in Explicit Solvent,” Journal of Chemical Physics 132, no. 24 (2010): 244101. See also http://folding.stanford.edu/English/About about the Folding@home project, which has harnessed over five million computers around the world to simulate protein folding.
4. For a more complete description of this argument, see the section “[The Impact…] on the Intelligent Destiny of the Cosmos: Why We Are Probably Alone in the Universe” in chapter 6 of The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil (New York: Viking, 2005).
5. James D. Watson, Discovering the Brain (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1992).
6. Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
7. “Mandelbrot Zoom,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEw8xpb1aRA; “Fractal Zoom Mandelbrot Corner,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs.
Chapter 1: Thought Experiments on the World
1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), 185/95–96.
2. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 751 (206.1.1-6), Peckham’s Variorum edition, edited by Morse Peckham, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).
3. R. Dahm, “Discovering DNA: Friedrich Miescher and the Early Years of Nucleic Acid Research,” Human Genetics 122, no. 6 (2008): 565–81, doi:10.1007/s00439-007-0433-0; PMID 17901982.
4. Valery N. Soyfer, “The Consequences of Political Dictatorship for Russian Science,” Nature Reviews Genetics 2, no. 9 (2001): 723–29, doi:10.1038/35088598; PMID 11533721.
5. J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–38, http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf and “Double Helix: 50 Years of DNA,” Nature archive, http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/archive.xhtml.
6. Franklin died in 1958 and the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA was awarded in 1962. There is controversy as to whether or not she would have shared in that prize had she been alive in 1962.
7. Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905). This paper established the special theory of relativity. See Robert Bruce Lindsay and Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1981), 330.