The editors of this compilation declare two goals: to show how computer science can help us to understand biological development, and to show how ideas from developmental biology can stimulate new thinking in computer science. The objectives are neatly symmetrical, but they do not sit comfortably together. Developmental biologists and computer scientists speak different languages and inhabit different worlds. On one side of the cultural divide, the developmental biologists struggle to digest complex experimental findings and make sense of them, tangled in wearisome quantities of data that defy quantitative analysis. On the other side, the computer modellers construct ingenious idealized systems, with a blithe disregard for biological realities and a greater concern for what is possible than for what is actual. A terrible jungle or a ridiculous toyland: in bad moments that seems to be the dichotomy. The question in my mind as I embarked on On Growth, Form and...

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