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Yeah, the reporting is a bit strange, though the Turing paper covers a wide range of subjects, so that's not too surprising. Turing's theory is so broad it would be difficult to "confirm" it with any single study, because he proposed a mechanism that he hypothesized could account for an extremely wide range of phenomena. It's not really a theory of one particular mechanism, so much as a meta-theory that many patterns in nature are produced by various physical instantiations of a more general mathematical mechanism. It would be difficult to confirm that in the strong sense with anything short of a wide-ranging survey covering thousands of experiments, showing that an enormous range of physical mechanisms and patterns in nature really are the result of this abstract meta-mechanism. This paper has not done that, so it hasn't really confirmed Turing's hypothesis in the strong sense.

On the other hand, one might be looking for a weaker sort of confirmation: not that Turing-style morphogenesis accounts for everything, but that it accounts for at least something, i.e. there is at least one demonstrable instance where a Turing-style explanation can be shown to account for a process as it actually works physically & historically in nature, vs. just being a clever way of mathematically approximating a pattern. In that case, the paper you link above is at least one prior example, and this article adds another domain-specific investigation.




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