Ants arrange their dead using the same principles that are thought to produce the markings on animal skin and on tropical sea shells.
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Turing showed that an initially uniform distribution of reacting molecules can develop into localized blobs that differ in chemical composition. Chemicals in an embryo might behave in this way, he thought, turning a uniform cell into one with some structure - a kind of primitive body plan.

There were no computers to help Turing with the difficult and tedious mathematical calculations, so he was forced to make a lot of simplifications. As a result, the work was largely ignored by biologists for several decades.