Notes · Hypothesis
Why the Nile remembers a spinal cord
Tracing the embryonic origin of the East African Rift through the analogy of the developing neural tube. A long shot, but the angles are too clean.
The East African Rift is, in a literal geological sense, a place where the planet's crust is folding open along a line. The vertebrate neural tube is a place where the embryo's surface is folding closed along a line. Mirror-image processes, mirror-image substrates — and yet, when I overlay them at scale, the bifurcation patterns are within a few degrees of each other.
I'm not the first to notice this. In a 1971 paper that the field has mostly forgotten, the geologist H. T. Mason argued that rifting and neurulation share a substrate of directed folding under tension. He died before he could write the second paper. I've been carrying that paper around for three years.
What I think I see
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