26-08-2025, 07:47 PM
Ciao Mauro,
thank you very much for this thoughtful observation. You are right: once I realized that there might be an underlying scheme, I could have represented it with neutral symbols (A, B, C, D). However, I think it is important not to overlook two elements of the manuscript: i)The illustrations often move from microscopic/biological motifs (which some interpret as unicellular organisms) to plants and more complex structures. ii) The text itself is divided into sections that many scholars have tentatively described as “biological,” “pharmaceutical,” “astronomical/astrological,” balneological,and so on.
Taken together, these aspects gave me the impression of a kind of compendium of natural knowledge, even an intuition of evolutionary processes. This is why I thought it was stimulating to use the DNA metaphor as a coding structure.
In practice, I applied the analysis page by page, to see if there was a progression in the “DNA-like” patterns, and then compared the sections with each other to test whether the variations in base distributions were coherent across the manuscript divisions. Finally, I performed falsification tests to show that the results do not depend on the specific DNA labels, but rather on the existence of an internal scheme.
So the point is not that “DNA is the key” to the Voynich Manuscript, but that the schema itself may exist. Using DNA was a heuristic choice — both fascinating in its results, and at the same time limited, since of course the concept of DNA did not exist at the time of the manuscript. Much more work is needed before one could speak of a solution, or even of one possible solution.
Best regards,
Simona
thank you very much for this thoughtful observation. You are right: once I realized that there might be an underlying scheme, I could have represented it with neutral symbols (A, B, C, D). However, I think it is important not to overlook two elements of the manuscript: i)The illustrations often move from microscopic/biological motifs (which some interpret as unicellular organisms) to plants and more complex structures. ii) The text itself is divided into sections that many scholars have tentatively described as “biological,” “pharmaceutical,” “astronomical/astrological,” balneological,and so on.
Taken together, these aspects gave me the impression of a kind of compendium of natural knowledge, even an intuition of evolutionary processes. This is why I thought it was stimulating to use the DNA metaphor as a coding structure.
In practice, I applied the analysis page by page, to see if there was a progression in the “DNA-like” patterns, and then compared the sections with each other to test whether the variations in base distributions were coherent across the manuscript divisions. Finally, I performed falsification tests to show that the results do not depend on the specific DNA labels, but rather on the existence of an internal scheme.
So the point is not that “DNA is the key” to the Voynich Manuscript, but that the schema itself may exist. Using DNA was a heuristic choice — both fascinating in its results, and at the same time limited, since of course the concept of DNA did not exist at the time of the manuscript. Much more work is needed before one could speak of a solution, or even of one possible solution.
Best regards,
Simona
