From my other blog, you would have learned that chaos theory is based on present states of systems and future states. The idea being that chaos can occur in a system which we can predicament the future of.

As everyone knows, our appearance is affected by genetic and environmental factors. This is its own deterministic system (since genes predict our appearance) but the environment also has an impact on our appearance. Since it is difficult to map how an environment affects us, it is difficult to completely predict our attributes. For instance, our birth can affect our height. So in some sense, chaos theory trivially affects our hair's curliness. What I am talking about in this blog is chaos theory on the atomic scale (or quantum scale).


If we look at proteins, we can see how they affect our growth. A protein is made up of a chain of amino acids. These are quite basic facts really. But, they actually are complex in chaos theory. You see, a protein is affected by the arrangement of these amino acids.

Suppose each amino acid was dubbed as a colour. We would have red, blue and green. Imagine if we then arranged it in blue, red and green. This would be surprisingly different to the original red, blue and green protein in terms of chemical properties. It would also have a different biological use.

How does this link to curly hair? Our hair is made of the protein ketamin. Our DNA tells our cells how to arrange the amino acids in these proteins affecting the atomic structure. So this means that any slight genetic mutations will affect our proteins in a seemingly miniscule way. But, it actually makes the difference between curly and straight hair. So chaos theory decides how curly our hair is.