Our group proposes three main principles for a theory of organisms, namely: the default state, the principle of variation and the principle of organization.
Abstract
Summary This chapter briefly presents and describes the three main principles that the group proposes for a theory of organisms, namely: the default state, proliferation with variation and motility, the principle of variation and the principle of organization. It is crucial to critique the philosophical and theoretical position on which the biological research feeding into the program is based and which has dominated biomedical research for the last 70 years. Physical theories are founded on stable mathematical structures, based onregularities and especially on theoretical symmetries. At the time of cell theory formulation and still today, cell theory plays a federating role between evolution biology and organism biology. Finally, analysis of the differences between the physics of inanimate and living matter leads to the proposal of three principles that provide aviable perspective for the construction of a necessary theory of organisms.
Nous décrivons trois principes proposés pour une théorie des organismes : l'état par défaut des cellules et les principes de variation et d'organisation.
Abstract
Les organismes, qu’ils soient uni ou multi-cellulaires, sont des agents capables de créer leurs propres normes ; ils articulent continuellement leur capacité à créer de la nouveauté et de la stabilité, c’est-à-dire qu’ils combinent plasticité et robustesse. Ici, nous présentons et articulons brièvement les trois principes proposés récemment pour une théorie des organismes, à savoir : l’état par défaut, prolifération avec variation et motilité, le principe de variation et le principe d’organisation. Ces principes modifient profondément les observables biologiques et leur nature théorique par rapport aux cadres des théories physiques. Ce changement radical ouvre la possibilité d’ancrer la modélisation mathématique à des principes proprement biologiques.
This focused issue of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology is entitled "From the century of the genome to the century of the organism: New theoretical approaches." It was developed during Ana M. Soto’s tenure as Blaise Pascal Chair of Biology 2013-15 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS,...
Abstract
This focused issue of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology is entitled "From the century of the genome to the century of the organism: New theoretical approaches." It was developed during Ana M. Soto’s tenure as Blaise Pascal Chair of Biology 2013-15 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS, Paris, France). Giuseppe Longo was the Pascal Chair host at the ENS. This ongoing theoretical was also used as the content of a 10 session course attended by graduate students and post-graduates, which took place at the National Museum of Natural History and at the ENS. The attendants of course encouraged the guest editors to make this material easily available, hence the origin of PBMB issue.
Critical phenomena disrupt the mathematical determination at a given level by couplings between scales, leading to a new perspective on levels of organization.
Abstract
Biological thinking is structured by the notion of level of organization. We will show that this notion acquires a precise meaning in critical phenomena: they disrupt, by the appearance of infinite quantities, the mathematical (possibly equational) determination at a given level, when moving at an “higher” one. As a result, their analysis cannot be called genuinely bottom-up, even though it remains upward in a restricted sense. At the same time, criticality and related phenomena are very common in biology. Because of this, we claim that bottom-up approaches are not sufficient, in principle, to capture biological phenomena. In the second part of this paper, following the work of Francis Bailly, we discuss a strong criterium of level transition. The core idea of the criterium is to start from the breaking of the symmetries and determination at a “first” level in order to “move” at the others. If biological phenomena have multiple, sustained levels of organization in this sense, then they should be interpreted as extended critical transitions.
Keywords: bottom-up, extended criticality, levels of organization, organism, renormalization, singularity
