Re: Article: On Scale and Complexity


"Robert Karl Stonjek" <rstonjek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dbvc4v$n0r$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> THEORETICAL BIOLOGY: ON SCALE AND COMPLEXITY
>
> The following points are made by Neil D. Theise (Nature 2005 435:1165):
>
> 1) Complexity theory, which describes emergent self-organization of
> complex
> adaptive systems, has gained a prominent position in many sciences. One
> powerful aspect of emergent self-organization is that scale matters. What
> appears to be a dynamic, ever changing organizational panoply at the scale
> of the interacting agents that comprise it, looks to be a single,
> functional
> entity from a higher scale. (snip)

> 2) Cells fulfill all the criteria necessary to be considered agents within
> a
> complex system: they exist in great numbers; their interactions involve
> homeostatic, negative feedback loops; and they respond to local
> environmental cues with limited stochasticity ("quenched disorder"). Like
> any group of interacting individuals fulfilling these criteria, they
> self-organize without external planning. What emerges is the structure and
> function of our tissues, organs and bodies.

Yes. And, to think about the fact that the earliest bilaterians known to
now
are those of only 100-200 microns width which existed 40-55 million years
prior to the Cambrian. Yet they had bilateral symmetry,mouth, gut, anus),
endoderm, mesoderm, ectoderm and paired coeloms.

Not a very large scale, by some standards, yet a sufficient scale for all
that.

Wow.



> Full Text at ScienceWeek
> http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050729-3.htm
>
> Posted by
> Robert Karl Stonjek
>
>


.

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