Trobada: "Beyond Physics Envy: The Case of Life and its Many Complexities"

por Diego Rasskin-Gutman (ICBiBE, Universidad de Valencia)

jueves 5 feb. 2015 10:30 → 11:30 Europe/Madrid

Seminar Room, 1.1.1 (IFIC)

Biology, the science of life, has borrowed many theoretical insights and mathematical tools to try to make sense of how living organisms came to be, keep their integrity, and evolve. Galileo's eloquent view of the "book of nature" as written in the language of geometry (taken from ancient Greek philosophy) set the stage for today's ubiquitous use of mathematical models. The presence of theoretical perspectives in the biological sciences reminds us of the 1900s, a time in which many biologists expressed "physics envy", that is, the desire to be able to treat biological phenomena with the power of abstraction used in math and, above all, as seen in the physical models of reality. What have we learned in biology from this perspective and what can we learn today? I will embark on a journey through the contributions of noted physicists and mathematicians to the realm of biology and I will talk about our own (envy-free) work on conceptual and theoretical evolutionary and developmental models.