1
This is a blog about some interesting books that I read on my extended Easter holidays. First up is Eric Beinhocker’s wonderfully accurate summary – well before the credit crunch – of how economies really work. (My thanks to Andy Hopkins for suggesting it.) The subtitle shows that we need to think of economic systems – just like biological systems – as complex adaptive systems or networks of interacting elements that evolve over time according to non-trivial but broadly knowable principles. I would like to hope (but doubt) that all economics students are exposed to this way of thinking. There is thus much to be gained by bringing together our knowledge of natural and other evolution (including evolutionary algorithms – introduction ) with that of the operation of social and economic systems, and I have some plans in this regard.
Continue reading: The economy is the network; non-equilibrium systems in the real world
It is easy to be seduced by the semantic traps of a two-valued logic system. “An organism is alive or dead” is one such. Clearly the truth or otherwise of this statement depends on the definitions of ‘alive’ and ‘dead’. However, these are necessarily operational even in higher organisms, and considerable legal and ethical issues attach to defining ‘life’ for humans. It is much harder with unicellular organisms such as bacteria, where conventionally it is taken that the ability to replicate defines whether a cell is alive or not. Since we can only determine that post hoc, however, the question can only be retrospective – was this individual cell ‘alive’ (i.e. capable of reproduction, or ‘culturable’) at a certain time? This may seem rather arcane (it is not unrelated to the Schrödinger Cat paradox of the quantum theory), but has profound significance for our understanding of the fundamentals of microbiology.
Continue reading: To be or not to be alive – that was the question
“Actually, the orgy of fact extraction in which everybody is currently engaged has, like most consumer economies, accumulated a vast debt. This is a debt of theory and some of us are soon going to have an exciting time paying it back – with interest, I hope.”
In Theory, in Loose Ends, Sydney Brenner, Current Biology, 1997, p. 37
Physics differs from biology in many ways, a particularly striking one being the status typically accorded to theory and theoreticians. To quote Danny Hillis from Brockman’s book, “…A theoretical biologist [is] almost an oxymoron. In physics there are the theoretical types and the experimental types, and there is a good understanding of what the relationship is between them.
Continue reading: In praise of theory
I have blogged before about membrane transporters, but since this subject is somewhat neglected – transporters are a kind of Cinderella subject of metabolism – I shall raise some further thoughts here. The blog is partly stimulated by a very interesting paper published by Westerhoff and colleagues, who used a pHauxostat to select for strains of the (already) fast-growing yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus that could grow even faster, by up to 30%. This increase in growth rate – a doubling time of 52 min, the fastest reported for a eukaryote – was accompanied by an increase in surface area of some 40% at essentially constant volume, implying that membrane processes (such as substrate uptake) were most limiting to growth rate. (This is even true for some anaerobes.)
Continue reading: Membrane transporters – the ‘gatekeepers’ of the cell and their importance in ‘white biotechnology’
Back to top