Chenling Xu Antelope ~ The Multiscale Complexity of Biology  From Molecules to Evolution
Channel: Complexity Weekend
Date: 2020-09-30

From Complexity Weekend 2019 https://www.complexityweekend.com/

As opposed to the common idea that rigorous, mathematical frameworks are ‘applied to’ biological systems, biology has always been at the forefront of quantitative science: the inspiration from heredity that motivated the invention of regression by Fisher, the link between information entropy and the physical world through Schrödinger's "what is life” and the development of flux balance analysis in order to understand the behavior of large metabolic networks. We will start with an overview of the breadth and complexity of the field of biology, followed by an examination into difficulties in reconciling the experimental practice of biology with its non-linear, probabilistic, and network-driven nature. Most importantly, we will look at some examples of research in biology that uses the principles of Complexity Science to better understand system behavior. We will cover topics in single-cell biology (deep Bayesian networks, metabolic modeling), evolutionary biology (speciation, density-dependent selection) and immunology (control, maximum entropy), some of which I contributed to in my own research.

Chenling Xu Antelope is a PhD Candidate at UCB, and was the biological complexity research facilitator at ComplexityCon 2019.