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 (Bailly, 1991b), 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.
Highlights
From our point of view, the topic of this special issue, “Is life a globally critical phenomena, and if so why?” raises a question of principles in theoretical biology
We will further investigate the application of renormalization ideas to biology in a future article
We can already notice that at least in some cases parts of biological systems behave like physical critical situations and more generally like singular, fractal-like structures
Summary
From our point of view, the topic of this special issue, “Is life a globally critical phenomena, and if so why?” raises a question of principles in theoretical biology. The point is that, when we are considering more and more microscopic interactions we are faced with divergences (comparable to divergences of critical phenomena) This means that the behavior at a scale cannot be given, in this theory, by the contribution of objects of arbitrarily small space scale (this would disrupt the equational structure, by the appearance of infinities). The introduction of a peculiar small scale behavior is in opposition with the manner in which the theory understand microscopic phenomena (Zinn-Justin, 2007) This does not preclude paradigmatic changes, especially because the introduction of gravity leads to non-renormalizability (taking more interactions into account leads to a complexification of the equational form, by the introduction of new variables). Biology seems to imply a finite class of heterogeneous, circularly coupled scales, which means, under the hypothesis of criticality, that several scales may be fundamentally relevant and that their co-determination may be a fundamental and constitutive aspect of biology
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