(This post is an attempt at elaborating the ideas I outlined in my talk at Bio-pitch in February.) The academic and investigative relationship to biology – our discourse about biology – is becoming increasingly technological. In fields such as bioinformatics and computational biology, the technological/instrumental relationship to nature is always at work, constructing deterministic models of […]
When perceiving an object, for example a chair, the statement “this is X” (this is a chair) is almost entirely uninteresting. The concept by which we identify the object is a mere word, and in a sense entirely devoid of meaning. That concept does help us align this object with other entities in space and […]
Scientific method can be understood as the following steps: formulating a hypothesis, designing an experiment, carrying out experiments, and drawing conclusions. Conclusions can feed into hypothesis formulation again, in order for a different (related or unrelated) hypothesis to be tested, and we have a cycle. This feedback can also take place via a general theory that […]
Scientific method is fundamentally concerned with repeatable events. The phenomena that science captures most easily may be described using the following formula: once conditions A have been established, if B is done, then C happens. This kind of science is a science of reactions, of the reactive. But what about a science of the active? Is […]
Fractals appear in many places in biology and ecology, in society, in man-made artefacts. Yet the concept itself is quite new. Fractal phenomena existed for a long time before Benoit Mandelbrot formally investigated them as such. Amazingly, the Greeks, who did so much, do not seem to have had the notion of a fractal. In […]