COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT: THE COMPLEXITY OF BIOLOGY AND THE BIOLOGY OF COMPLEXITY
http://views.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/
phone: 828 4500
NATURE
OF THE COURSE:
This first year graduate level course is based on a growing new field. It is aimed at being a complement to courses directed toward more traditional subjects such as molecular biology and the disciplines constituting basic health sciences. It is an introduction to a set of inter-related ideas that are forming the basis for this century’s science along with the more traditional approaches. It calls upon the results of about fifteen years of being taught as a series of undergraduate honors modules, building on the success of that endeavor. It also incorporates results of research in complexity from places like the Santa Fe Institute (A pioneer in complexity research) and fresh information from a set of Internet discussion groups including:
The VCU
Complexity Research Group http://views.vcu.edu/complex/
Principia
Cybernetica Project
The New
England Complex Systems Institute (Home of the Harvard, MIT, etc. complexity
research groups)
The
Text is Essays on Life Itself by Robert Rosen, Columbia University
Press, 1999. {Available now at the
Academic Campus VCU Bookstore}
An
extensive source bibliography will also be provided.
Topics to be covered:
What is complexity? |
The role of models |
Quantum entanglement and its role in
complexity |
|
Why is the whole more than the sum of
its parts? |
The role of causality |
The role of “information” |
|
Why are organisms different from
machines? |
Phenotypes and Genotypes |
Why Biology tells us more about matter
than physics |
|
Why will reductionism necessarily fail
to answer certain key questions? |
“Hard” vs. “soft” science |
Creation, Darwinian fundamentalism, and
the alternative |
|
Artificial Intelligence and Artificial
Life as shadows of complexity |
“Alternative” Medicine to what? |
Can living systems be fabricated? |
TIME TO BE ARRANGED – CONTACT DR. MIKULECKY IF INTERESTED