Thinking About Biology

"No science has ever been done without an indissoluble link between theory and fact: facts are colored by the theoretical spectacles on puts on, just as much as theory is shaped by the results of empir"

This book discusses the emergence of life, the development of the individual, and the study of the interaction between individuals and species. It gives the student of theoretical biology some idea of the flavor of current research in the field.

About the Santa Fe Institute -- Thinking about Biology: An Introductory Essay -- The Emergence of Life -- Defining the Transition to Life: Self-Replicating Bounded Structures and Chemical Autopoiesis -- The Organism as a Dynamical System -- Designing Bacteria -- Structural Patterns in Macromolecules -- Development as a Robust Natural Process -- Development as a Robust Natural Process -- Generation of Morphological Patterns: The Mechanical Ways to Create Regular Structures in Embryonic Development -- Gastrulation and the Evolution of Development -- Biological Organization, Coherence, and Light Emission from Living Organisms -- What is the Immune Network For? -- Randomness and Pattern Scale in the Immune Network: A Cellular Automata Approach -- Species and Societies: Communication Among Multiple Agents -- Self-Organized Criticality and Gaia -- Requirements for Evolvability in Complex Systems: Orderly Dynamics and Frozen Components -- Modeling the Behavior of Ant Colonies as an Emergent Property of a System of Ant-Ant Interactions

Stein, Wilfred | Varela, Francisco J.