The 17th century poet, John Donne, famously wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.” In reality, even an island is not an island - structurally or functionally. Islands are separated (or connected) - depending on perspective or purpose - to… Continue reading The Systems Above
Category: Complexity
The systems above, the genomes below
In medicine, it is often said the exceptions are the rule and atypical presentations of diseases are typical. However, diagnoses are also often preceded by typical symptoms, accompanied by diseases, and succeeded by other symptoms and diseases. There are patterns in these journeys and they often follow consistent trajectories. A heart attack is announced by… Continue reading The systems above, the genomes below
Wild Places
In the Tale of a Springbok, I narrated the story of a springbok approaching an empty but hot desert watering hole in Etosha National Park, unaware of the two lionesses sitting underneath the bush in the periphery. As the scene unfolded, I anthropomorphized and looked on with mixed feelings vacillating from suspense and excitement to… Continue reading Wild Places
Unknown Unknowns
Picture a late morning scene at a watering hole in Etosha National Park in Namibia. The sun is getting close to its apex position in the sky, its fierce rays pierce through the cloudless sky onto the ground. All types of animals from a family of majestic African elephants to a tower of leggy giraffes… Continue reading Unknown Unknowns
The Present of Things Past
As stated in one of Zeno’s nine paradoxes, an arrow in flight is “somewhere” and “somewhere in transit”, implying the flow of time as a continuum. Thereafter, approximately a thousand years after Zeno, the theologian Augustine of Hippo attempted to categorize time by writing, “perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times -… Continue reading The Present of Things Past
The Single Aim
Evolutionary biologist Leslie Orgel’s second rule of biology states that “evolution is smarter than you are.” Evolution and its mechanisms can explain much of the seemingly boundless complexity and organization evident in biological ecosystems. As I discussed in my last essay, biological evolution with its objective function of survival and reproduction driven by the processes… Continue reading The Single Aim
Problem of the Criterion
In the 1930s, the evolutionary biologist, Sewall Wright, developed the concept of the fitness (adaptive) landscape as a visualization of evolution. The fitness landscape, conceived as a topographic map that resembles a mountain range with peaks and valleys, described different phenotypes of an organism that can vary over a continuous range of genotypes. The vertical… Continue reading Problem of the Criterion
Similarities in Dissimilars
The name Homo sapiens was applied by the 18th-century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus in 1758. Sapien - the wise - suggests that the defining attribute of our species is a distinct and unparalleled cognition. We think differently from all other animals, and we are able to share those thoughts with one another in ways that are… Continue reading Similarities in Dissimilars
The dose makes the poison…
Stress is defined “as a process of altered biochemical homeostasis produced by psychological, physiological, or environmental stressors.” Etymologically, the word is derived from Latin, meaning “tight, compressed, drawn together.” Conceptually, it can be found in the physical sciences as early as the 17th century. In physics, Hooke’s law (F = -kX) states that the strain… Continue reading The dose makes the poison…
Super Ants
The biologist, Nigel Franks, wrote, “the solitary ant is behaviorally one of the least sophisticated animals imaginable...if 100 army ants are placed on a flat surface, they will walk around in ever decreasing circles until they die of exhaustion...yet put half a million of them together, and the group as a whole becomes what some… Continue reading Super Ants
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