Perturbing the Organism
Perturbing the Organism

Author: Herbert Weiner

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-06

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780226890418

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Overlooked in the early accounts was that all organisms face many additional types of natural challenges and obstacles in their efforts to survive and reproduce: for example, they must fight or escape predators, replenish diminished food supplies, and anticipate, seasonal changes of climate. Weiner's survey of the literature shows that much progress has been made in understanding the effects of exposing animals to these kinds of naturally occurring stressful experiences and their varied outcomes. Under such conditions there appear patterns of integrated behavioral and physiological responses that are exquisitely attuned to the experience. He carefully assesses the research on the ways in which neural circuits and peptidergic mechanisms in the brain generate and integrate these patterns. In addition, he presents new concepts about the perturbation of subsystems, including biological clocks, which may, or may not, lead to disease or ill-health.

Mapping the Future of Biology
Mapping the Future of Biology

Author: Anouk Barberousse

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-02-26

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1402096364

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Carving Nature at its Joints? In order to map the future of biology we need to understand where we are and how we got there. Present day biology is the realization of the famous metaphor of the organism as a bete ˆ machine elaborated by Descartes in Part V of the Discours,a realization far beyond what anyone in the seventeenth century could have im- ined. Until the middle of the nineteenth century that machine was an articulated collection of macroscopic parts, a system of gears and levers moving gasses, solids, and liquids, and causing some parts of the machine to move in response to the force produced by others. Then, in the nineteenth century, two divergent changes occurred in the level at which the living machine came to be investigated. First, with the rise of chemistry and the particulate view of the composition of matter, the forces on macroscopic machine came to be understood as the ma- festation of molecular events, and functional biology became a study of molecular interactions. That is, the machine ceased to be a clock or a water pump and became an articulated network of chemical reactions. Until the ?rst third of the twentieth century this chemical view of life, as re?ected in the development of classical b- chemistry treated the chemistry of biological molecules in much the same way as for any organic chemical reaction, with reaction rates and side products that were the consequence of statistical properties of the concentrations of reactants.

New Perspectives on Cybernetics
New Perspectives on Cybernetics

Author: G. Vijver

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-06-29

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9401580626

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Gertrudis Van de Vijver· Seminar of Logic and Epistemology University of Ghent Before being classified under the fashionable denominators of complexity and chaos, self-organization and autonomy were intensely inquired into in the cybernetic tradition. Despite all rejections that cybernetics has gone through in the second half of this century, today its importance is more and more recognized. Its decisive influence for connectionist theories, autopoietic and constructivist theories, for different forms of applied or experimental epistemology, is being more and more understood and generally accepted. It is mainly due to the success of connectionist models that we observe today a revival of interest for cybernetics. The 1943 article by McCulloch and Pitts is evidently a founding article. Cybernetics has however a much broader interest than the one linked to technical-mathematical details relevant to the construction of networks. For instance, the evolution from first to second order cybernetics, the ways of approaching biological and cognitive phenomena in the latter and the limits that were formulated there, are particularly meaningful to understand current developments and divergences in connectionism. A nuanced picture of cybernetic's history and its present state is therefore clearly epistemologically essential.

Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology
Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 030909612X

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Advances in computer science and technology and in biology over the last several years have opened up the possibility for computing to help answer fundamental questions in biology and for biology to help with new approaches to computing. Making the most of the research opportunities at the interface of computing and biology requires the active participation of people from both fields. While past attempts have been made in this direction, circumstances today appear to be much more favorable for progress. To help take advantage of these opportunities, this study was requested of the NRC by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy. The report provides the basis for establishing cross-disciplinary collaboration between biology and computing including an analysis of potential impediments and strategies for overcoming them. The report also presents a wealth of examples that should encourage students in the biological sciences to look for ways to enable them to be more effective users of computing in their studies.

Systems Biology
Systems Biology

Author: A.K. Konopka

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2006-11-20

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1420015125

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With extraordinary clarity,the Systems Biology: Principles, Methods, and Concepts focuses on the technical practical aspects of modeling complex or organic general systems. It also provides in-depth coverage of modeling biochemical, thermodynamic, engineering, and ecological systems. Among other methods and concepts based in logic, computer

The Health of Populations
The Health of Populations

Author: Stephen J. Kunitz

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0195308077

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In the maelstrom of current public health debate over the social determinants of health, this book offers a discussion on the roots of prevalent strains of thought on the matter. The author brings an independent perspective to bear on the debate.

Biomolecular Networks
Biomolecular Networks

Author: Luonan Chen

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-06-29

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780470488058

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Alternative techniques and tools for analyzing biomolecular networks With the recent rapid advances in molecular biology, high-throughput experimental methods have resulted in enormous amounts of data that can be used to study biomolecular networks in living organisms. With this development has come recognition of the fact that a complicated living organism cannot be fully understood by merely analyzing individual components. Rather, it is the interactions of components or biomolecular networks that are ultimately responsible for an organism's form and function. This book addresses the important need for a new set of computational tools to reveal essential biological mechanisms from a systems biology approach. Readers will get comprehensive coverage of analyzing biomolecular networks in cellular systems based on available experimental data with an emphasis on the aspects of network, system, integration, and engineering. Each topic is treated in depth with specific biological problems and novel computational methods: GENE NETWORKS—Transcriptional regulation; reconstruction of gene regulatory networks; and inference of transcriptional regulatory networks PROTEIN INTERACTION NETWORKS—Prediction of protein-protein interactions; topological structure of biomolecular networks; alignment of biomolecular networks; and network-based prediction of protein function METABOLIC NETWORKS AND SIGNALING NETWORKS—Analysis, reconstruction, and applications of metabolic networks; modeling and inference of signaling networks; and other topics and new trends In addition to theoretical results and methods, many computational software tools are referenced and available from the authors' Web sites. Biomolecular Networks is an indispensable reference for researchers and graduate students in bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology, computer science, and applied mathematics.

Basic Biology for Born Engineers
Basic Biology for Born Engineers

Author: Guenter Albrecht-Buehler

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-10-19

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1527519988

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Physics owes much of its success to the application of differential calculus. Correspondingly, most laws of physics are formulated as differential equations. This success has created the prejudice that a science cannot be ‘exact’ unless it stands firmly on a foundation of calculus. This doesn’t, however, work for biology. Living things are not as continuous, let alone differentiable, as most organisms and their parts change or end quite abruptly. Biology cannot offer differential equations for (say) the role of chromosomal telomeres in aging, or a link between macrophage polyploidy and cancer. The information flow between the limbic system and the frontal cortex is far too erratic to permit differentiation. The pheromone secretions that control the social order of ants follow no mathematical laws. The topology of the human skeleton is neither a perfect sphere, nor an idealized doughnut. However, all these and countless other biological phenomena decide life and death and are amazingly exact As such, instead of even trying to paint living things with the exquisitely resolving brush of differential calculus, we may accept that they are actually made up of individual and sizable ‘pixels’. Hence, this book presents a novel view of biology as the unified science of ‘living mosaics’, which consist of discrete, yet interacting, ‘tiles’, which, in turn, are such ‘mosaics’ in their own rights.