From Logic to Biology via Physics: a survey

TL;DR

This survey explores the theoretical foundations of biology by integrating concepts from logic, physics, and complexity science, emphasizing the roles of time, symmetry, and randomness in understanding organismal unity and dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interdisciplinary perspective connecting logic, physics, and biology, highlighting the importance of incompleteness and randomness in biological stability and evolution.

Findings

Biological time and complexity are key to understanding organism unity.

Randomness plays a central role in biological stability and adaptation.

Evolution involves continual symmetry changes within dynamic stability.

Abstract

This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time, complexity, theoretical symmetries, singularities and critical transitions. We explicitly borrow from the conclusions in some key chapters and introduce them by a reflection on "incompleteness", also proposed in the book. We consider that incompleteness is a fundamental notion to understand the way in which we construct knowledge. Then we will introduce an approach to biological dynamics where randomness is central to the theoretical determination: randomness does not oppose biological stability but contributes to it by variability, adaptation, and diversity. Then, evolutionary and ontogenetic trajectories are continual changes of coherence structures involving symmetry changes within an ever-changing global stability.