Re:When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman
by sooheon on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @09:39AM
(#17073809)
Isn't it at least literally true that biology encompasses all of physics, plus some added complexity/emergence on top of that?
Re:When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman
by skuzye on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @09:50AM
(#17073889)
Biology is a huge field so I don't mean to speak for all of them. My wife is doing a PhD in Immunology so I know that at least for her, she's thinking in a whole different abstraction level. She's not that concerned about the physics in her day to day experiments.
Re:When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman
by stochastic_monk on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @10:36AM
(#17074204)
Good point. It really depends on what area in biology you're in. For immunology, pathology, and, honestly, most subfields, you're closer to phenomenology than emergence.
I will say that I'm skeptical of a lot of the work done in biology in relation to networks and complexity. It's often either done by those without sufficient mathematical background (and, typically, wholly statistically invalid) or a bunch of hand-wavy, feel-good nonsense for a sexy tagline by those who should know better.
Better work is done by researchers in complexity who analyze biological systems.
Memorizing large numbers of facts give way to understanding and intuition in my experience. It’s quite similar to how a chess player’s experience regarding strategy starts out by exhaustively enumerating potential futures and eventually turns into an intuitive understanding of future plays and how training a neural network leads to a high dimensional manifold representation of a concept.