Conti Filippo, Valerio Maria Cristina, Zbilut Joseph P, Giuliani Alessandro
Chemistry Department, University of Rome, 'La Sapienza', Rome, Italy.
Syst Synth Biol. 2007 Dec;1(4):161-5. doi: 10.1007/s11693-008-9016-1. Epub 2008 May 30.
A biological system, like any complex system, blends stochastic and deterministic features, displaying properties of both. In a certain sense, this blend is exactly what we perceive as the "essence of complexity" given we tend to consider as non-complex both an ideal gas (fully stochastic and understandable at the statistical level in the thermodynamic limit of a huge number of particles) and a frictionless pendulum (fully deterministic relative to its motion). In this commentary we make the statement that systems biology will have a relevant impact on nowadays biology if (and only if) will be able to capture the essential character of this blend that in our opinion is the generation of globally ordered collective modes supported by locally stochastic atomisms.
生物系统与任何复杂系统一样，融合了随机和确定性特征，兼具两者的性质。从某种意义上说，这种融合正是我们所认为的“复杂性的本质”，因为我们倾向于将理想气体（完全随机，在大量粒子的热力学极限下在统计层面上是可理解的）和无摩擦摆（相对于其运动完全是确定性的）都视为非复杂系统。在本评论中，我们提出这样的观点：如果（且仅当）系统生物学能够捕捉到这种融合的本质特征，即由局部随机原子论所支持的全局有序集体模式的产生，那么它将对当今生物学产生重大影响。
