An update of General physical laws ruling biology

Recently, a letter entitled “Physical Laws Shape Biology” was published in Science (8 February 2013, 10.1126/science.339.6120.646). The title of this letter is very similar to the one that I previously posted in my blog “General physical laws ruling biology” , but my post was not cited and the exact concept of laws might be different from the one that I posted and originally proposed more than 10 years ago during my oral presentation in an international academic meeting. At that time, most scientists thought my proposal as a science fiction, but it seemed that scientists have recently realized that problem and the similar topic was reviewed in a special issue at Science (12 October 2012, vol 338, issue 6104), including two reviews and two perspectives. Although these Science papers are still restricted to some specific disciplines and the overall vision of these papers is still limited as well as the approaches proposed by these papers might not really help to solve the general physical laws controlling biology as thought, it seemed that this direction is starting. It sounds interesting and exciting, but please be careful when examining the direction if interested.


Biological laws – variable

Continuing..(please see my last post for an introduction)

We might need a couple steps to uncover the biological laws. Finding such laws is my missions, and it also might be the missions for biologists who might be interested in it. The core of the laws is the variables that can be used to describe the laws. I would keep posting this parts step by step as I think. Below is the general part.

For the long term, we would find the fundamental elements as variables for describing the basic general laws in biology.  We still do not know the fundamental elements in biology right now, but our understanding the biology evolve fast, from the morphological phenotypes to molecular phenotypes. With the DNA discovery, biology has gone through a molecular era. Recently we knew the functions of microRNAs and no-coding RNAs. We even start a trip to walk into the junk DNA (>98% genome) to identify the functions for them. All these sounds amazing, but they might not be the fundamental elements for controlling biology.  These fundamental elements might have already been known but have just been ignored or they are still concealing in our ordinary practices.  We have been limited by the conventional concepts in biology. After the theory of evolution  formulated by Charles Darwin, followed by DNA-based molecular biology, we have not got any real breakthroughs in biology.  We should find a way like fractal theory to decompose the biological complexity into a simple form and then develop a pattern finder like Chaos-based approaches to uncover the fundamental elements in biology. Once we know the fundamental elements, we could write a math equation to describe the biology. By then, we will know the principles of biological evolutions, aging, diseases, and so on.

….to be continued