2007/12/06

Biology... tricks and accidents

I approached Feynman after one of his Cornell lectures in 1964 for advice about how best to move into mathematical biophysics from engineering physics as I had planned when choosing Cornell. He cautioned against any such move, on grounds that biology is too much a matter of tricks and accidents of evolution, and too complex for useful mathematical representations. I believe that that is correct, on average, but the rich diversity of living nature provides many niches for peculiar questions and aptitudes.

---A. T. Winfree (2001) The Geometry of Biological Time


This can probably be said about "useful neurophysiological representations" as well. Most modern neurophysiologists blindly assume that their practice, foundationally based on isolated invertebrate preparations, is universally applicable to the complex neocortical network, during the complex function of cognition. However, this assumption is actually a hypothesis, and one which is not necessarily trivial.

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