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In this course we will try to answer some of the most pressing questions of life, which will ultimately be: “Why do we die?”
It turns out that in order to answer such a question, we will have to dive into the way as to how Biological systems are organized: what makes them ‘tick’? Why are they so special, when compared to other physical-chemical systems, like the ocean, rocks, or the moon and the stars? Why is it that there are these astonishing scaling laws that seem to hold over almost 25 (!) orders of magnitude in body mass (i.e., from single-cell organisms, with a mass of a few picograms, all the way up to the 30 m long Blue Whale of 160 tons …).
We will see that all Biological systems share three basic principles (‘Newton’s Laws’ for biological systems ….) that we can formulate quantitatively, and on the basis of which we can build a true scientific theory of complex systems that answers the above questions. In a nutshell: “Complex biological systems are characterized by branching networks that have optimized the total energy transfer throughout the network to ‘feed’ the body”.
The theory has been developed by Geoffrey West and his colleagues from the Santa Fé institute of Complex Systems (New Mexico, USA). The work has been published in Nature, Science, PNAS, etc., and in the course we will discuss several of their most important papers.
Instructional Modes
2 hrs lecture + 2 hrs practical/discussions/literature reading
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Although the course is designed for 2nd year Science students, other students are welcome to join as well.
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Home-written essay on selected research papers on this topic.
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- Lecture 1: Classical scaling laws (V~R3 and A~R2) and Poiseuille flow
- Lecture 2: Fractal geometry
- Lectures 3+4: Scaling facts in Biology: power laws with exponent ±n/4, not ±n/3; Introduction to the three ground principles for scaling in biological distributive networks: the model of West et al. (Santa Fé institute): applied to the heart and blood circulation, the lungs, tracheae in insects, and vesicles in plants and trees
- Lecture 5: Influence of temperature on the scaling relationships
- Lecture 6: Application of allometry to growth and death
- Lecture 7: Application of allometry to other systems: cities and forests
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