posted 2010-11-22T16:27:00Z (apropos 2010-11-18).
Goldenfeld and Woese discuss how we should think about biology.
"...The point of this lengthy discourse should now be clear. It is as limiting to view life as chemistry as it is to view condensed matter collective states as being primarily about the atoms. The physics of living systems would have at its core a generalized description of evolutionary processes, reflecting allowable dynamical symmetries, not merely static configurational ones. Such a description would, in a very crude sense, be a counterpart to the description of emergent states of matter embodied by effective theories such as the Ginzburg-Landau theory alluded to above. A genuine physics of living systems would encompass different limits of the evolutionary process, each recognized as, and described by different effective theories..."
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