Today we had lunch with Dr. John Wikswo from the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education. After lunch he gave a seminar with the title: “Can we comprehend the full complexity of our own biology?”. Who would miss a talk with such an appealing title!!
The talk was brilliant. Definitely one of the top 10 talks I have ever witnessed live. It was full of uber interesting technical aspects such as the fact that a mathematical model of a complex biological system might require Avogadro’s number of differential equations (apparently this is called a Leibnitz). How can we tackle such a problem? Dr. Wikswo, his team and collaborators are trying to use robot scientists and genetic algorithms to try to find the right equations that fit the data. He also talked about the concept of having biological invariants, just like in physics, which blew my mind away. Again lots of fascinating concepts and technicalities that I might talk about in future posts.
The most interesting thing for me, however, was the philosophical question that he enounced in the title. He separates the problem of understanding biology into two problems: an ontological one and an epistemological one. The ontological problem might be solved by all the interesting technicalities mentioned above. It’s a matter of getting enough data so that we get a picture of what ‘is’ (the ontological meaning of ‘is’).
The epistemological problem however is the one that worries Dr. Wikswo. And I have to say I don’t share his worry. I would argue that depending on how we define ‘understanding’ we don’t need to worry about it. Other scientific areas such as quantum mechanics and astronomy deal all the time with concepts that epistemologists might consider beyond our ‘understanding’. Do we really know/understand what entangled states are? Do we know/understand what’s the size of the universe? I think these are the same type of epistemological problems and yet we are able to use our knowledge about them and thus one might argue that we do understand them.
Anyway, I am no philosopher and I am nowhere near the level of understanding of Dr. Wikswo so I should stop writing before I embarrass myself talking too much about what I don’t know. But wait… how do I know I don’t know what I don’t know? Good question.
