Data / Hora
Date(s) - 31/03/2022
17:00 - 18:00
Categorias
| COLÓQUIO DO DEPARTAMENTO DE FÍSICA | Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (MD) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After completing his residency in Emergency Medicine, he moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, genetic regulatory networks, and origin of life, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago 1969-1973, National Cancer Institute 1973-1975, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he served as Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987–1992. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He also holds an Honorary Degree in Science from the University of Louvain; and was awarded a Gold Medal of the Accademia Lincea in Rome.
Kauffman is among the founders of “Complexity Theory”. With M. Ballivet, in1985, he filed and held the founding patents on high diversity molecular libraries, now a world- wide industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Recently, Kauffman and Andrea Roli have published “The World Is Not A Theorem”, in Entropy (2021), maintaining that the evolving biosphere is a propagating construction, not an entailed deduction, and that no mathematics based on set theory can be used to deduce the diachronic emergence of adaptations in evolution. The implication is that there can be no Final Theory that entails the becoming of the universe. With Leroy Hood, Sui Huang, Ingemar Ernberg, Lars Larsson, Anders Harfstrand, Sonia Lain, Erik Moberg, and Soren Gyll, he has founded P4Bios, 2021, with hopes to create antivirals for Covid–19, other viruses and pathogens, and new approaches to cancer therapy and regenerative medicine.
|
The third transition in science31 de março – 17h |
|
| Conectem no “zoom” com o seguinte link para assistir o seminário: https://puc-rio.zoom.us/j/96015223853?pwd=UDBGMGxuWmRqWkMwUnVSckxMbDVXdz09Meeting ID: 960 1522 3853 Passcode: 979585 |
|
| Abstract: Since Newton, all classical and quantum physics depends upon the ”Newtonian Paradigm”. Here the relevant variables of the system are identified. For example, we identify the position and momentum of classical particles. Laws of motion in differential form connecting the variables are formulated. An example is Newton’s three Laws of Motion and Law of Gravitation. The boundary conditions creating the phase space of all possible values of the variables are defined. Then, given any initial condition, the differential equations of motion are integrated to yield an entailed trajectory in the pre-stated phase space. It is fundamental to the Newtonian Paradigm that the set of possibilities that constitute the phase space is always definable and fixed ahead of time.
All of this fails for the diachronic evolution of ever new adaptations in our, or any biosphere. The central reason is that living cells achieve Constraint Closure and construct themselves. With this, living cells, evolving via heritable variation and Natural selection, adaptively construct new in the universe possibilities. The new possibilities are opportunities for new adaptations thereafter seized by heritable variation and Natural Selection. Surprisingly, we can neither define nor deduce the evolving phase spaces ahead of time. The reason we cannot deduce the ever evolving phase spaces of life is that we can use no mathematics based on Set Theory to do so. We can neither write nor solve differential equations for the diachronic evolution of ever new adaptations in a biosphere. These ever-new adaptations with ever-new relevant variables constitute the ever-changing phase space of evolving biospheres. Because of this, evolving biospheres are entirely outside the Newtonian Paradigm. One consequence is that for any universe such as ours with one or more evolving biospheres, there can be no Final Theory that entails all that comes to exist. The implications are large. We face a third major transition in science beyond the Pythagorean dream that “All is Number”, a view echoed by Newtonian physics. We must give up deducing the diachronic evolution of the biosphere. All of physics, classical and quantum, however, apply to the analysis of existing life, a synchronic analysis. But there is much more. We begin to better understand the emergent creativity of an evolving biosphere. |