Prospect and Limits of Explaining Biological Systems in Engineering Terms

Abstract

Systems biology represents an effort to develop new modelling approaches in molecular and cell biology, drawing inspiration from disciplines like physics, computer sciences and engineering. In particular, many scientists have called for a transfer of methods, models and concepts from engineering in order to analyze and explain biological systems in all their complexity. In this paper, I examine how such transfer can contribute to systems biology explanatory project. Model building in the context of post-genomic biology raises a number of difficult challenges, mainly due to the complexity of the processes studied and their intricate dynamical features. Engineering methods can be used to efficiently analyze quantitative data about systems behaviour and use them to build mathematical dynamical models, in a way that goes beyond classical mechanistic approaches. More generally, engineering has suggested adopting a modular framework, as a general approach of decomposition and explanation based on analogies between biological and engineered systems, which promises to identify intelligible principles in the complex organization of molecular networks. I discuss the nature of this explanatory framework and on what assumptions it rests.