The complex adaptative systems approach to biology

Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is to describe the applications of concepts and methods derived from statistical physics of disordered systems and nonlinear dynamics to certain issues in Theoretical biology. In those applications, the central issue is to study functional organization of a multicomponent system based on a simplified description of the components. The first section gives a few examples of complex systems taken from physics and biology. We then describe three formalisms commonly used in theoretical biology. The central concepts of this approach, the attractors is introduced in the section on networks. Rather than emergence, we further discuss generic organizational properties of networks and give some examples which characterize the difference between organized and chaotic dynamical regimes. Before concluding, we discuss two implementations of memory in models of the brain and of the immune system.© 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.