A while ago, Charles Auffray stumbled upon my blog and sent me his papers about Integrative Systems Biology.
In these two companion papers (1 and 2), Charles Auffray and Laurent Nottale provide an overview and a brief history of the multiple roots, current developments and recent advances of integrative systems biology and identify multiscale integration as its grand challenge. Then they introduce the fundamental principles and the successive steps that have been followed in the construction of the scale relativity theory, which aims at describing the effects of a non-differentiable and fractal (i.e., explicitly scale dependent) geometry of space–time. The first paper of this series is devoted, in this new framework, to the construction from first principles of scale laws of increasing complexity, and to the discussion of some tentative applications of these laws to biological systems. In the second review and perspective paper, they describe the effects induced by the internal fractal structures of trajectories on motion in standard space. Their main consequence is the transformation of classical dynamics into a generalized, quantum-like self-organized dynamics. A Schrödinger-type equation is derived as an integral of the geodesic equation in a fractal space. They then indicate how gauge fields can be constructed from a geometric re-interpretation of gauge transformations as scale transformations in fractal space–time. Finally, they introduce a new tentative development of the theory, in which quantum laws would hold also in scale space, introducing complexergy as a measure of organizational complexity. Initial possible applications of this extended framework to the processes of morphogenesis and the emergence of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cellular structures are discussed. Having founded elements of the evolutionary, developmental, biochemical and cellular theories on the first principles of scale relativity theory, they introduce proposals for the construction of an integrative theory of life and for the design and implementation of novel macroscopic quantum-type experiments and devices, and discuss their potential applications for the analysis, engineering and management of physical and biological systems and properties, and the consequences for the organization of transdisciplinary research and the scientific curriculum in the context of the SYSTEMOSCOPE Consortium research and development agenda.
A very interesting use of the Scale Relativity tools in the field of Biology, indeed. And sorry for the late publishing, Charles.
