Math Reveals the Secrets of Cells’ Feedback Circuitry
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Most biologists tend to take very little math (calculus and stats) and dont even realize that control systems are a thing.
We definitely need more of that cross pollination.
Wow, really? That's surprising to me. The hardest course I ever took was one I took for my MSCS in bioinformatics. It seemed very math-heavy, and math-heavy in ways that I couldn't lean on my past experience to "muscle" my way through.
edit: D'oh! I commented before reading the article. Sorry. It does mention Cybernetics.
As the article states, Cybernetics as originally conceived makes no distinctions about the physical (or otherwise) nature of the underlying processes it models, and it was explicitly expected to unify the math of feedback and control in biological as well and mechanical systems.
The fictional "Bionic Man", et. al., was an exploration in the popular imagination of how this might result in e.g. artificial limbs and organs that worked like the real thing and, in the stories at least, even improved on them.
In any event, what this article describes could be called cellular bionics.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Co...
Servomechanisms existed way earlier than 1948, so did analog computers - navy ships in WWII extensively used both in gun control, to move the guns and calculate balistic trajectories, etc. Wiener merely wrote down existing knowledge, and suggested it could also be applied to humans.
> Wiener merely wrote down existing knowledge, and suggested it could also be applied to humans.
A little more than that.
> During World War II, his work on the automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns caused Wiener to investigate information theory independently of Claude Shannon and to invent the Wiener filter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener#During_and_afte...
But you're absolutely right that "original control systems math" is older than cybernetics, well met.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439837171/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
One more thing they may want to add. A way to break down all these neutralized pairs and clear them out. Depending that these molecules look like there may already be something in place to do that, then it's more a matter of ensuring compatibility rather than making a new clearing mechanism.
By analogy, imagine a tower with guy wires only on one side. The tower will remain upright only as long as the “right” magnitude of force comes from the “right” direction to balance the force of the wires. But stability is achieved by balanced opposing forces, such that any reasonably expected deviation (in any direction) is countered and stability is maintained.
On the contrary. It means that you probably won't find anything simpler, but you will certainly find more complex ones as exaptation drags part of the system off in a new direction.
A couple of potential examples: software engineering and animal intelligence.
In software there are loops between the programmer and various levels of the development process, from compilers to test runners all the way to user testing and feedback.
A large function of animal intelligence may be to integrate (in a very broad sense, not mathematically as used in the article) information about the environment in order to regulate the organism's place in it.