Alex, Dan and John Wilkins have wise things to say about metaphors in biology, Big Biology and a recent article by Sir Paul Nurse.
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A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice…
So Sir Paul Nurse gave a talk today where he discussed the 5 big ideas in the Life Sciences.
Instead of going through the talk, I'll just say that he ended it with his 5th big idea - biological organization. It reminds me of discussions I've had with colleagues on cell polarity. And in someways it'…
Sorry, I've been busy these past few days.
I want to respond to a comment posted by Dan and take this opportunity to broaden the discussion about how we use language to construct models.
Dan's concerns about information and life have been echoed by many out there, for example by John Wilkins. Can…
Oh, that's right -- that's what philosophers are good for. They're really good at questioning models. John Wilkins has been busily dismantling the cheap and easy metaphors we use to describe molecular biological concepts in a series of posts, taking on genes as language, other popular gene myths…