Systems biology is a vigorous and expanding discipline, in many ways a successor to genomics and perhaps unprecedented in its combination of biology with a great many other sciences, from physics to ecology, from mathematics to medicine, and from philosophy to chemistry. Studying the philosophical foundations of systems biology may resolve a longer standing issue, i.e., the extent to which Biology is entitled to its own scientific foundations rather than being dominated by existing philosophies. This book answers the question of what distinguishes the living from the non-living, takes an in-depth look to a vigorous and expanding discipline, from molecule to system and explores the region between individual components and the system.
Contenuti
Proposed Table of Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Philosophical foundations of systems biology 3. Methodology of systems biology 4. The role of theory, models and simulation in systems biology 5. Organization in biological systems 6. Conclusions [^]