Why complexity in biology is different from how we traditionally think about physics.
Best description I've seen:
It is often said that biological systems, such as cells, are ‘complex systems’. A popular notion of complex systems is of very large numbers of simple and identical elements interacting to produce ‘complex’ behaviours. The reality of biological systems is somewhat different. Here large numbers of functionally diverse, and frequently multifunctional, sets of elements interact selectively and nonlinearly to produce coherent rather than complex behaviours.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12432404/
@8599d6ab I've always thought of biological systems as "messy" rather than complex. Messy in the sense that there are so many things going on and we don't have a handle on them, how they behave and how they interact. But I'm a physicist.
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