ITT: The most complex subjects in biology

Informational approaches to autopoeisis.

Hard problem is bullshit.

I think you're kinda proving his point if you're arguing that the only hard parts of biology are math-related.

Just like the hardest parts of physics happen to involve math?
KYS retard.

Yes?

You're highly arrogant for an idiot.

Could say that about physics too...

If youre going to model the world accurately, maths is a must, especially with complexity

Let's try to make a rigorous definition for a "hard" subject. A subject that is necessary for the other to exist is harder.

Whats your point?

Math is harder than Physics which is harder than Chemistry which is harder than Biology which is harder than the humanities.

Recombination. You can't do extreme things like hard mutagenesis or knockouts of critical genes because then your model organism is sterile, so you're stuck looking at genes with modest contributions to recombination trying to turn smudges of data into fine lines of inference.

It also doesn't help that the subfield is insular even within molecular biology. All the papers are super dense and assume a high expert level of knowledge in anyone reading them.

Runner up: anything related to histone modifications.

Ya got me there, uni courses make me blend everything together.

That's the problem, there is no rigorous definition of hard. Even your definition ignores the fact that there is a lot of emergent complexity that is hardly reducible to the underlying subject.
Take aging for example, it's a clusterfuck of factors of which we only understand a small part of and that we are still ill-equipped to investigate.

I'm interested, do you have any papers on those subjects for me to take a look at?

gah, sorry, i dont think so. the recombination seminar i took was a long time ago, i dont think i have the papers sitting around anymore.

but if you do a little searching on NCBI you can find lots of material pretty easily im sure

Subjects are not discrete puddles. Science is one big puddle and people set up ship in different parts of the puddle but there are no boundaries and the water freely flows.

No, all of physics is said through math you moron.

Change physics and math and we are all set.

So our parts of biology..

Biology = 4 fags

>complex
>biology

pick one and only one

>Physicists and chemists get nice temperature controlled laboratories where they can sit their dainty asses down and control for every variable
>Biologists have to work outside in extreme heat, humidity, cold, insect swarms, altitude changes, and near plants and animals that can injure and kill you

Seems like all other scientists are just a bunch of pussies to me. Biology is a real man's science.

i'm a chemist but a girl, is that fine?

Perfectly fine ma'am.

Autism

This is ironic

A complete theory that explains all biological phenomenon, from viruses, the existence of male and female, sex, camouflage, pheromones, DNA, Pavlovian training, territory marking, all sensory organs, neuroscience, and so on. Basically every living organism and their behavior must be explained by a set of principles in the same way Newton three laws of motion tries to explain the motion of planets, particles, and cars.
Human beings are biological organism so the theory must include the activity of human beings too, such as the use of currency, philosophy, mathematics, science, and engineering, "consciousness," neurons, and so on.
All of these phenomenon exists in the same physical reality, and thus they are, at the fundamental level, govern by a single set of principles that are used in combination to produce the phenomena we see.

The free energy principle to start.

Reproduction is second. Funny thing is that people apply reproduction to only living organisms but they can't see that the cars on the streets, the computers, our cell phones, also reproduce. Quite frankly anything that displays adaptive, intelligent behavior, will be a product of reproduction. Albeit not by themselves but requiring a whole production facility. We human beings also don't reproduce by ourselves, we require a male and female. An individual worker ant does not reproduce, the colony does, and so on.
I find it retarded that all these different theories of intelligence does not include the phenomena of camouflage and evolution. It's fucking retarded since the human brain itself is a result of biology.

I think all life is self regulation and reproduction is that on longer time scales; just another mechanism to be optimised as with the rest of your metabolism, but macroscopically; species populations being their own large macro-organisms (or atleast system) with these self-regulatory ptrinciples. Maybe it isnt individual organisms that abide to these principles but biological systems and even in our own bodies we see how systems are nested within eachother.

Yeah I know. Out of a billion and billion of events, the events that yields reproduction will continue on. In a random universe, reproduction is guaranteed to occur. But I'm going deeper than that. I'm saying that we all live in the same universe and subjected to the same laws of physics. The decay of time, random destruction, fundamental forces, all applies to everything we do. As a result everything that displays increasing complexity, whether it is an airplane, a tank, computers, smartphone, bridges, immune system, and so on, will also display reproduction.
What's retarded is that people who claim to seek the understanding of intelligence ignore all the phenomena displayed by living organisms. They ignore the act of camouflage, the act of sex, why there are male and female, and so on even though these phenomenon are repeatedly seen everywhere. Instead they focus on the human brain and human beings. It is arrogance and this arrogance caused blindness.

There are particularly complex systems (pun not intended) in genetics, specifically in transcription regulation.

Those mechanical things cannot be said to be reproducibg systems though

Depends what you mean by intelligence

I thincck biology is only a bunck of others sciences, like maths or chemistry, and a bit of effort to memorize and understand the biologic processes.
So, i think the hardest part is to understand toshe parts

>protein folding

go ahead I'll wait

True

Which can be argued that mostly not as hard as most maths
It's mostly emprical after all, the hard math problems are already solved by mathematicians

I don't know much about the highest levels of biology so I probably sound like an idiot, but you don't actually try to solve math problems right? You basically apply already established math methods

Yeah, same as physics though. Anything involving math will need skill. Guess you still have to use mathematical methods creatively to create models or theories though.

No, I argued mathematics AND complexity, you overlooked the complexity part. The others were absolutely right that your comment would have to apply to physics, and I would say, to virtually every aspect of science. But I would add for the part you overlooked, complexity, that this comes in with the new discoveries that flow through each day, and learning to assemble them like a big jigsaw puzzle. I do not agree that my original comment proved the point of the user in question, or any point to the contrary.

False

Why

How would a plain mathematician with no affiliation to biology, understand how to apply such findings to precise mathematical models? It is obvious, that a high degree of competence in both fields is necessary to understand how they intermingle and, to understand the structure of relations existing between both forms of data.

I'm not that guy but from my experience the bioinformaticians and mathematicians that are tackling the most difficult questions of genetics don't need to know that much about biology. They just need to know the basics of gene and chromosome organization, and the types of processes that can change DNA. It's not nothing, but it's way easier for a mathematician to learn the biology he needs to learn to solve these problems than it is for a biologist to learn all the advanced math he would need to solve the same problems.

I was gonna suggest that but dont know too much. Just know that u get people who didnt do any bio undergrad coming in working on bio problems with math.

Looks a bit like the eve online map.

Why are there retards in this thread claiming the hardest thing about biology is the math? I'm not even talking about the >biology >hard science baiters, but it's not even close to the truth.

Try reading some advanced genetics and mol. bio papers and then see if you think the same. There's a reason that some of the top scientists and scientific innovators in the world are molecular biologists rather than bioinformaticians or mathematicians working on biology.

This may have been true, in most cases, for the preceding centuries, but concerning the new millennium, this is overly simple thinking. The premise of what you are saying is that mathematics is more difficult to learn than biology, an opinion without any sound basis. The further away you get, from biology 101, the less black and white and more sophisticated things will become.

True.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that, for the types of problems we're talking about, the mathematical component is simply more advanced and complex than the biological component. I'm not making any statements about the merit of either field in its entirety. Also, I am a graduate student in genetics, not an undergrad as you seem to be assuming, and I'm speaking from my experience collaborating with bio-statisticians and mathematicians.

[spoiler]what a lovely but dying game[/spoiler]

I don't think so. That might have been true 20 years ago but now we have enough good tools to make this just a computational problem.
There are still some tangential problems, but i wouldn't call those the most complex in biology.