From bottom-up approaches to levels of organization and extended critical transitions.

Giuseppe Longo (1, 2, 3, 4) , Maël Montévil (5, 6, 2) , Arnaud Pocheville (6, 7)

1 CREA - Centre de recherche en épistémologie appliquée
2 CIRPHLES - Centre international de recherche Philosophie, Lettres, Savoirs
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
4 ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris
5 Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology Tufts University School of Medicine
6 FdV - Ecole Doctorale Frontières du Vivant - Programme Bettencourt
7 Laboratoire Ecologie et évolution

Biological thinking is structured by the notion of level of organization. We will show that this notion acquires a precise meaning in critical phenomena: they disrupt, by the appearance of infinite quantities, the mathematical (possibly equational) determination at a given level, when moving at an "higher" one. As a result, their analysis cannot be called genuinely bottom-up, even though it remains upward in a restricted sense. At the same time, criticality and related phenomena are very common in biology. Because of this, we claim that bottom-up approaches are not sufficient, in principle, to capture biological phenomena. In the second part of this paper, following (Bailly, 1991b), we discuss a strong criterium of level transition. The core idea of the criterium is to start from the breaking of the symmetries and determination at a "first" level in order to "move" at the others. If biological phenomena have multiple, sustained levels of organization in this sense, then they should be interpreted as extended critical transitions.

Mots clés: Theoritical biology

Domaines: Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences; Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]; Autre [q-bio.OT]; Biophysique [physics.bio-ph]

Giuseppe Longo, Maël Montévil, Arnaud Pocheville. From bottom-up approaches to levels of organization and extended critical transitions.. Frontiers in Physiology, 2012, 3, pp.232. ⟨10.3389/fphys.2012.00232⟩. ⟨hal-01192909⟩