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Page 172
2.3.9—
Biological Implications of Sensitivity to Initial Conditions
Suppose that we take a dish of cells out from our incubator on Tuesday, add 10 µl of some drug into the dish, and find that it produces a certain effect in the cells. We are used to thinking that if we take out another dish of cells from our incubator on Wednesday, add 10 µl of the same drug into the dish, that we should see approximately the same effect in the cells.
This type of thinking is based on our experience with linear systems. This behavior is not necessarily true for nonlinear systems. It is not true for chaotic systems.
Chaotic systems have sensitivity to initial conditions. This means that quite similar values for the starting conditions will produce quite different results.
The variability found when experiments on biological systems are repeated has previously been attributed to chance, or to the complexity of these systems, or to uncontrollable factors in the experiment.
However, those may not be the only possible reasons for the observed variability found in experiments on biological systems. Perhaps some biological systems are chaotic, and this variability is a manifestation of their sensitivity to initial conditions.

 
[Cover] [Abbreviated Contents] [Contents] [Index]


Fractals and Chaos Simplified for the Life Sciences
Fractals and Chaos Simplified for the Life Sciences
ISBN: 0195120248
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 261

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