The Strange Mathematics of Cell Biology

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From the Quanta Magazine article titled "The Math That Tells Cells What They Are" (dated March 2019):

"Biologists haven’t traditionally cast analyses of living systems as optimization problems because the complexity of those systems makes them hard to quantify, and because it can be difficult to discern what would be getting optimized. Moreover, while evolutionary theory suggests that evolving systems can improve over time, nothing guarantees that they should be driven to an optimal level."

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