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Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics

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  Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-10-26 13:55 -0500
    Re: Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2015-10-26 19:14 +0000
    Re: Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics gilber34 <fafa@invalid.com> - 2015-10-26 16:46 -0500

#528278 — Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics

Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics
> http://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/101


> Do simple laws govern the dynamics of complex ecosystems? Are these
> dynamics predictable? These are hard questions to address because of
> the intrinsic complexity of ecosystems and the lack of data
> available. In a new study, Stanislas Leibler from the Rockefeller
> University, New York, and colleagues [1] take on this problem by
> tracking the population dynamics of a closed ecosystem of three
> microbial species at an unprecedented level of detail. Using a novel
> method of automated counting of single cells, which tracks the
> abundances of the species as frequently as every 400 seconds for 90
> days, the authors find that the intrinsic dynamics of the
> three-species ecosystem are strongly deterministic, that is, the
> system’s evolution is highly reproducible under controlled external
> conditions. Despite the high level of determinism, the observed
> abundances of the species don’t have a simple dependence on position
> and time and, to current knowledge, are unpredictable. This means
> that although the dynamics of the system is not left to chance, we
> don’t know how to model its future states.
>
> To fully appreciate the importance of these findings, we need to put
> them in context. Life has different levels of organization, from
> molecules, cells, and organisms, all the way to collectives like
> populations, communities, and ecosystems. The higher the
> organizational level of a biological system, the more complex the
> behavior of the system’s members is and the more difficult it is to
> find general principles that predict their dynamics. Over the past
> decade, quantitative biology has made enormous progress in mapping
> the dynamics of biological systems at ever-higher levels of temporal
> and spatial resolution. But this progress has mostly occurred at the
> lowest levels of organization; for example, it has allowed the
> precise quantification and modeling of molecular dynamics inside
> cells. However, ecology, the branch of biology that deals with the
> dynamics of groups of organisms, has remained fairly observational.
> This is because quantitative data of real ecosystems is hard to
> obtain and because there are few well-established model systems that
> can be replicated to distinguish deterministic factors (leading to
> reproducible dynamics and structures) from chance events within
> populations. As a consequence, there are plenty of conceptual models
> in ecology but very few with general predictive power [2].


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#528295

Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> wrote:
> Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics

Oh goody; arm waving about biology to the physics group...

Have you ever wondered what your life might have been like if you had
the competence to do more than just copy the words of others, spamming
piece of shit?


-- 
Jim Pennino

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#528357

On 10/26/2015 1:55 PM, Sam Wormley wrote:
> Viewpoint: Microbial Ecosystem Follows Deterministic Dynamics
>> http://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/101


>  This means
>> that although the dynamics of the system is not left to chance, we
>> don’t know how to model its future states.


obvious. the classic demo in elementary chaos theory

take any system with 5 dimentions (or variables) or more, and......  you 
can't predict that stuff either.

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