数学如何重构生物学——基因组学视角

How Mathematics Reconstructs Biology:By Genomics

数学与关于生命的思索,两者相互锚定,具有深度的耦合性:数学是理性生命追问自己存在的重要方式。但历史上两者发生了形式上的疏离。20世纪“哥德尔革命”终结了数学对统一公理体系绝对确定性的追求,也深刻地重构了生物学。20世纪90年代兴起的基因组学体现了生物学与新的“元数学”的相容。基因组学由关于“相互作用”的“组学”思维、多元化离散性数学实体、“共享抽象”方法塑造,超越了传统生物学对特殊物质成分的依托、关于生命本源假设之结构、关于物种关系的类比思维。这令数学与“生命”的耦合重新显式化,即以非线性、递归、反馈投射等为旨趣的复杂性思想转向。

Mathematics and the contemplation of life are mutually anchored and deeply coupled:mathematics is an important method for rational life beings to question their own existence.But in history,there has been a formal estrangement between the two.The"Godelian Revolution"of the 2oth century ended mathematics'pursuit of absolute certainty in a unified axiomatic system and profoundly reconstructed biology.The rise of genomics in the 1990s demonstrated the compatibility of biology with the new"metamathematics".Genomics is shaped by the omics thinking about"interactions",pluralistic and discrete mathematical entities,and"shared abstraction"approach,surpassing reliance on special material components,the structure of traditional biology's hypothesis about the origin of life,and analogical thinking about species relationships.This makes the coupling between mathematics and"life"re-explicit,that is,a shift towards complexity thinking with a focus on nonlinearity,recursion,feedback projection,and more.