Varieties of noise: Analogical reasoning in synthetic biology
Varieties of noise: Analogical reasoning in synthetic biology
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DOI：
10.1016/j.shpsa.2014.05.006
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发表时间：
2014-12-01
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Loettgers, Andrea
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Knuuttila, Tarja;Loettgers, Andrea
合成生物学作为一种工程科学的图景在很大程度上创造了公众对这一新领域的理解，涵盖了它的承诺和风险。在本文中，我们将认为，实际情况更加微妙和复杂。合成生物学是一个高度跨学科的研究领域，位于物理学，化学，生物学和计算科学的界面。所有这些领域都提供了概念、隐喻、数学工具和模型，合成生物学家通常通过在不同的研究领域之间进行类比来利用这些概念、隐喻、数学工具和模型。我们将通过噪声的功能意义的出现来研究合成生物学中的类比推理，这标志着工程概念在这一领域的应用方式发生了重要转变。噪音的概念也突出了合成生物学两个分支之间的差异：面向基础科学的分支和面向工程的分支，这两个分支在与其他研究领域进行类比的方式上有所不同。此外，我们发现，固定源域和目标域之间的映射似乎不是类比推理在实际科学实践中的目标。(C)2014爱思唯尔有限公司版权所有。
The picture of synthetic biology as a kind of engineering science has largely created the public understanding of this novel field, covering both its promises and risks. In this paper, we will argue that the actual situation is more nuanced and complex. Synthetic biology is a highly interdisciplinary field of research located at the interface of physics, chemistry, biology, and computational science. All of these fields provide concepts, metaphors, mathematical tools, and models, which are typically utilized by synthetic biologists by drawing analogies between the different fields of inquiry. We will study analogical reasoning in synthetic biology through the emergence of the functional meaning of noise, which marks an important shift in how engineering concepts are employed in this field. The notion of noise serves also to highlight the differences between the two branches of synthetic biology: the basic science-oriented branch and the engineering-oriented branch, which differ from each other in the way they draw analogies to various other fields of study. Moreover, we show that fixing the mapping between a source domain and the target domain seems not to be the goal of analogical reasoning in actual scientific practice. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.