ABSTRACT
References ........................................................................................................................................24
Systems Biology
is a well-established area of human activity that can be traced back at least to the writings of
Aristotle
around 350 B.C. [1]. The term “system” signifies here an entity that represents wholeness, which can be superficially divided (fractioned) into components (parts) but whose pivotal properties cannot be fully explained solely from the knowledge of the parts. The paradigms of life sciences were changing with time but the core fundamental concepts of systems biology are apparently resistant to these changes and remain pretty much the same today as they were in the time of Aristotle. That is particularly true of the holistic Aristotelian notion of the system as a
functionally robust but otherwise complex whole. It also remains true of other basic methods and concepts of life sciences (such as, for instance, embryogenesis) described in Aristotle’s work [1].*
I should mention here that because of
semantic
and
pragmatic
ambiguity of the popular credo of scientific holism [3,4], “system is more than a sum of its parts,” one can distinguish several coexisting paradigms of systems biology that generate different shades of meanings of words “system,” “more,” “sum,” and “parts.” In contrast to physics-related research programs, there does not need to be a “winning paradigm” in biology. Several different schools of thoughts, methodologies, and belief systems can easily coexist in
life sciences
and it is reportedly a rare event that one well-formulated paradigm would prevail (i.e., “win”) over the others [4].
