ABSTRACT
At macroscopic scales, the processes of life appear highly deterministic. At molecular scales, however, biological processes are highly stochastic, due both to the cellular environment and the nature of information flows in biological networks. The effects of these stochastic variations or noise are neglected in deterministic chemical rate equations (and their corresponding differential equation models) and this is reasonable, because in most cases such effects disappear when they are averaged over large numbers of molecules and chemical reactions.
