Lost me at "The main theme of biology in twentieth-century is an attempt to reduce biological
phenomena to the behavior of molecules". Maybe the theme of biophysics in the 80s-2000s, but certainly not all of biology. Evolution? The central dogma? The cell + DNA+ evolution is what I'd put as the main themes. At least toward the end of century in biophysics the ideas of emergence and hierarchy can be found in any biology or biophysics textbook.
Having done it myself, I really hate the apparently irresistible pull to set up a straw man of your field in the abstract/intro then saying your minor results resolve it. I guess it's part of science now, but I wish it could at least be confined to job talks(1).
Continuing "We argue here that "hierarchy" is a critical level of biological organization". Welcome to the club. Again, any biology/biophysics textbook worth its salt from the 90s on (conservatively) would include probably by page 50 a picture/discussion of the multiple scales involved and probably even mention hierarchical organization explicitly.
It's just hard to take seriously. What is he actually trying to prove/show? Searching Google scholar Im prematurely concluding he applied existing clustering methods (clustering was very sexy in statistical physics right around 2010) and found some modularity across scales. You couldn't throw a rock 10 feet in a physics/biophysics department around that time without finding someone doing some clustering study to show some modular/hierarchical structure in some biological or otherwise "complex" system (trade networks in his case).
Bah I think I'm just in a bad mood lol don't mind me.
Edit- I just noticed he threw in spontaneous. I don't understand what that adds to the description besides making it sound more complicated.
(1) Which reminds me of one job talk I sat in (physics department) where the speaker tried to pass off levinthal's "paradox" of protein folding as unresolved until he graced the field with his brilliance. Maybe he thought no one in the department knew anything about proteins? I was almost impressed by the boldness.
Having done it myself, I really hate the apparently irresistible pull to set up a straw man of your field in the abstract/intro then saying your minor results resolve it. I guess it's part of science now, but I wish it could at least be confined to job talks(1).
Continuing "We argue here that "hierarchy" is a critical level of biological organization". Welcome to the club. Again, any biology/biophysics textbook worth its salt from the 90s on (conservatively) would include probably by page 50 a picture/discussion of the multiple scales involved and probably even mention hierarchical organization explicitly.
It's just hard to take seriously. What is he actually trying to prove/show? Searching Google scholar Im prematurely concluding he applied existing clustering methods (clustering was very sexy in statistical physics right around 2010) and found some modularity across scales. You couldn't throw a rock 10 feet in a physics/biophysics department around that time without finding someone doing some clustering study to show some modular/hierarchical structure in some biological or otherwise "complex" system (trade networks in his case).
Bah I think I'm just in a bad mood lol don't mind me.
Edit- I just noticed he threw in spontaneous. I don't understand what that adds to the description besides making it sound more complicated.
(1) Which reminds me of one job talk I sat in (physics department) where the speaker tried to pass off levinthal's "paradox" of protein folding as unresolved until he graced the field with his brilliance. Maybe he thought no one in the department knew anything about proteins? I was almost impressed by the boldness.