title: Can biological complexity be reverse engineered?
abstract: Concerns with the use of engineering approaches in biology have recently been raised. I examine two related challenges to biological research that I call the synchronic and diachronic underdetermination problem. The former refers to challenges associated with the inference of design principles underlying system capacities when the synchronic relations between lower-level processes and higher-level systems capacities are degenerate (many-to-many). The diachronic underdetermination problem regards the problem of reverse engineering a system where the non-linear relations between system capacities and lower-level mechanisms are changing over time. Braun and Marom argue that recent insights to biological complexity leave the aim of reverse engineering hopeless - in principle as well as in practice. While I support their call for systemic approaches to capture the dynamic nature of living systems, I take issue with the conflation of reverse engineering with naïve reductionism. I clarify how the notion of design principles can be more broadly conceived and argue that reverse engineering is compatible with a dynamic view of organisms. It may even help to facilitate an integrated account that bridges the gap between mechanistic and systems approaches.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Science Studies, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, Denmark. Electronic address: saraehrenreichgreen@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Green
mesh_terms: D057005:Bioengineering; D008954:Models, Biological; D049490:Systems Biology
keywords: Design principles; Diachronic underdetermination; Dynamical systems theory; Engineering approaches; Reverse engineering; Systems biology