[fao_]

> if we assumed order first, I suspect we'd look harder for it and find it faster than assuming chaos so early every time.

But that's exactly what the field of biology (and every other science) has been trying to do for 2000 years. We keep coming up with flawed analogies for systems that are inherently chaotic. Chaos can follow from simple rules, which is the entire basis for Chaos Theory.

That doesn't mean that there aren't rules, it means that the amount of predictions we can make about the system are limited and that the system may arbitrarily behave 'erratically' or non-deterministically, which biological systems often do! (i.e. the scales that biologists and microbiologists are primarily looking at).

The fact that there is a resulting, large-scale purpose emerging from it is an 'accident' of nature, in as much as that behaviour is not intentional, it is not created with a will or intent for those specific effects, but pure causality and the evolutionary fact that systems without those characteristics either could not propagate in the environment, or could not support other systems like itself to propagate.

[tsimionescu]

Isn't the required theory more like the opposite of Chaos Theory? That is, biological organisms are extremely well ordered when looked at from a high level, with extremely rare occurrences of chaos. From the moment an egg is fertilized, you can predict with excellent accuracy what that organism will look like months or years later, give or take a few details.

To beleive there is chaos at some level of this extremely predictable system, you would have to have a system that starts with simple rules (chemistry), evolves chaotically, but has extreme order emerge from that mathematical chaos.

[fao_]

The fundamental point here is that the scale that you're looking at on a cellular level is highly chaotic. The poster above was stating that you should look for order, but as I mentioned that's exactly what we've been doing for thousands of years! We already look at cells, and expect order. It's a totally different viewpoint to expect chaos, and what TFA states is that it's a better and more accurate view when dealing with cellular microbiology.

[Socketier]

Would you agree that the systems at those scales are remarkably well architected to function in such conditions?

Flawed analogies are the result of improper understanding and the need for explanatory tools and models, but that's always going to happen as facts are revealed over time.

The answer isn't just to assume they're chaotic systems, but instead to accept that we don't fully understand all the systems and forces in play and keep searching for truth.