Biology as Information Dynamics - John Baez 

Please upvote Chuang's message so that it appear at the top of the comments and no one else get confused

@@withanametocome I did that!

I don't know if he's right so I'll just see where the chips lay

The real question is, how do you know this stuff?

No the real question is why do you know this?

The editorial "we," man!

in information theory one uses logarithm base 2. Generally log_b(b)=1. If you want to benefit from lectures like this, then do your precalculus, calculus (real and complex, of course), fourier analysis and fucntional analysis, maybe process control. Do some of these, and then think about limitations of applicability, which will bring you to computation theory and finitistic mathematics. You are probably a young person, so you have all the time to do it. Don't get put off. The ideas, that I mentioned didn't come to people in a fortnight. The great, which discovered them (seldom as mere individuals; almost always in social context) were themselves walking in the mist. Some of them did admit it.

Slawomir P Wojcik Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. I have noted down all the concepts you mentioned, and will keep track of learning them individually as I go through my classes. I’ve got a long way to go since my fascination with mathematics grows each time I learn a new concept. Thank you again.

@@syremusic_ Hi, I've got to apologise: logarithm base b of b is one (log_b(b)=1 because b^1=b - that is b to the power of one equals b - that's and logarithm is an inverse function of an exponential. Sorry. Stefan Banach once said that mathematics is about seeing parallels and good mathematics is about seeing parallels between parallels (or something very similar). It means, that you should never take the subjects separately. There is a whole new subject of mathematics called Category Theory, which deals with the structures common to all mathematics (a rather esoteric book on it is Emily Riehl's Category Theory in Context)

@rwalser Depending what you mean by "understand". Maybe, just maybe, there is some way forward in "understanding" this lecture and correspondence between complex and p-adic analysis is vital to understanding of the developments? After all, the lecturer only points out to some toy models, while attention of a good (better?) part of scientific community is on evolution of complex systems and mentioned above are, to my knowledge, best tools we have.

answering before watching: nothing, amirite?

Yes

Don't tell, don't ask policy here. If you want to know, (and you do, because much more sophisticated versions of them are applied in, say, virology) then there is no other way, but to learn solving differential equations. Newton and Leibniz might be the first who wrote differential equations formally. It is very easy to write a differential equation (especially a homogenous, liner first order equation). It is a much harder business to solve one. On the other hand, you might be confinig yourself to watching a slightly upgraded version of cat videos. As for the one at hand you were given a suggestion, that (the space of solutions of) the equation can be moved to a Riemanian manifold, treated as a many sheet surface, which in itself opens a huge richess of possibilities. This is something for hard working people. Again, when applied to the video lecture, a perturbation, which gives the lizards higher premium for aggression (environment rich in food and warm enough to give them premium over theromstasis keeping creatures) might result in the blue ones evolving into dinosaurs again. Interestingly, the reverse is, due to difficulty of limiting ones size, nay to impossible. Latest changes in our political system can be modeled as a direct result in such perturbation of replicator equation. So, yes, for a man with a manifold everything is a dynamical system. This is a best tool set we have, so, probably worth knowing.

Regardless of whatever he is talking about in this video, John Baez indeed qualifies as a mathematician. By "mathematician", I mean any reasonable definition of "mathematician" that a professional research-active mathematician would agree with. For example, he proves theorems in his non-expository papers, most of which are published in quality, peer reviewed mathematics journals, and many of these are highly cited. (Source: I'm a professional mathematician with access to MathSciNet, the AMS citation database.)

@@philly1729 So.. yep, he is a professional mathematician like you: he comes from an ivory tower. But thanks to you for not publishing a video about biology, for not sharing wrong ideas about life and, last but not least, for not twitting that "computing Kan extensions is something that's actually very practical for migrating databases" (and many other similar, silly things). Also Trump qualifies as President for the number of American voters and he is highly cited by the media, but is not someone I would appreciate as a politician, regardless of whatever they are saying about him. Take care

Can you indicate what's the main issue with what he is saying? Is it that replicator equation is not representative in biology or what exactly wrong with his statements?