Serendip's Biology Forum

Does randomness exist in Nature? Or is it only a tool to examine and interpret nature, like geometry with its points and lines that do not exist as such in nature. Or random numbers of mathematics which in computer models are represented by pseudo random numbers.

The concept of randomness is an essential ingredient of the exact sciences. Remove randomness from physics and you land in Aristotle’s world. On the other hand Life and randomness seems to me an oxymoron. Please note, that I am talking about Life and not Biology, which like physics cannot exist without randomness. Think of evolution, or randomly mutated genes that drive cancer. Yet Biology is a way to interpret nature and many of its statements are flawed since involving randomness.

Randomness is bad for your health and may even kill you. Medicine is driven by statistical models based on randomness which I call machine statistics. Like the central limit theorem which is not applicable to life phenomena. Yes, you may apply it to analyze disease, provide that you transform your observations accordingly. Unfortunately the human organism may not be transformed in the same way as dead matter. Nevertheless medicine applies such transformation in clinical trials when testing newly developed drugs, and there randomness is really dangerous for you.

So why is Biology so addicted to Randomness? Because it hides its ignorance. Life is complex and Biology attempts to simplify it. Whenever it fails it is rescued by randomness. Every statistical model applied by biology has a rescuing component, called random error (noise). It accounts for the discrepancy between model prediction an real life.

More on this painful topic, in my site