I've been hunting through theoretical mathematics books, websites, etc looking for even bizarro math conecepts that might somehow apply to the biological complexity issue. Rule 110 sounded intrigueing as Wolfram claimed that it is Universal and may be one of the rules that nature uses as a building block algorithm. So Wolfram publishes a book a few years back and it seems some people give him a thorough bitch-slapping for ripping off decades old concepts and adding a few twists and refinements to them (See the Amazon book reviews if interested). While that may be true (I really don't care), the ideas rule 110 are quite ingenius and amazing to think about.

The most controversial thesis in Wolfram's book is likely to be his treatment of physics, in which he postulates that the Universe is a big cellular-automaton computer.

This may be in fact true, that all rules of sub-atomic particles or string particles are following some very basic rules that lead to all of the emergence and patterns we see in the universe and throughout nature. Turing was very intersted in Fibonacci phyllotaxis. I remember reading that his notebooks were filled with Fibonacci sequences but I think he ran out of time before making significant breakthroughs in this area. If anyone would have, he had the mind for it. My brain hurts thinking these for the past two days. Has anyone else explored this as it applies to biology? It would be great if we could find some rules that work at the atomic level like this. Simulations would be much easier I would think. Kurzweil gave this a pretty good treatment. See last link. Enough rambling...

Rule 110 @ Wiki

Cellular Automata @ Wiki

Kurzweil & Wolfram & Rule 110?

Like permutation city?

I would just like to add that this wolfram has nothing to do with me.

The attached paper discusses cellular automata as being a good modeling technique at the cellular level where there are large populations of like cells. E.g. tissues, bacterias, tumors, etc. After reading this and a few other papers it isn't clear to me that CA provides much beyond that unless you have many CA rules running in parallel where they are intertwining and producing cross-CA emergent properties, mechanical structures and function we see at the subcellular level. This essentially puts you back at modeling biology at the molecular with computational chemistry and molecular dynamics which can then lead to CA like behavior once all of the forces are properly accounted for. Conclusion: CA isn't a silver bullet.

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