The Illusion of the Causality of Life

Event language is Chinese, no translation.

---

Modern life sciences, based on reductionism, hold that all life activities follow strict physical and chemical laws and adhere to definite cause-and-effect relationships. However, as scientific research has advanced, particularly with the implementation of the "Human Genome Project" at the turn of the century, researchers have observed that life exhibits complex behaviors that deviate from simple causality.

Firstly, life can be seen as an "internet" where not only do various genes, proteins, and metabolic molecules interact to form networks, but complex interaction networks also emerge at different levels, such as between molecules, cells, and tissues. The existence of this "internet" means that life activities involve numerous factors that are highly interrelated.

Secondly, biological macromolecules exhibit various types of variations, which arise not only from environmental influences but also from random noise. These variations and noise lead to a marked randomness in cellular physiological activities.

More importantly, life, as a multi-level complex system ranging from molecules to cells to tissues and organs, exhibits properties at different levels that often arise from "emergence." This refers to the new properties that emerge from interactions among various parts, properties that cannot be simply defined by "cause-and-effect" relationships—where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Speaker

WU Jiarui
Researcher, CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science
2023—2024 Berggruen Fellow

Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently a researcher at the CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science (Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology) and Director of the National Protein Science Research Facility (Shanghai) at the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Wu’s main research areas include protein regulatory networks in cellular activities and systems biology research on complex diseases. He has published over 100 research papers in international academic journals.