Short Articles on Unsolved Problems
(A) Theoretical biology means different things to different people. For some it is the discovery of a paradigm, which can be stated in words, and which serves to orient thought about living organisms, or ecosystems in the most general sense. For others it is a means for developing quantitative use of data sets which are too complex to.handle intuitively. For yet others it may be a means of classification, or of making a specific prediction, or of analyzing a system so as to optimize the chances of correctly stating a research problem.
(B) We can all see research problems the solution of which depends upon the use of the correct paradigm. These are problems such as:
How did life originate? How did the eukaryotes originate? How do cells from the zygote differentiate into the various tissue cells? How does speciation occur? How do enzymes work? How does a muscle contract? How does a genome give rise to an organism? How does a eNS store information? How are population densities regulated? What is consciousness? How can the permeability properties of cell membranes be described in precise physicochemical terms? What are the criteria for evolutionary relatedness in bacteria? What is the basis of virulence? Are manganese nodules produced by geological processes, or by bacterial processes? How can the efficiency of photosynthesis be increased? What are the basic principles for constructing life support systems for long-term space flight? How does one design a set of organisms to colonize a lifeless planet? (C) These and any number of others may be considered biological problems amenable to theoretical as well as experimental attack. Often in biological literature the problem to be solved is inferred rather than stated: