Towards a Stochastic System Theory of Evolution

摘要

We propose an initiative to develop a theory of organisms. Such a theory was already demanded by Whitehead in the 1920's. The theory has to capture the following aspects of organisms - structure, function, and history. We argue that such a theory should use a mesoscopic view, i.e. it should work with stochastic processes and probabilities instead of individual configurations. New developments how to efficiently compute probabilities based on factorizations of the distributions are presented. Two examples in the field of population genetics and population dynamics are presented.