It may have fewer than many of the other sciences, but biology does have two dozen or so “rules”—broad generalizations about the behavior or nature and evolution.
Now, USC researchers want to add a new rule called “selectively advantageous instability (SAI),” which explores how instability can actually benefit a cell and a cellular organism.
The flipside of this “rule” is that SAI can also be a key factor to things like disease and aging, so understanding this process could aid in exploration of those biological processes.
Across the sciences, rules and laws help us make sense of the world around us, whether applied to cosmic scales or subatomic ones. However, in the biological world, things are a bit more complicated. That’s because nature is often full of biological exceptions, and so “rules of biology” are also considered broad generalizations rather than absolute facts that explain and govern all known life. READ MORE...
