This episode explores the contributions of theoretical physics to understanding biological evolution and self-assembly.

Ard Louis is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and leads a group that uses computational tools to answer fundamental questions about the emergence and evolution of protein and RNA structures and gene regulatory networks. An attractive proposal developed in his recent work is that there is a bias towards simplicity in biological outputs, using the formalisation of complexity from Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT). 

We discuss

• The historical role of theoretical physics in the life sciences
• The bias towards biological structures with low descriptional complexity 
• The concept of "Arrival of the Frequent" in evolution
• The usefulness of mathematics in describing biology

Prof Ard Louis: https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/louis

Pre-print on the algorithmic nature of evolution :https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.454038v2

Wigner's paper on mathematics in the natural sciences: https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf