Cell doctrine in a complex and uncertain world: time for reappraisal?

IN RECENT DECADES, complexity theory has provided profitable new perspectives and analyses in the discourse of many “hard” and social sciences (Johnson, 2001; Lewin, 1999). The oftquoted remark by Stephen Hawking—“I think the next century will be the century of complexity” (Chui, 2000)—will prove, in the near term, to be either hyperbolic appreciation or prophetic, but the good professor, at least, recognizes that an epochal shift, powered by this paradigmatic approach to analysis of systems of interacting agents, is on the way. While many fields, including many disciplines within the biological sciences, have embraced the analytic approaches of complexity theory, there remains a relative paucity of discussion or debate regarding its potential to shed light on cell or molecular biology.