@article {Diaz Ochoa111666, author = {Juan G. Diaz Ochoa}, title = {Distorted Biologic Mechanisms in Evolution and Model Extrapolation}, elocation-id = {111666}, year = {2017}, doi = {10.1101/111666}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {Explanations based on low level interacting elements are valuable and powerful since they contribute to the identification of mechanisms controlling essential biological functions and responses, if nature is complete and decidable. But this assumption often generates frustration since organisms are still far to be controllable and predictable, implying that the knowledge about mechanisms are often not enough to explain many biological processes. We argue that the accommodation and assimilation of organisms to their environment continuously challenge biological mechanisms, and consequently that systems are fundamentally incomplete and undecidable, in the same way as the halting problem in mathematics is unsolvable. This condition allows a constant creativity that drives evolution, continuously distorting these mechanisms. We introduce a measure of this distortion, which should be useful to determine if the identification of simple mechanisms for modelling in Biology is feasible or not. We test this concept in a population of predators and predated cells with uncertain chemotactic mechanisms and demonstrate how the selection of a given mechanism depends on the whole population. We finally explore this concept in different frameworks and postulate that the identification of predictive mechanisms that can be extrapolated to other organisms is only successful with low distorted mechanisms.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/25/111666}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/25/111666.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }