Modeling Complex Biological Systems: Tackling the Parameter Curse Through Evolution

Abstract

As we all know, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” Dobzhansky (Am Biol Teach 35(3):125–129, 1973). Among the challenges of modeling complex biological systems is to determine the relevant parameters. The common practice is to extract parameters from the literature, or to determine them from ongoing experiments, or by collectively fitting the parameters to the experimental results the model tries to explain. Doing so ignores, or at least does not exploit, Dobzhansky’s wisdom. In this perspective paper, we argue and demonstrate the importance of using evolutionary methods to derive relevant parameters. We show that by doing so, we can debug experimental and modeling artifacts.