William Bialek

From a physicist's point of view, when trying to model a biological system, the number of parameters that needs to be accounted for can be daunting, whether they're genetic or biochemical, and subject to change on evolutionary or physiological timescales.

Such a state of affairs is rather, quote, unsettling for a theoretical physicist, end quote, as William Bialek of Princeton University notes.

Quote, our most complete theories of the natural world certainly have parameters, but there's a sense that if we are focused too much on these parameters, then we are doing something wrong.

If parameters proliferate, we take this as a sign that we are missing some additional level of unification that could relate these many parameters to one another.

It can also emerge through the independence of specifically higher-level behavior from lower-level parameters, as in coarse-graining of the renormalization group.

Low-dimensionality can even be a result of evolutionary optimization.

William Bialek has most recently been pursuing the optimization program as a path toward building elegant theories for biological systems, and it turns out that his program and the sloppiness research have converged.

Bialek's group discovered that even the landscape of optimization itself is characterized by sloppiness.