Broken Symmetries, Information and Emergence: What is theory, that biology should be mindful of it?

Abstract: The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical science. However, the scenario has been changing in recent years with statistical mechanics, nonlinear dynamics and soft-matter physics being more and more frequently invoked to explain various biological observations. As distinct from computational biology, theoretical biology is not just an attempt to reproduce in-silico experimental phenomena, but asks more general and abstract questions. It strives to attain a more fundamental understanding of the mechanisms underlying biological phenomena, ranging from oscillations to strategic actions, that can be unified through the perspective that views organisms as processing information to respond appropriately despite the noise in their environment. We show through a number of investigations carried out by our group, on the emergence of systems-level phenomena through interactions between components, how an approach melding physics, and the theory of information & computation can act as an unifying framework for biological processes across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales.