A superficial analysis might lead to the conclusion that the success of the chaos theory has only a semantic origin: the term deterministic chaos being constructed as an oxymoron, as are the Tivantinib in vivo successful terms of “virtual reality” or “artificial intelligence.” Moreover, terms such as equilibrium, unpredictability, and strange attractors that are at the core of the chaos theory, can easily be used in many other contexts and meanings. Some researchers

in the field of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical social sciences even propose that the chaos theory offers a revolutionary new paradigm, away from the materialistic Utopia, and that social system should be maintained at the edge of chaos, between too much and too little authoritarian Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical control. This comment concerns politics rather than physics. The specificity of present time physics, with entropy, chaos, and fractal dimensions, confers reality to phenomena as we can perceive and measure them, and it somehow invalidates the idea of

a fundamental, or true, reality that might be explained by an elegant model. The use of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical such models entails too many simplifications, and may lead for instance to the reversibility of time that is imposed by the mathematical structure of mechanics. The initial conditions of the universe with mass, charge of particles, size of atoms, fundamental forces, speed of light, combination of carbon and oxygen, and many others happened to be organized in such a way that life could Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical appear, and with it consciousness. This could suggest that the destiny of the universe is not towards an inevitable and generalized chaos. On the contrary, this destiny might be oriented towards complexity. Chaos theory and medicine Many discoveries in medicine

can be seen as indications that organs function in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical a linear and deterministic manner, and that the causality principle applies to normal or abnormal physiology: for example, pressure increases when arteries constrict, and obstruction of an artery from the heart leads to angina pectoris. In chronobiology, destruction of the suprachiasmatic nucleus alters Orcadian rhythms, and genetic crossing of insects strains with different circadian clock gene modifies the 4-Aminobutyrate aminotransferase period of circadian rhythms in a predictable manner, etc. These obvious findings are numerous and they might hide, to some extent, the fact that bodily functions and their temporal coordination are probably under laws that are inherently complex. Indeed, living species are capable of increasing their complexity, to organize orderly functions from disorder (in terms of physics, not medicine), and they do this without external informational input. Thus, living species exhibit some complex chaotic systems.