Professor Ard Louis is a theoretical physicist here at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics. He speaks to Ursule Demael on Holobiont, a podcast at the crossroads of microbiology, immunology, evolution, computational biology and more.
In the podcast, they explore the contributions of theoretical physics to understanding biological evolution and self-assembly. Professor Louis leads a group that uses theoretical and computational tools to answer fundamental questions about the evolution of protein and RNA structures and gene regulatory networks. A recent proposal based on his work in the field of algorithmic information theory and complexity theory is that there is a bias towards simplicity in the biological outputs of evolutionary processes.
Symmetry and simplicity spontaneously emerge from the algorithmic nature of evolution, Iain G Johnston et al