Biography:

Ayşe Erzan got her bachelors from Bryn Mawr College in 1970, and Ph.D. in physics from SUNY Stony Brook, in 1976. Returning to Turkey, she taught at the Middle East Technical University and the Istanbul Technical University (1976-1981). Between 1981 and 1990 she worked at the University of Geneva and the University of Porto, held an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the University of Marburg and was FOM research fellow in Groningen, returning to the Istanbul Technical University in 1990 after a brief stay at the ICTP. Her research work has been in the area of critical phenomena and phase transitions, fractals and most recently, non-adaptive complexity in biological systems. She has numerous papers in international journals and has taught and lectured widely on her research. A member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA) and recipient of the highest science prize in Turkey (TUBITAK prize), she was the LOreal-UNESCO Women in Science laureate for Europe in 2003. She has served on the editorial boards of several international physics journals and on the IUPAP Statistical Physics (C3) committee. Her non-academic activities have included membership in the Science Ethics Committee of TUBA and the executive committee of the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies. She is presently a member of the ALLEA (All European Academies) Science and Ethics committee. She is also a member of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) and honorary member of the Palestinian Academy for Science and Technology (PLAST).

Abstract:

Combinatorics of random sequences and the non-adaptive emergence of complexity

The most revolutionary aspect of Darwins theory of evolution is the role played by randomness. A lot of the present literature on evolution, however, is very much reverse-engineering based, competing with tracts on "intelligent design" in its teleological flavor. In fact, it can be argued that many of the presently observed complex patters and structures found in living beings may have emerged by chance, from a multitude of other possibilities offered by the laws of physics, chemistry and combinatorics. Subsequent selection then leads to the conservation and fine tuning of these already complex formations. We have demonstrated that the topological properties of transcriptional gene regulatory networks of S. cereviciae and E. coli can be reproduced on the basis of a sequence-matching rule between random sequences, given the appropriate length distributions corresponding to their information content. We argue that RNA interference and the role played by micro-RNA in gene regulation can also be understood on purely probabilistic grounds.