Collin Rice (Bryn Mawr College)
Biological modelers have recently started to explicitly appeal to universality classes in order to justify their use of highly idealized computational models to investigate limiting behaviors. For example, these modelers justify their use of a very simple Eden growth model by showing that their idealized model and the actual bacterial growth processes whose limiting behaviors they are interested in are both in the KPZ universality class. I argue that these cases show that the concepts of universality and stable limiting behaviors can be expanded beyond physics and used to develop more general accounts of idealization, modeling, and explanation.
