The Never-Ending Story ◾ 289
6.4.2 Robustness of Biological Systems
An important property of living organisms is their robustness to various
internal or external mishaps occurring before and during their lifetime,
including genetic mutations, developmental perturbations, and accidental
events. We will not dene robustness here, and it is clear that too many
accidents will cause an organism to fail and eventually to die; however,
our daily experience convinces us that organisms are generally robust to
many such events.
Engineering has taught us a variety of methods for achieving robust-
ness. e central ones are as follows (Kitano, 2002):
• Control mechanisms: In particular, negative feedback.
• Modularity: Allows for the containment of ...