Landscapes of change: Catastrophe theory and biological processes

Abstract

Elementary catastrophe theory provides a method for the qualitative description of systems with associated potential energy functions. It can serve at least as an illustrative metaphor for the local description of biological development. It replaces earlier theories of development that utilized paths on an ad hoc epigenetic landscape, for example, with one that generates trajectories on a well-defined hypersurface, the catastrophe manifold. While the elementary theory does provide a much richer mathematical language than the earlier geometric theories, it suffers from several drawbacks, outlined in this paper, which prevent it from being a conclusive theory for biological development.

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