Emeritus Professor Peter Saunders
Telephone: +44 020 7848 2218
Email: peter.saunders@kcl.ac.uk
Office: S4.21, Strand Building, Strand Campus
Title: Emeritus Professor
Biography
to be added.
Research Interests
The aim of Peter's research programme is to explain the properties of organisms and other complex systems in terms of ordinary mathematics, physics and chemistry.
This is in contrast to the neo-Darwinist approach, originally applied only in biology but now increasingly in other fields as well, in which selection is seen as the sole creative force and consequently the focus of interest.
At present, his work is concentrated into two main areas:
(a) Physiological control
(b) Generic properties of complex nonlinear systems
(He is unable to take on any graduate students at present.)
Selection of Publications
The Organism as a Dynamical System. In: Thinking about Biology, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Lecture Notes Vol. III (F. Varela & W. Stein, eds). Addison Wesley, Reading, 1993, pp 41-63. (This file is about 1.7Mb. For the 200Kb version without the drawing of the epigenetic landscape, click here).
Evolution without Natural Selection: Further Implications of the Daisyworld Parable. Journal of Theoretical Biology 166 (1994) 365-373.Figures (tif file)
Reliable segmentation by successive bifurcation. P.T. Saunders & M.W. Ho. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 57 (1995) 539-556.
Glucose homeostasis with infinite gain: An application of the Daisyworld parable? J.H. Koeslag, P.T. Saunders & J.A. Wessels. Journal of Endocrinology 517 (1997) 643-649.
Integral Rein Control in Physiology. P.T. Saunders, J.H. Koeslag & J.A. Wessels. Journal of Theoretical Biology 194 (1998) 163-173.
Darwinism and Economic Theory. In Sociobiology and Bioeconomics (ed P. Koslowski). Springer, Berlin, 1999, pp. 259-278.
The chromogranins and the counterregulatory hormones: Do they make homeostatic sense? J.H. Koeslag, P.T. Saunders & J.A. Wessels, Journal of Physiology 517 , (1999) 643-647.
Integral rein control in physiology II: A general model. P.T. Saunders, J.H. Koeslag & J.A. Wessels, Journal of Theoretical Biology 206 (2000), 211-220
Archetypes, complexes and self-organisation. P.T. Saunders & P. Skar, Journal of Analytical Psychology 46 (2001), 305-323
A reappraisal of the blood glucose homeostat which comprehensively explains the Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus-Syndrome X complex. J.H. Koeslag, P.T. Saunders & E. Terblanche. Journal of Physiology 549.2 , (2003) 333-346.
Bricks without straw: Darwinism in the social sciences. Theoria 18 (2003) 259-272.