> "The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself." But that is trivially true about everything, including golf balls. The interesting quest

> "The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself." But that is trivially true about everything, including golf balls. The interesting question isn't if the model is complete, but if it is sufficient (or complete enough) to make predictions. And in the case of golf balls we can make quite good predictions with a very simple model, mostly because we are only interested in if it ends up in the hole or not. But a complete model of a golf ball would need to include the exact dynamics of the different layers and the turbulence around it, which we just can't do. Luckily, we don't need to. So what is a sufficient model of a living organism? That of course also depends on what we want to know. I am quite certain that modern egg farmers have, for their purposes, quite sufficient models of hens. They know how fast the hens grow, the effects of different amounts and types of food, how much heat they produce, and of course how many and how big eggs they lay, etc.. And it is of course possible that we need to know the exact wave function for the complete system that is the cell to model it sufficiently enough to, say, synthesise new drugs. But I don't think so.