The NATO workshop on Disordered Systems and Biological Organization was
attended, in march 1985, by 65 scientists representing a large variety
of fields: Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics and Biology. It was
the purpose of this interdisciplinary workshop to shed light on the
conceptual connections existing between fields of research apparently as
different as: automata theory, combinatorial optimization, spin glasses
and modeling of biological systems, all of them concerned with the
global organization of complex systems, locally interconnected. Common
to many contributions to this volume is the underlying analogy between
biological systems and spin glasses: they share the same properties of
stability and diversity. This is the case for instance of primary
sequences of biopo Iymers I ike proteins and nucleic acids considered as
the result of mutation-selection processes [P. W. Anderson, 1983] or
of evolving biological species [G. Weisbuch, 1984]. Some of the most
striking aspects of our cognitive apparatus, involved In learning and
recognttlon [J. Hopfield, 19821, can also be described in terms of
stability and diversity in a suitable configuration space. These
interpretations and preoccupations merge with those of theoretical
biologists like S. Kauffman [1969] (genetic networks) and of
mathematicians of automata theory: the dynamics of networks of automata
can be interpreted in terms of organization of a system in multiple
possible attractors. The present introduction outlInes the relationships
between the contributions presented at the workshop and brIefly
discusses each paper in its particular scientific context.