Dr Keith D. Farnsworth                                     

  Reader in Theoretical Biology

School of Biological Sciences,
Queen's University Beflast MBC 97 Lisburn Road,
Belfast BT97BL,
United Kingdom.

Email: k.farnsworth (at) qub.ac.uk



BSc. (Hons) Astrophysics, University of London 1984
MSc. Acoustics, Southampton, 1985;
PhD. Mathematical Biology, Edinburgh 1994
MSc. Public Health Epidemiology, Aberdeen 2002


Here is a list of highlighted Publications    the full set is available on Google Scholar


Please take a look at my Research Team page.

About me:

Presently, I am a theoretical biologist working in Queen’s University Belfast and, counter to the current fashion for applied research led by anxious funding agencies, I am trying to develop as deep as possible an understanding of what life is and how it works (in a material universe) [1]. Over the past 20 years, though, I have been active in marine biology, helping create the size-spectrum approach to fisheries ecology, with applications in sustainable fisheries management and the 'ecosystem based approach' to the same, culminating in contributions to the 'Real-time incentive' scheme of fisheries regulation and co-management plans for  artisan fisheries in Egypt. Before that I worked on the behavioural ecology of large mammalian grazers, showing how they can coexist in the wild, matching their distribution to the resources available using multi-scale biased diffusion and before that I worked on optimality theory for branched systems such as trees and even before that, I was briefly involved in medical physics, helping to develop the MRI scanner and some aspects of doppler ultrasound scanners. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I got interested in medical epidemiology and public health medicine - it remains a sort of side-line.

A lot of my previous work was more or less motivated by employers and funding agencies. Now, as I say, I am using my time to concentrate on what I am personally motivated by because it is where I think I can make the most profound contribtion. These deeper theoretical enquiries led from information theory and cybernetics, to causation and what has been termed ‘the organisational approach to biological systems’. On the way, I have proposed a modernisation of Aristotle’s four aspects of cause, especially identifying formal cause with information embodied in the pattern of matter and interpreting efficient cause as the empowerment of formal cause with physical force [2]. So far that is proving very useful in constructing explanations for biological phenomena of fundamental interest [3, 4, 5]. The organisational approach helps us understand why organisms are special in the sense of causation and agency [3, 7] and is certainly open to philosophical approaches. The central idea is that of closure to efficient causation: unique to organisms and without which, agency cannot be attributed. Life remains a great mystery and I see it as the most fascinating and marvellous thing in the universe. A lot of the pioneering work (e.g. by Rosen, Varela and Maturana, Kauffman, Pattee and many others) has necessarily been quite abstract, but recently people like Jannie Hofmeyr and Marcello Barbieri have built much more biochemical realism into our explanations. At the moment my contribution seems to be to develop a link between this and the physics and information theory that describes its material underpinning. It's an exciting ride - for those that like that sort of thing.


[1] Farnsworth, K.D., Nelson, J., Gershenson, C., 2013. Living is information processing: From molecules to global systems. Acta Biotheor. 61, 203–222. doi:10.1007/s10441- 013-9179-3.

[2] Farnsworth, K.D., 2022. How an information perspective helps overcome the challenge of biology to physics. BioSystems 217, 104683. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j. biosystems.2022.104683.

[3] Farnsworth, K.D., 2018. How organisms gained causal independence and how it might be quantified. Biology 7, 38. doi:10.3390/biology7030038.

[4] Farnsworth, K.D. and Elwood, R.W. 2023. Why it hurts: with freedom comes the biological need for pain. Animal Cognition, 1-17. doi:10.1007/s10071-023-01773-2.

[5] Farnsworth, K.D., Albantakis, L., Caruso, T., 2017. Unifying concepts of biological function from molecules to ecosystems. Oikos 126, 1367–1376. doi:10.1111/oik.04171.

[6] Farnsworth, K.D., 2021. An organisational systems-biology view of viruses explains why they are not alive. BioSystems 200, 104324. doi:0.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104324.

[7] Farnsworth, K.D., 2017. Can a robot have free will? Entropy 19, 237. doi:10.3390/ e19050237.

More on my research activity

What is Life?

My quest in biological information and function started with thoughts about biodiversity. I wondered what biodiversity really is. I needed to know so that I could find a fundamental way to quantify it and also to value it. I realised ‘diversity’ meant degree of difference and quickly worked out that this was equivalent to information. So started an effort to quantify biodiversity in units of information, but it was obvious that not all the differences, e.g. among leaf shapes or the markings on a shark, matter. A lot of this detail was just random. What was needed was some quantifiable measure of functional information - that which caused a difference that mattered. To understand that, I needed to know what information did and meant to living organisms. The result was to realise that living is fundamentally a process of  information processing, i.e. computing. But if living organisms are computing, what is it that they are working out? The answer came from Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis: life is computing itself. That is a completely auto-reflexive cybernetic process and attempts to understand it led me to the theories of Robert Rosen and Stuart Kauffman. They captured the ideas of closure to efficient causation, autocatalytic sets and thermodynamic work cycles, but remained rather abstract. This was resolved by Jannie Hofmeyr's work and deeper understanding of formal, efficient and final cause, as well as the putting the biochemical reality back in the picture.

Realising that information constrained randomness by specifying the particular from among a set of possibilities, I understood that life computing itself meant that it was constantly constraining the set of possible chemical reactions that take part within organisms to only that small subset that collectively and continuously re-make the organism. The key value of information is the constraint it provides, selecting what is functional from all that is not (and we needed a precise definition of biological function to realise that).

Previous work: Sustainable Fisheries Management

My most recent previous work involved the application of ecological theory to practical problems of current real-life importance. A lot of it now concerns fisheries science - vital work if we are to save the world's fisheries from the global collapse for which many believe they are heading. A major part of this work is pursued through European Union and Irish Government funding, previously : An Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management, but also includes an  Irish  Science Foundation project and two European Union FP7 consortium projects. In general, my team and I are using a variety of theoretical approaches to find real-world solutions to some of the major ecological problems that we face. This work is also being used to create new theories of organism distribution, predator-prey dynamics, life history, and evolution.

Applications to Global Food Security

Building an 'appropriate technology' management system for artisan fisheries of the Egyptian Red Sea is the work of an Egyptian PhD student that I am currently supervising. It is interesting that this contributes towards something that the ancient Egyptians of tomb paintings, papyrus scrolls and pyramids would be quite at home with. Being pioneers of administration and quantification, I am sure they would approve of the `data limited stock assessment' methods being deployed and the participatory management processes (they were certainly not the autocratic tyrants we used to be misled into thinking). It seems the fishery is overexploited and declining, so proper management is urgently needed for this ancient way of life to survive.


More broadly, of course, we need to understand marine ecosystems a lot better to avoid over-exploiting them.
My work, in collaboration with the Irish Marine Institute, Danish Technical University and others, contributed to this by reinterpreting predator-prey and competition dynamics in far more realistic terms than previous models allowed. This is needed to provide a scientific underpinning to the reform of fisheries management: one that takes proper account of the complex dynamics of real marine food-webs. For example, we developed new ways to characterise and monitor the 'health' of fish communities in terms of population size and structure. This has led to an explanation of how life-history of fish can be changed by selective fishery. Using size-structured community models we examined the quality of ecological indicators for use in fisheries management and investigated the  interaction between industrial and 'forage' fisheries. his work was extended to address the highly topical problem of designing and assessing spatial management such as 'closed areas' and other new conservation measures in commercial fisheries and also to objectively assess the interactions between large marine predators such as seals and capture fisheries.


In a major collaboration, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, my team helped to devise an alternative to the stock quota system of the Common Fisheries Policy. This alternative is the Real Time Fisheries system, developed by Dave Reid (Marine Institute, Ireland) and Sarah Kraak (Thünen Intitut, Germany), who very sadly died of COVID-19 in 2021. RTI is a high spatial and temporal resolution quasi-economic incentive method which supplies real-time fine-grid tarrif maps to operating vessels, using a lot of technology, data and sophisticated modelling.

Early endeavours

Previous work under the Beaufort Award Scheme developed realistic mathematical models of fish communities undergoing fishery exploitation and used to calculate recovery times, sustainable yields, interactions among fishery types and interactions with other marine organisms, as well as developing an understanding of stakeholder interests and their interactions (see list of publications for more detail).

Before fisheries, I developed a theoretical understanding of how large mammalian grazing animals managed to co-exist in the wild and how the effectively distributed themselves to optimise their food resources. Even before that I worked out the optimal growth algorithm for the shape of botanical trees, did a bit of mathematical epidemiology and diagnostic radiology physics (for the Institute of Cancer Research).