Biology is the new physics

Abstract

The application of mathematics and computer science to biology is changing the nature of research. Philip Hunter explores the cross‐fertilization of ideas between the disciplines and how it creates new job opportunities for biologists and mathematicians

EcoEvoApps: Interactive Apps for Theoretical Models in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

“…Otto andDay 2007, Gotelli 2008). More recently, there has been a renewed emphasis on strengthening quantitative and computational training in undergraduate curricula, due to both the increasingly quantitative nature of EEB research and the increased demand for such skills across STEM careers (Cohen 2004, Ellison and Dennis 2010, Hunter 2010, Losos et al 2013, Barraquand et al 2014, Feng et al 2020, Cooke et al 2021. A central challenge for instructors teaching quantitative topics is the need to manage issues such as limited mathematical training or negative emotions towards mathematics among students, which can interfere with students' abilities to process mathematical problems and can lower student achievement and interest across STEM disciplines (Ashcraft 2002, Foley et al 2017.…”

Cellular intelligence: dynamic specialization through non-equilibrium multi-scale compartmentalization

“…While this knowledge has often been abstracted mathematically and computationally, the field of theoretical biology is far from being as unified as theoretical physics (1). Although sets of principles have been drawn for sub-fields of biology (2), there is no consensus as to how one should write, model and reason about biology within the same logical language (3).…”

“…To better appreciate this analogy from an entropic point of view, we can compare living systems as compartments containing specific chemical attributes, in which case the game of interactions happening in a system of living systems (25) can be likened to Maxwell's demon thought experiment (26). In this theoretical experiment, the compartmentalized system is able 1 to increase the entropy -essentially the specialization -of one of its compartments by letting specific types of chemical attributes migrate to other compartments.…”

Development of the Statistical Reasoning in Biology Concept Inventory (SRBCI)

“… Garfield (2002) noted that statistical reasoning skills need to be used by people from very different disciplinary backgrounds, and Ben-Zvi and Garfield (2004) underlined that discipline-specific norms exist for what constitute acceptable data arguments. While variation and spread are universally accepted as being important concepts in statistical reasoning, physicists and chemists, for example, who are used to relatively high precision in their experiments ( Hunter, 2010 ), may be less used to reasoning about wide variation in experimental data. On the other hand, biologists should be comfortable with wide variation, seeing as it is a central concept in the discipline ( Hallgrimsson and Hall, 2011 ).…”