The Wedding

Before the year ends, I dare say it’s not the best book to read before fireworks were released to the midnight sky. Sure, you can read it any time of the year but I recommend you do not read it during holiday breaks. The book seriously points out all mathematics have done in accordance with how biology looks at things. And I’m pretty sure you care less on such things when global celebrations deserved your best.

The author listed five revolutions. Throughout the flow, the interplay of articles regarding these five breakthroughs is in my opinion, brilliant. He started with microscope, followed by classification. The first two doesn’t have any hints of mathematics but the following three showed application of math. These are Darwin, Mendel and Watson and Crick. I meant evolution, genetics and deoxyribonucleic acid rather. There was a sixth, he mentioned. He even cared to mention Felis catus, Turdus merula and Quercus robur – species of cat, blackbird and an oak tree so I’ll mention them here, too. The way of writing scientific names is credited for the Linnaean system which he discussed under classification.  

Under the microscope scope of his book, lens was pointed out for its utilization into cosmic and microscopic levels alike. He was good to point out that religious authorities disapproved of Galileo’s testaments of the cosmos while they approved of the discoveries the naked eye sees beneath specialized lens. While they do not like what lens discovered beyond the skies, they were accepting what earth has beneath what our human perspective can see. These things so small were even referred to the many wonderful things God can create. Some bias in earlier times was well presented by Stewart.

He proceeds to talking about what made organisms, cells. And with cells, he includes all what we know in our biology subjects. Reproduction, development, ecological interactions, he discussed them. Development involves an intricate interaction between genetics and physical processes of growth, movement and death. We are only just beginning to understand such processes, which pose a fascinating challenge for biologists, physicists, chemists and mathematicians (Stewart, 2011). He indeed knows that there is a genuine connectivity among complicated fields.

Fibonacci’s ideas and other supporting people were powerfully established in his work. His descriptions of significant peoples, things, processes, events and historical periods are well researched. They are all brief but he never failed to include the most important key points.

Evolution, adaptation and natural selection are also in the mix. He continued discussing each revolution with the contributions of the many people behind each in his list. With Darwin, he even chronicled the whole journey he had taken and what he observed among his travels, the missing mechanism to prove how diverse species form (Stewart. 2011). In the end, Darwin never missed the right missing link. Not in the way he expected, though.

Genetics by Mendel is another area of mathematics that has joined the party. Alongside combinatorics, probability theory came as well as the mathematics of uncertainty. He writes names of those that aren’t naturally printed in our biology books and their significant contributions that played also fruitful discoveries for respective breakthroughs/revolutions.

The fifth topic he discussed is the DNA, a sequence and a blueprint. However, more techniques, tools and other required components are needed to build what the code instructs. He was right to say that unlocking the DNA code reveals another locked box inside. More wonderful contributions follow like the Human Genome Project which is indeed a huge advancement in medicine as he had discussed.

All this makes the Human Genome Project excellent science: it changes our views. Unfortunately, the resulting picture has turned out to be more complicated than biologists had expected, and it is becoming clear that the gap between sequencing an organism’s DNA and knowing how that organism works is far greater than most people had hoped (Stewart, 2011).

More biological concepts are discussed along the way which is surely familiar to us students with Biology for a course. Cladogram, cladistics, viruses, gene transfer, bacteria and species are discussed comprehensively. He continually inserted these concepts into the third revolutions mostly. He added Euclid’s Elements and how his fifth platonic solid, icosahedron, applied to most biological studies which is known to have no relation with other fields of science and even in physics or other mathematically related subjects as well.

He moves on to the symmetry properties of these solids are what make them so prevalent in modern pure mathematics. The key point is that symmetry of an object is not a thing, but a transformation, whose application leaves the object looking exactly the same (Stewart, 2011). Then I realized Stewart seriously pour out more information which requires higher means of understanding. I was seriously repeating the paragraphs just so I can still see the big picture.

He talks more of things you don’t want to really know like sequence space, multidimensional geometry, abstract geometric language, Twarock’s work on viruses, theorems, brain activity,  continuity, topology, correct folding of proteins, patterns, forms and shapes, mirror symmetry, rotational symmetry and symmetry breaking.

As Eggenberger remarks, ‘Putting evolutionary techniques on firm ground, where the mechanisms can be understood, is itself a major reason to investigate the potential of such systems.’ I remember my STAT 162 experience. Yes, my friend, it is not easily forgotten. I made a brochure regarding response surface methods or RSM. These methods use computers for mathematical calculations to prove hypothetical solutions. A good model must, of course, be sufficiently realistic that it doesn’t leave out anything of vital importance. What counts is what the model predicts, not what it leaves out. He added statistics then connected with population distributions and speciation. Patterns in the environment were discussed as means of presenting more mathematical contributions to better understand and interpret certain forces happening in biological phenomena.

Mathematics, properly used, can make complex problems simpler. But it does so by focusing on essentials, not by faithfully reproducing every facet of the real world (Stewart, 2011). The last three chapters focus on all the possible arguments and affirmation with defining life and possible evidences of the “life” we know beyond our planet, our system, our galaxy. Ian defines life, ‘in order to distinguish possible extra-terrestrial beings. The upshot is that the current working definitions of life concentrate on what it does, rather than what it is.’

There are actually more people he cited than the number of his chapters, as it should be, to express all his ideas into one piece of long explanation. I say long because it took him 379 pages to formally tell us and the world so. He even focused his attention to one reference mostly in one topic like Rare Earth. He also talks of parochials and universals. Habitable zones, artificial or synthetic life, mathematical models, the whole shebang to conclude the various functions and malfunctions history weave to fill the gaps between biology and mathematics. Cheers to biomathematics! He finally said, ‘to evolution, we would both be normal – relative to our habitat.’ Wait, that’s wrong.

What I actually mean is that he had an excellent research compiled into “The Mathematics of Life”. He is never wrong in his title all throughout the book. I like how he talks to his readers by joking about ‘considering a spherical cow.’ And yet, he is always right to say that all else is hypothetical. There are a lot of things I seriously learned not only mathematics as one and biology as another. I spill it for you guys, there’s no sixth revolution. Say what? I recommend this book to anyone who wanted to witness the marriage between mathematics and biology. So here’s one last say about what I’ve learned in the book about mathematics’ love for biology. One thing stands out: it was doing so long before anyone noticed. Cheers!