The Wrong Mentality

            Biology is the study of life. When you let a child define ‘life’, he or she will always refer to living organisms such as plants and animals. For biologists it is much deeper than that. As a biology student, Biology was my field of choice because it is interesting; how life becomes ‘life’ and how life is lived variously. Of course, there are always other reasons like – biology does not require that much of Mathematics which was contradicted by Ian Stewart. He said that Biology without Mathematics is a wrong mentality. He also added that there have been five revolutions which changed how biologists viewed life.

            The first revolution was the discovery of microscope 300 years ago. This discovery unraveled the mystery of the basic unit of life – cell. It was then known that an organism may be made up of one, millions, or trillions of cells. The second revolution was known as the Linnaean system by a botanist Carolus Linnaeus. He established the system of binomial nomenclature. This revolution, in my opinion, is one of the greatest events that happened in biology. Due to the numerous languages, dialects, and other means of communications the world has in it, it was hard to know which species of cat you are referring to. That is the main reason why we have the so called ‘scientific names’. The third revolution was when Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in his book The Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859. He proposed that humans evolved from monkeys and this was due to the environment with all the biotic and abiotic factors in it. The fourth revolution is the discovery of genes by a monk named Gregor Mendel who is also known as The Father of Genetics. He studied about peas and how traits were passed on or inherited from parents to offspring.  The fifth revolution happened due to a new invention called the X-ray diffraction – the discovery of the structure of DNA or Deoxyribonucleic acid which is said to be the main reason why a monkey is a monkey and a human is a human. The discovery of the structure was by Watson and Crick.

Stewart then mentioned that due to these five revolutions, biology was never the same. It was not limited to plants and animals but it has now a wider scope. It requires and touches other fields of sciences and of course, Mathematics. What is common in all these revolutions is Mathematics. He said that it is Mathematics that united all these revolutions. As you start to read the book, you can’t help but think twice if this book is really this easy to read and to understand. As you read the first twenty pages, it was all about Biology and how Mathematics was used as a tool to analyze and understand data obtained from experiments until there became Biomathematics. I, myself, was afraid of such term (but note my tense ‘was’). It was a marriage of biological sciences and Mathematics. Yet, Stewart explained that there is nothing to worry or to be afraid of. It does not necessarily mean to create new mathematical concepts but to also try to use and apply ‘old’ concepts which you think would be necessary in your study. This is, according to Ian Stewart, the sixth revolution.

As the book progresses, it becomes harder to analyze and requires re-reading especially the part of Fibonacci and Lucas sequences. Actually, I love how the author deal more on the applications of mathematics in the field of science rather than dealing with mathematics per se which will sure cut my interest off the book. It was also good that the author used analogies to explain his ideas in order for it to be easily understood. I particularly like the chapter entitled “Is Anybody Out There?’ and want to reiterate a line, “So either Earth won a jackpot in a cosmic lottery, or we are not alone”. In this chapter he says that the re is probability that there are other lifeforms outside Earth as well as the probability that there isn't.

The book was able to convey that science is far more complex than what we can imagine but as we know more and discover more does not mean that the basic concepts we once knew were invalid. Also, Science isn’t always about what is directly observed. Most of the time, it is indirect deduction.