Academics Andre's Research Biocuriosities Books Graduate School History of Science Hot off the Press Igor's Research Interdisciplinarity Molecule of the Month Open Access Philip's Research Philosophy of Science Physics Physicsworld.com
Backreaction Ceclia's Blog at PHD Comics Cocktail Party Physics Cosmic Variance The Daily Transcript Easternblot Everyday Scientist The Evilutionary Biologist Freelancing Science The Futile Cycle Good Math, Bad Math iMechanica in singulo Incoherently Scattered Ponderings Juniorprof Klara Stefflova Life of a Lab Rat The Loom Metadatta Mixed States Morning Coffee Physics Not Even Wrong Notes from the biomass Notional Slurry OpenScience Project Pharyngula PLoS Blog Ponderings of a fool Recombinants The Sandwalk SciAm Observations ScienceBlogs Scientific Clearing House Shtetl-Optimized Three-toed Sloth Uncertain Principles What's New by Bob Park
In his article Why a Lion?, Stephen Strauss explains that something he finds “a little despairing about biology is that it is so denuded in terms of theory.” I can’t say that I totally agree since there have been good theorists in biology for a long time, but it is certainly true that no one has been able to come up with a quantitative theory that does justice to the hugely unifying empirical observation that all of life’s programs are written in the same language. As Strauss suggests, “reorganization as dramatic as that fomented by Einstein or Newton in physics clearly is possible if someone can produce a simple, cohesive theory of how DNA evolves, stays the same, and remains viable throughout the process.” I find it fascinating to think that there may be some relatively simple laws underlying evolution.
So, does biology need an Einstein? It wouldn’t hurt, but if people want to this putative Biostein to make an impact in biology, they had better start giving young students the quantitative tools they will need to formulate these laws, if they exist.
Teaching Biological Physics (as opposed to biophysics) BioStein II
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
