Bonus Content
The Mathematics of Life
Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great
revolutions have changed the way scientists think about life.
A sixth is on its way.
The first five revolutions were the invention of the microscope,
the systematic classification of the planet’s living creatures, the theory of evolution, the discovery of the gene, and the discovery of the structure of DNA. Let’s look at them in turn, before moving on to my sixth, more contentious, revolution.
The Microscope
The first biological revolution happened 300 years ago, when the invention of the microscope opened our eyes to the astonishing complexity of life on the smallest scales. More precisely, it opened up the complexity of life to observation by our eyes, by providing a new instrument to augment our unaided senses.
The invention of the microscope led to the discovery that
individual organisms have an amazing internal complexity. One of the first big surprises was that living creatures are made from cells – tiny bags of chemicals enclosed in a membrane that lets some of the chemicals pass in or out. Some organisms consist of a single cell, but even those are surprisingly complicated, because a cell is an entire chemical system, not something simple and straightforward. Many organisms are made from a gigantic number of cells: your body contains roughly 75 trillion of them. Each cell is a tiny biological machine with its own genetic machinery which can cause it to reproduce, or die. Cells come in more than 200 types – muscle cells, nerve cells, blood cells, and so on.
Cells were discovered very soon after microscopes were
invented: once you can look at an organism under high
magnification, you can’t miss them.
Classification
The second revolution was started by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, doctor and zoologist. In 1735, his epic work Systema Naturae appeared. Its full title in English is ‘The system of nature through the three kingdoms of nature, according to classes, orders, genera and species, with characters, differences, synonyms, places’. Linnaeus was so interested in the natural world that he decided it needed to be catalogued. All of it. The first edition of his catalogue was just 11 pages long; the 13th and last ran to 3,000 pages. Linnaeus made it clear that he was not trying to uncover some kind of hidden natural order; he was just trying to organise what was there, in a systematic and structured manner. His chosen structure was to classify natural objects in a five-stage subdivision: kingdom, class, order, genus, species. His three kingdoms were animals, plants and minerals. He founded the science of taxonomy: the classification of living creatures into related groups.
Excerpted from The Mathematics of Life, by Ian Stewart. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.
The Mathematics of Life
Can math describe the complexity of the natural world? As Ian Stewart shows in The Mathematics of Life, the answer is “Yes!” In his new book Stewart traces insights from biomathematics, the field at the crossroads of numbers and nature.
The principles of math can help describe everything from the structure and function of DNA, to the shape of viruses, to the evolutionary games that led to the diversity of life on Earth. And let’s not forget the workings of the nervous system and brain, or the dynamics of ecosystems. In clear language, Stewart shows, for example, how the Fibonacci sequence is built into the number and arrangement of petals on flowers; how a theory of pattern formation devised by Alan Turing shows how various species such as boxfish got their stripes; and how the so-called logistic equation lets us predict the ultimate size of animal populations based on the carrying capacity of the environment. We see how the payoff matrix from game theory that governs “scissors-paper-stone” applies to lizard mating strategies, and even how the origin of new species can be modeled mathematically.
The Mathematics of Life celebrates the role of math in understanding everything from cellular organization to the behavior of entire organisms.
Hardcover : 368 pages
Publisher: Basic Books Inc. ( June 07, 2011 )
Item #: 13-399424
ISBN: 9780465022380
Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 inches
Product Weight: 19.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Copyright © Bookspan. Scientific American® is a registered trademark, used under license. Unauthorized use prohibited. All rights reserved.
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