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Comment by trisomy21 | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, are you saying that someone with higher biological numeracy would be better equipped to answer the questions you've posed in your simple intuition example?

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I'd say, arguably, yes. And not necessarily because those examples use numeracy directly - but rather because a biological numeracy would provide a foundation to an intuition that would prevent the beginner's mistakes in those examples.

I argue that that biological numeracy is a prerequisite (and a consequence) of having a properly scaled biological intuition. And those examples test that intuition.

Thanks for clarifying. I find this topic quite interesting. I was thinking about the process to create recombinant DNA vs the PCR process and, as a thought experiment, wondered how biological numeracy might have played a role in the development of each. I feel like PCR is a great example of biological numeracy in action (as you pointed out), but I think part of the beauty of the recombinant DNA process is that it demonstrates our understanding of the physical attributes - size, structure, shape, etc. of biological molecules, perhaps even more so than numeracy.

Those "physical attributes" are most grossly characterized with those same measures- size, shape, length, stiffness, etc. And if you have access to those simple attributes you get a lot farther than if you just think about a genome as a magical information store.

Totally agree.

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