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Comment by gmonk | Hacker News Reader

If you can't read or have a basic working knowledge of mathematics, what's the point of science?

Biology is one of the most dynamic, rapidly advancing fields of science today. Can you name an important equation in biology? Quite a bit harder to do than for chemistry or physics...

It's also worth noting that the people who generally tend to be anti-science in America are typically not anti-law-of-gravitation or anti-atomic-theory-of-matter types.

jballanc, Your point is good, but it is still true that you need both math and English to advance in science.

Any real advance in biology will require a well written paper for example. Also, if the person wanted to have access to the best minds, they will need to be accepted in to a good school at a minimum.

Math and English are great places to focus as amazing building blocks.

Yes, but my point was that science is its own field of human thought, not merely an emergent property of sufficient skill in Math and English. Deductive reasoning, single-variable analysis, control experiments...these are all skills which I would classify as "science". These are skills that I learned very early on in my education (6th and 7th grade, primarily), and I feel they were key in guiding me down my present path.

I would argue that biology without equations is just as useless as physics or chemistry without them. Yes, its interesting to know about evolution and how cells work, but to interact with a cell or guide evolution in any meaningful way you need to know the equations that describe flux over a membrane or evolutionary equilibrium. Just like its interesting to know the order of the planets and that rubbing a balloon against your head will make your hair stand up but if you actually want to send something to space or use electricity you need to add the equations.

The advancement of biology is driven by the development of algorithms and equations and to suggest that it is somehow less dependent on them than other branches of science does it a disservice.

I disagree if you mean "usage" to be "direct usage".

My guess would be that most "equations" in biology curriculum are not really related to biological or physical processes directly, but rather to statistics, experimental setup, i.e. data interpretation and manipulation.

Now, of course, stats are very important and are probably basic knowledge is key in reading and critically analyzing any scientific paper. So I am not criticizing that. However my opinion is that mathematics is not as critical to biology as it is critical for physics.

Not "less dependent on them", rather state it: "fewer of them to be serviced by". I am the first to suggest that biology needs many more equations than it currently has. But deriving those equations will not come from studying math, but rather from studying science.

fundamental formula to pretty much everything in macro biology, its equivalent of the Newton's second law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

I suggest also Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (p2) + (2pq) + (q2)= 1 (both allele and genotype frequencies in a population remain constant)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principl...

I didn't say there were no equations in Biology (would be rather silly of me to say so, since my doctoral dissertation is based on equations applied to biology), only that Biology is a good example of science that is not strictly the application of equations.

Another way to state the point I was attempting to make: while modern physicists can derive many new insights from ages old equations (or manipulations thereof), Newton was tasked with creating the equations from scientific first-principles. It is this skill (the ability to formulate scientific frameworks) which would be lost if scientific education is neglected.

I'm not a biologist, but from what I know I'd say that modern biology is either applied Chemistry or really heavy on statistics.

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