"Uses and Abuses of Mathematics in Biology"

Science invited Robert May, one of the leading mathematical biologists of our time, to contribute an essay to its special section on mathematical biology for its 2/6/04 issue. This link has excerpts from the article, which was very interesting and which I plan to assign the next time I teach a mathematical modeling or mathematical biology course. (I have previously taught one of each type of course.)

May goes through several important examples of both good and bad uses of mathematics in biology. For example, he presents some of the b.s. that occurs in systems biology about which I've ranted before. He makes essentially the same points as I have, but he does so much more cogently and he provides some excellent examples. (One of the sins, for example, is to have a huge set of equations that try to model every single mechanism with a differential equation but then have tons and tons of parameters that one has no hope of measuring with any degree of accuracy. All the supposed "accuracy" one gets from having a complicated set of equations is thereby completely wasted, and one has a system so big that it's impossible to understand everything. Now, there is good systems biology research as well, but one has to be very careful with things like which quantities one can measure and which quantities one can't.)

You can go here for the article's abstract. If you want to use your institution's electronic access to Science, you can follow the link to full text of the article.