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Recent Posts
- Walls, energy, and a Centre for Biology
Let us consider the following apparently definitive declaration made by the Centre for Mathematical Biology, Oxford University: “You can’t compare a living organism to a heat pump”. But … is this really true?
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- The more they remain the same the more they change
John Ray, the English naturalist and scientist, produced the first ever biologically-relevant definition of ‘species’. He was trying to classify plants and in 1686 wrote: In order that an inventory of plants may be begun and a classification (divisio) of them correctly established, we must try to discover criteria of some sort for distinguishing what [...]
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- Can we escape evolution?
Although the word ‘constraint’ often has a negative connotation in ordinary language, it is how scientists and mathematicians operate. One of the first and most effective uses of a scientific-mathematical constraint came in the seventeenth centruy from the Frenchman Pierre de Fermat (of ‘Fermat’s last theorem’ fame). Natural philosophers of his day wondered what path [...]
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- Geography and the Gibbs energy
The ‘Gibbs energy’ is invariably difficult to explain to those who don’t know what it is. And despite its importance, it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Max Rubner, the German physicist and physiologist, at last convinced other scientists that the energy that biological organisms use in metabolic processes exactly equals [...]
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- Circumambulations: what are they, and why are they relevant to biology?
So what is a circumambulation, and why is it relevant to biology and evolution? Brian Charlesworth wrote in his book Evolution in age-structured populations (Cambridge University Press, 1994) that: “… the concept of generation time is a rather arbitrary one”. He then lists several alternatives. It is surely rather strange that something so fundamental to [...]
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