The Dismal Lack of Abstraction in Biology
By Jurgen Kaljuvee

“Study mathematics like a house on fire” - Charles Darwin

“We all stand on the shoulders of giants” - Isaac Newton

The two famous quotes by the founding fathers of biology and physics illustrates the crux of scientific inquiry. The first one was Darwin’s advice to young Francis Galton, a British polymath, geneticist and statistician, who later gave us some very useful statistical concepts such as correlation.

The second quote is by Isaac Newton, who refers to the fact that science should not be a circular or lateral journey, but rather a cumulative progress: every scientist does not have to re-invent the scientific toolbox with each new question. Instead, science builds on the work and discoveries of those who went before us, while also constantly abstracting, refining and reordering of the components of the scientific framework.

But the lack of mathematics, or inability for biologists to stand on the shoulders of the mathematicians before them, and the resultant slow progress are precisely the characteristics that have become the bane of modern biology.

Back to High School

Think back to your high school education. You will probably recall that in physics there were something called Newton’s Laws of Mechanics. If you made it to electromagnetism, you will also recall Maxwell’s Laws, and if you made it to your senior year, perhaps you have a vague image of Einstein’s Laws of Relativity and something called Shroedinger’s equation in quantum physics. Similar investigations in chemistry produced the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and a couple of other successful formalizations such the law kinetics and so forth. All these laws have one thing in common: they can be expressed in simple mathematical expressions, and because of their exceptional brevity can fit on a piece of napkin.

Now think back to your biology studies. You will only find broad observations, but no laws that were described in mathematics. Statements like 'evolution is a combination of variation and natural selection', or 'information flows from DNA to proteins and not vice-versa' are not laws, but simply observations. Of course, they are useful, but in a much more limited way when compared to their counterparts in physics and chemistry.

College and Beyond

The state of affairs in biology today is – for the lack of better word - catastrophic in all of its forms, including molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, genomics, proteomics, physiology and bioinformatics. For some reason, the discipline of biology never took time to establish a proper highly mathematical scientific framework similar to that created by Newton or Leibniz in physics.

As a result, biology and its graduate programs as they stand today will scare away any intelligent mind having even basic ability for abstraction or clear thought, as opposed to memorization or manual dexterity which seems to be in vogue in modern biology. Sadly for biology – and for all of us – more analytical minds will probably end up in physics, mathematics, economics (the only social science which has managed to introduce math), or chemistry departments.

Biology as Science of YAABA - Yet Another Ad-Hoc Biology Acronym

To be blunt, biology seems to be collapsing under never-ending data accumulation with almost no sign of abstraction or synthesis. What is worse, the longer we wait, the harder is to find a needle in this hay stack as the data sets are rapidly growing to astronomical proportions with better technology.

To convince yourself, try browsing through some of the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals today in life sciences such as Nature, Cell and Science. First, you will probably notice that the biology article is many times longer, while at the same time containing less ideas than the articles of sister sciences. Also, at a closer look the article resembles at best some sort of strange hybrid between a stream-of-consciousness James Joyce travel journal, surreal hallucinatory science fiction, and intentionally ambiguous college freshman humanities papers.

Thus, a typical sentence in a modern biological paper would sound something like the following: “We looked at this, it was green or at least greenish, mixed this and it looked like that. Or maybe not. Who knows, we need to look at again probably. What we saw, we now call it YAABA (Yet Another Ad-Hoc Biology Acronym). For further studies, we need to mix some more acronyms and peek into the microscope. We cannot formulate anything more precise since that is not the mode of analysis here, but we have to publish so we threw some stuff out anyway” and so forth.

Such articles make both the Mendel and Darwin of a couple of hundred years ago seem like real quantitative virtuosos since at least these founding fathers of biology used some form of math like rudimentary additions and subtractions. In contrast, you will be lucky to find even a single rigorous abstraction in modern biology papers.

Key Discoveries in Biology Made by Non-Biologists

Biologists will not like this but the sad truth is that that many of the most important discoveries of biology in the past century were made actually by non-biologists who took an interest in biology. If it were not for the two physicists who discovered DNA – Crick and Watson - and the chemist who figured out how to amplify it so it could be actually studied – Mullis – biologists would be still doing what they were doing before that – looking at liquids through a microscope and drawing up shopping lists of things they thought they saw.

Biologists proper, while truly curious about nature and mystified by the unknown seem to harbor a strange type of artisan masochism. This causes them to play with pipettes for hours in the labs, investing time in learning manual skills which can be made useless in an instant by a simple Perkin-Elmer sequencer or other similar machine.

Frozen Accidents

Sometimes, when people get used to an inefficient way of doing things, it becomes impossible to change their thinking. It turns out that a wrong standard can become so entrenched that it will be highly counterproductive to any progress of human thought or productivity. Take the example of the common keyboard and the way the letters are laid out. The problem of QWERTY [the letter sequence in the top left of your keyboard] has long been discussed with dismay since typing with this topology of keys is actually very inefficient. However, given that everyone who has ever used a typewriter or a computer is used to the layout, it has become impossible to change it. The entire world is typing now on a keyboard layout that was originally designed to be the slowest possible to avoid major issues with mechanical typewriters. Economists call these terrible, unfortunate situations ‘frozen accidents’, and the list of such frozen accidents is quite long, including such things as the English measurement units and political systems (think again Communism or labor-union socialism in France and Scandinavia). I am afraid the format of the modern biological research is just another example of such an accident. Luckily, we can change political systems and measurement units and whether we like it or not, biology needs to do something similar.

Sad Implications

Biology as a study of all living organisms is order of magnitudes more significant than the other sciences. Of what value is the inter-stellar travel or better plastics if we drop dead tomorrow? And we all will as it stands now, won’t we? We should prioritize biology and medical research and take it very seriously since it is a little too late to start thinking about when we or our close ones are lying on death bed. The unfortunate implication of the current gridlock in biology is that the opportunity cost of not straightening things out is massive. Many bright minds would not turn away from this intrinsically fascinating science if it had a similar language and framework as other natural sciences do.

Where Do We Go From Here? Or Rather, Where Do We Start?

Biology, biologists and those taking interest in biology – and everybody should since chances are that you, your parents, my parents and I will die of cancer if of nothing else - should start by formalizing a couple of fundamental laws and do that in a mathematical succinct manner, much in the spirit of Newton’s or Maxwell’s laws, or the Laws of Thermodynamics in chemistry. Saying that DNA codes proteins and not the other way around and calling it The Central Dogma is simply not good enough (and even this ‘law’ was formulated by a physicist, Watson). It is a long and painful progress, but at least it is a start and a step in the right direction.