Mathematics of Life: Unlocking the Secrets of Existence PDF
Preview Mathematics of Life: Unlocking the Secrets of Existence
Mathematics of Life By the same author Concepts of Modern Mathematics Game, Set and Math The Problems of Mathematics Does God Play Dice? Another Fine Math You’ve Got Me into Fearful Symmetry (with Martin Golubitsky) Nature’s Numbers From Here to Infinity The Magical Maze Life’s Other Secret Flatterland What Shape Is a Snowflake? The Annotated Flatland Math Hysteria The Mayor of Uglyville’s Dilemma Letters to a Young Mathematician Why Beauty Is Truth How to Cut a Cake Taming the Infinite: The Story of Mathematics Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures Cows in the Maze with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen The Science of Discworld The Science of Discworld II: the Globe The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch with Jack Cohen The Collapse of Chaos Figments of Reality Evolving the Alien/What Does a Martian Look Like? Wheelers (science fiction) Heaven (science fiction) Mathematics of Life Unlocking the Secrets of Existence Ian Stewart First published in Great Britain in 2011 by PROFILE BOOKS LTD 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R OJH www.profilebooks.com Copyright © Joat Enterprises, 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The right of Ian Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by his estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 184668 198 1 eISBN 978 184765 350 5 Export ISBN 978 184668 550 7 Text design by [email protected] Typeset in Stone Serif by Data Standards Ltd, Frome, Somerset Printed and bound in Britain by Clays Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061. Contents Preface 1 Mathematics and Biology 2 Creatures Small and Smaller 3 Long List of Life 4 Florally Finding Fibonacci 5 The Origin of Species 6 In a Monastery Garden 7 The Molecule of Life 8 The Book of Life 9 Taxonomist, Taxonomist, Spare that Tree 10 Virus from the Fourth Dimension 11 Hidden Wiring 12 Knots and Folds 13 Spots and Stripes 14 Lizard Games 15 Networking Opportunities 16 The Paradox of the Plankton 17 What is Life? 18 Is Anybody Out There? 19 The Sixth Revolution Notes Acknowledgements Index Preface Mathematical theory and practice have always gone hand in hand, from the time primitive humans scratched marks on bones to record the phases of the Moon to the current search for the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider. Isaac Newton’s calculus informed us about the heavens, and over the past three centuries its successors have opened up the whole of mathematical physics: heat, light, sound, fluid mechanics, and later relativity and quantum theory. Mathematical thinking has become the central paradigm of the physical sciences. Until very recently, the life sciences were different. There, mathematics was at best a servant. It was used to perform routine calculations and to test the significance of statistical patterns in data. It didn’t contribute much conceptual insight or understanding. It didn’t inspire great theories or great experiments. Most of the time, it might as well not have existed. Today, this picture is changing. Modern discoveries in biology have opened up a host of important questions, and many of them are unlikely to be answered without significant mathematical input. The variety of mathematical ideas now being used in the life sciences is enormous, and the demands of biology are stimulating the creation of entirely new mathematics, specifically aimed at living processes. Today’s mathematicians and biologists are working together on some of the most difficult scientific problems that the human race has ever tackled – including the nature and origin of life itself. Biology will be the great mathematical frontier of the twenty-first century. Mathematics of Life celebrates the rich variety of connections between mathematics and biology that already exist, from the Human Genome Project, through the structure of viruses and the organisation of the cell, to the form and behaviour of entire organisms and their interaction in the global ecosystem. It will also show how mathematics can shed new light on difficult issues concerning evolution, where many important processes take too long to observe, or happened hundreds of millions of years ago and have left only cryptic traces. Initially, biology was about plants and animals. Then it was about cells. Now it is mostly about complex molecules. To reflect these changes in scientific it is mostly about complex molecules. To reflect these changes in scientific thinking about the enigma of life, the book starts from the everyday human level, and follows the historical path that led biologists to focus ever more sharply on the microscopic structure of living creatures, culminating in DNA, the ‘molecule of life’. Most of the material discussed in the first third of the book is therefore about biology. However, mathematics makes an early appearance, tracing questions about the geometry of plants from Victorian times to the present day, to illustrate how new mathematical ideas have been motivated by biology. Once the biological background has been established, mathematics comes to centre stage as we build up from the atomic scale, back to the level with which we feel most comfortable, the one on which we all live. The world of grass, trees, sheep, cows, cats, dogs ... and people. The mathematics involved is far-ranging: probability, dynamics, chaos theory, symmetry, networks, mechanics, elasticity – even knot theory. Most of the applications discussed here are to mainstream mathematical biology: the structure and function of the complex molecules that co-ordinate the complex processes of life, the shapes of viruses, the evolutionary games that led to the huge diversity of life on this planet and are still happening today, the workings of the nervous system and the brain, the dynamics of ecosystems. I’ve also included chapters on the nature of life and the possible existence of alien life forms. The interaction between mathematics and biology is one of the hottest areas of science. It has already come a long way in a very short time. Only the future will show just how far it can go. But one thing I guarantee: it’s going to be an exciting ride. Ian Stewart Coventry, September 2010
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