Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A guide to the book
- 1 Putting two and two together
- 2 Units, formulae and the use of old envelopes: confronting some obstacles to quantitative thinking
- 3 Aspects of energy metabolism
- 4 Getting things in proportion
- 5 Perilous percentages, dangerous ratios
- 6 Building a trophic pyramid
- 7 Sodium in animals and plants
- 8 Exchanges of water and carbon dioxide
- 9 A geometric series
- 10 Introduction to logarithms
- 11 Bringing logarithms to life
- 12 Exponential relationships
- 13 Aspects of allometry
- 14 More on allometry, and on quantitative patterns in nature
- 15 How the abundance of food affects rates of feeding
- 16 The characterization of trees and other branching systems
- 17 Epilogue
- References
- Notes
- Index
17 - Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A guide to the book
- 1 Putting two and two together
- 2 Units, formulae and the use of old envelopes: confronting some obstacles to quantitative thinking
- 3 Aspects of energy metabolism
- 4 Getting things in proportion
- 5 Perilous percentages, dangerous ratios
- 6 Building a trophic pyramid
- 7 Sodium in animals and plants
- 8 Exchanges of water and carbon dioxide
- 9 A geometric series
- 10 Introduction to logarithms
- 11 Bringing logarithms to life
- 12 Exponential relationships
- 13 Aspects of allometry
- 14 More on allometry, and on quantitative patterns in nature
- 15 How the abundance of food affects rates of feeding
- 16 The characterization of trees and other branching systems
- 17 Epilogue
- References
- Notes
- Index
Summary
With Darwin let us contemplate a tangled bank
where plants of many kinds all interweave
their roots and diverse leaves and stems,
where insects flit and earthworms dig
their dank, dark tunnels through the soil
and molluscs move on silver trails.
Reflect upon these complex, varied forms,
each one dependent on the rest
and each begot by natural laws.
What grandeur in this view of life:
unnumbered young;
the war of nature, famine, death;
survival of the fitter few;
The Tyger rising from the night!
The final paragraph of The Origin of Species paints a picture of a tangled bank to which any biologist might warm. Is the spell broken by the counting of worms or reckoning of calories? I hope that some who thought that way can see now the pleasures and usefulness of biological arithmetic. I began this book by alluding to the accelerating rise of quantitative biology, and have made use of recent examples, but just a few pages on from the Preface I was quoting not the latest papers in cellular biology or genetics, but Darwin, and even Harvey. My concern, however, is very much with ways of thinking and ‘transferable skills’ (to use a current educational buzz-phrase) – and I think it interesting to see how the Ancients exercised them in contexts that are still meaningful. As to the actual biology, which of course I rank no lower, the plants and animals in the book ‘all interweave’ in consequence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Biology by NumbersAn Encouragement to Quantitative Thinking, pp. 205 - 216Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998