There is often interest among the public and in the media about evolution and its effects for contemporary humans. In this context, some argue that humans have stopped evolving, including persons who have a good degree of influence over the public opinion. Famous BBC Natural History Unit broadcaster David Attenborough, for example, argued a few years ago in an interview that humans are the only species who “put halt to natural selection of its own…

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Last week, I expanded on Rob Noble’s warning about the different meanings of de novo resistance with a general discussion on the meaning of resistance in a biological vs clinical setting. In that post, I suggested that clinicians are much more comfortable than biologists with resistance without cost, or more radically: with negative cost. But I made no argument — especially no reductive argument that could potentially sway a biologist — about why we should…

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This Wednesday, on These few lines, Rob Noble warned of the two different ways in which the term de novo resistance is used by biologists and clinicians. The biologist sees de novo resistance as new genetic resistance arising after treatment has started. The clinician sees de novo resistance as a tumour that is not responsive to treatment from the start. To make matters even more confusing, Hitesh Mistry points to a further interpretation among pharmocologists:…

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For the last week, I’ve been at the Institute Mittag-Leffler of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their program on mathematical biology. The institute is a series of apartments and a grand mathematical library located in the suburbs of Stockholm. And the program is a mostly unstructured atmosphere — with only about 4 hours of seminars over the whole week — aimed to bring like-minded researchers together. It has been a great opportunity to…

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Plato’s writing and philosophy are widely studied in colleges, and often turned to as founding texts of western philosophy. But if we went out looking for people that embraced the philosophy — if we went out looking for actual Platonist — then I think we would come up empty-handed. Or maybe not? A tempting counter-example is the mathematician. It certainly seems that to do mathematics, it helps to imagine the objects that you’re studying as…

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For the last half-year I’ve been keeping TheEGG to a strict weekly schedule. I’ve been making sure that at least one post comes out during every calendar week. At times this has been taxing. And of course this causes both reflection on why I blog and an urge to dip into old unfinished posts. This week I deliver both. Below is a linkdex of 7 posts from 2016 and earlier (with a few recent comments…

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One of my favorite conceptual metaphors from David Basanta is of mathematical models as maps. From this perspective, we as scientists are exploring an unknown realm of our particular domain of study. And we want to share with others what we’ve learned, maybe so that they can follow us, so we build a model. We draw a map. At first, we might not know how to identify prominent landmarks, or orient ourselves in our fields.…

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There are many approaches to teaching higher maths, but two popular ones, that are often held in contrast to each other, are the Bourbaki and Russian methods. The Bourbaki method is named after a fictional mathematician — a nom-de-plume used by a group of mostly French mathematicians in the middle of the 20th century — Nicholas Bourbaki, who is responsible for an extremely abstract and axiomatic treatment of much of modern mathematics in his encyclopedic…

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Twitter is not a place for nuance. It is a place for short, pithy statements. But if you follow the right people, those short statements can be very insightful. In these rare case, a tweet can be like a kōan: a starting place for thought and meditation. Today I want to reflect on such a thoughtful tweet from Rob Noble outlining his template for doing good work in mathematical biology. This reflection is inspired by…

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On a prior version of my paper on computational complexity as an ultimate constraint, Hemachander Subramanian made a good comment and question: Nice analysis Artem! If we think of the fitness as a function of genes, interactions between two genes, and interactions between three genes and so on, your analysis using epistasis takes into account only the interactions (second order and more). The presence or absence of the genes themselves (first order) can change the…

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