Sometime before 6 August 2014, David Basanta and Tamir Epstein were discussing the increasing focus of mathematical oncology on tumour heterogeneity. An obstacle for this focus is a good definitions of heterogeneity. One path around this obstacle is to take definitions from other fields like ecology — maybe species diversity. But this path is not straightforward: we usually — with some notable and interesting examples — view cancer cells as primarily asexual and the species…

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In his autobiography, Darwin remarked on mathematics as an extra sense that helped mathematicians see truths that were inaccessible to him. He wrote: During the three years which I spent at Cambridge… I attempted mathematics… but got on very slowly. The work was repugnant to me, chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra. This impatience was very foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted…

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For a mathematician — like John D. Cook, for example — objectives and constraints are duals of each other. But sometimes the objectives are easier to see than the constraints. This is certainly the case for evolution. Here, most students would point you to fitness as the objective to be maximized. And at least at a heuristic level — under a sufficiently nuanced definition of fitness — biologists would agree. So let’s take the objective…

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Traditionally, knowledge is separated from activity and passed down from teacher to student as disembodied information. For John Dewey, this tradition reinforces the false dichotomy between knowing and doing. A dichotomy that is socially destructive, and philosophically erroneous. I largely agree with the above. The best experiences I’ve had of learning was through self-guided discovery of wanting to solve a problem. This is, for example, one of the best ways to learn to program, or…

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“The logic of animal conflict” — a 1973 paper by Maynard Smith and Price — is usually taken as the starting for evolutionary game theory. And as far as I am an evolutionary game theorists, it influences my thinking. Most recently, this thinking has led me to the conclusion that there are two difference conceptions of evolutionary games possible: reductive vs. effective. However, I don’t think that this would have come as much of a…

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Last month, I blogged about abstraction and lamented that abstract models are lacking in biology. Here, I want to return to this. What isn’t lacking in biology — and what I also work on — is simulation and heuristic models. These can seem abstract in the colloquial sense but are not very abstract for a computer scientist. They are usually more idealizations than abstractions. And even if all I care about is abstract models —…

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There is a lot of advice written out there for aspiring science writers and bloggers. And as someone who writes science and about science, I read through this at times. The most common trend I see in this advice is to make your writing personal and to tell a story, with all the drama and plot-twists of a good page-turner. This is solid advise for good writing, one that we shouldn’t restrict to writing about…

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At the start of this month, one of my favourite blogs — Dynamic Ecology — pointed me to a great interview with Michela Massimi. She has recently won the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for the philosophy of science, and to celebrate Philip Ball interviewed her for Quanta. I recommend reading the whole interview, but for this post, I will focus on just one aspect. Ball asked Massimi how she defends philosophy of science against dismissive…

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Today is Alan Turing’s birthday. He would have turned 106. It has been too long since I last wrote about him on TheEGG. Today, I want to provide an overview of some of his most important work based on my and other’s answers on this old cstheory question. This will build slightly on a post I wrote two years ago for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, but it will share a lot of text in common.…

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Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on how abstract is not the opposite of empirical. In that post, I distinguished between the colloquial meaning of abstract and the ‘true’ meaning used by computer scientists. For me, abstraction is defined by multiple realizability. An abstract object can have many implementations. The concrete objects that implement an abstraction might differ from each other in various — potentially drastic — ways but if the implementations are ‘correct’…

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