Basic Biology for Born Engineers: Living Mosaics

Physics owes much of its success to the application of differential calculus. Correspondingly, most laws of physics are formulated as differential equations. This success has created the prejudice that a science cannot be ‘exact’ unless it stands firmly on a foundation of calculus. This doesn’t, however, work for biology. Living things are not as continuous, let alone differentiable, as most organisms and their parts change or end quite abruptly. Biology cannot offer differential equations for (say) the role of chromosomal telomeres in aging, or a link between macrophage polyploidy and cancer. The information flow between the limbic system and the frontal cortex is far too erratic to permit differentiation. The pheromone secretions that control the social order of ants follow no mathematical laws. The topology of the human skeleton is neither a perfect sphere, nor an idealized doughnut. However, all these and countless other biological phenomena decide life and death and are amazingly exactAs such, instead of even trying to paint living things with the exquisitely resolving brush of differential calculus, we may accept that they are actually made up of individual and sizable ‘pixels’. Hence, this book presents a novel view of biology as the unified science of ‘living mosaics’, which consist of discrete, yet interacting, ‘tiles’, which, in turn, are such ‘mosaics’ in their own rights.