Tim Howard interviews me and Sy Garte about our new paper with Stuart Kauffman The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences. Join us for a fascinating discussion about a new revolution underfoot in biology:
“The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences” challenges conventional scientific thinking by arguing that biology fundamentally breaks free from mathematical description. Published in the journal Entropy in March 2025, the paper by Seymour Garte, Perry Marshall, and Stuart Kauffman presents a radical idea: living systems cannot be fully described by mathematical equations because biology creates rather than merely follows mathematical rules.
The paper takes inspiration from Eugene Wigner’s classic 1960 paper that marveled at how well math describes physical phenomena. In contrast, we argue that the biological sciences have resisted the creation of precise mathematical laws that model the complexity of the living world.
- While physics and chemistry follow mathematical laws, biology breaks free because living things make choices, adapt creatively, and generate unpredictable responses to their environments.
- The paper presents solid proof that it’s impossible to build a completely predictable model of biology or to use traditional math to capture how evolution really works.
Nature’s creativity cannot be contained within mathematical boxes—potentially upending decades of reductionist thinking in science and opening doors to new ways of understanding life.
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