Mountain excitement

theory? What is its legacy today in biology? Quite a few mathematical fads have burst onto the popular press, promising great new insights into biology: information theory, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and most recently complexity theory, to name just a few. All were quite useful in their founding fields (except complexity, which has proven slippery to even define), but all failed to live up to their hype, and faded from the public eye, slinking back to the specialties wherefrom they arose, and where they still prove quite useful. But none has really contributed much to biology. As for chaos, it is a mathematical phenomenon that biologists were well advised to be aware of: that deterministic models could mimic random variation in some ways. But beyond that, I can’t see that it has provided any startling biological insights. In physics and chemistry, mathematical phenomena have occasionally found amazing correspondences in the real world, but this has not happened very much in biology, where biological truths are not found in mathematics, but in measurements. Someday this may change, but I don’t foresee it happening any time soon.