Earlier this week I argued that biological systems posses dynamical properties that are biologically important, and understandable primarily through mathematical modeling. As an example, I discussed a paper that explored the advantages of double positive feedback loops in bistable switches.

I glossed over the math behind the model because of space and time constraints. (Constraints on a blog, you wonder? Well, I ran out of time, and once a blog post gets beyond 1000 words, the number people who read it to completion probably drops exponentially for every word over 1000.)

Why should we bother building mathematical models of biological systems? Scientists from other fields might wonder why one would as such a question - physicists, climate scientists, economists, engineers, and chemists all use mathematical models to understand the world.

Some biologists do too - individual proteins are studied with quantum mechanical models by biophysicists, enzyme reactions are modeled by biochemists, physiologists have mathematical models of the circulatory system, and population geneticists model the evolution of gene frequencies in populations.