One interesting thing about my new job is that my colleagues are not biologists, but physicists. To some
extent, physics was quite absent from my biology curriculum; of course, as a
freshman in biology I attended physics classes, but they were usually
disconnected from the scope of biology (with some notable exceptions, such as mentioned in this post). If you think about it, there are reasons for this.
Physics – and chemistry as well, for the matter – are fundamentally different
from biology in the sense that each individual atom or molecule is
undistinguishable from another one of the same kind, whereas in biology, in the
words of Ernst Mayr, each individual is unique. The uniqueness of individuals stands at the core of evolution, since natural selection requires
it to operate.
Despite
this observation, it is undeniable that biological organisms live and evolve in
the physical world. In that respect, a lot of what organisms can or cannot do
is under direct control of physical laws. If I want to jump, I’d better
hope that my muscles can counteract the force of
gravitation… Physics is thus intricately associated to biology, and when
biologists forget this fact it can lead to absurd hypotheses or ideas that
could be refuted by a wave of a hand.
With this
in mind, I have decided to do some more reading about the influence of physics
on biology. And one very savory topic is the one of size!
