Talk:Mathematical biology

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I reverted the partial AE -> BE shift in the spelling - BE was the first spelling used for any variant word [1]. In addition, this was only a partial shift, made spelling inconsistent in the article. Guettarda 13:16, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for this change. Porcher 14:42, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] referencing

I think there's a problem with the referencing on this page. The idea of footnotes is, well, they are meant to refer to something at the foot of the page! That should give the full formal reference, and *that* may in turn link to a copy of the paper. But I don't expect to have to download some PDF to find out which paper you are referring to.

In fact, I much prefer the Harvard referencing style. If I say in the text "genes are selfish (Dawkins 1976)" then probably 70% at least of the people reading the article wouldn't need to go look & see what book I was referring to, so it saves them time. If you don't allow Harvard referencing, most people are not going to have time or bother to look up every single reference, so they loose out on some information.

See further WP:Cite --Jaibe 20:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

pointless comment: Harvard style referencing is awesome as it puts metadata (who and when was the data made) with the data! That paradox is so bad that some people hate it (or they hate sorting the reference list alphabetically). --Squidonius (talk) 11:22, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Citecheck template removed

The citecheck template covers a narrow sort of problem: if an editor doubts that a citation presents information appropriately (such as giving inaccurate facts or quoting out of context). It seems that some other template would be appropriate here. See Wikipedia:Citing sources and Wikipedia:Cleanup resources. Durova 02:49, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Woe to the future.

an increasing interest in in silico experimentation due to the complications involved in human and animal research.

That's a euphemistic way of saying "an increasing interest in not performing experiments because they're too hard. "In silico experimentation" is an oxymoron.

Also, this entire "Importance" subsection is purely speculative, subjective, unreferenced, and unjustified. It should be removed. --75.58.54.17 23:49, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge of Computational biomodeling

The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

The result was merge into Mathematical biology, 1 disagree present. -- Squidonius (talk) 11:48, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

A merge tag was placed on this article in November. I have changed the tag there to mergeto and added the mergefrom tag here. The discussion is directed here. There is none on the other article. This merge seems sensible. Please discuss below. --Bduke (talk) 00:41, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

  • Agree Mainly the definitions are vague and no way established, and hence author specific and overlapping. Mathematical modelling, mathematical biology and computation biology should be one but mentioned. In my opinion there are too many separate records in bioinformatics/compbio, which is ironic that the bio topic which should know more about networks actually is an unlinked agregate of records. --Squidonius (talk) 23:16, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Disagree:

"Computers are to biology what mathematics is to physics" Harold Morowitz

I would echo that sentiment, and add that the Computational Biology Wiki should not be merged with the Mathematical Biology Wiki. It seems unlikely to me that there will ever be a math capable of modeling life, but an approximate and pragmatic computational biology seems plausible. 209.90.238.134 (talk) 05:09, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

  • Being a a semantics/grey line issue on the definition of its breath, that the two may or may not be identical is "debated", but a page with only 3 lines in it is a nearly useless article. If we can establish why the two may differ, we can add a section to each pointing out this issue with a good reason and with references, if they are both the same shade of gray changing the title to "mathematical biology and computation modelling" might be wise.

In reply, in my opinion they are the same due to:

    • fyi, ppl in physics do similar analyses and models.
    • Nobody here is saying mathematical biology is computational biology. Instead, that it is an aspect of compuation biology, that of making models with maths on a computer and hence a synonym of computational modelling.
    • Mathematical biology is making mathematical models using computers, a tool that allows complex mathematics and to run through all combinations (dynamic modelling still involves maths).
    • All quantitative computational models are mathematical models.
    • All "good" models are quantitive as qualitative models can be derived from quantitative and not viceversa.
    • The definition of good model to approximate life is ambigous, as it does define what robustness is considered acceptable and what system is in focus. Saying a whole planet to the molecule level is not an isolated system (in this hypothetical scenario dinosaurs would be alive, say). Reguarding robustness, adding noise to the system at a point of dimuishing returns (every protein can interact with any other protein, say, is a waste of effort as only a few specific changes have an effect). so, even though currently untractable, life on an isolated system to an extremely high degree of robustness is mathematically possible (unless life is a miracle).
    • Stuff like normalizing a qPCR intensity is not mathematical biology, but just algebra in biology, mathematical biology is identical to theoretical physics.

In summary, is there a computer model that is not quatitative (=mathematical)? and is mathematical biology only "theoretical" model building? I do not want to have an edit war even less over semantics, so please point out where I am mistaken, thanks #REDIRECT --Squidonius (talk) 18:14, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

DISCUSSION FROM OTHER PAGE (error in system when tag were placed) Computational biomodeling mean making biological models with a computer. Mathematical biology is more apt title and is a richer page, although it is completely orphaned I think. --Squidonius (talk) 18:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

There are actually a few articles that this article could be merged in (or replaced by).
It is not clear from this article how computational biomodeling relates to these subjects. Is it really a concept that deserves its own article? I would suggest to merge any relevant content into Mathematical biology, Computational biology or others and mark this article for deletion. Hendrik Fuß (talk) 15:52, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
Hendrik: No, a page should not be deleted after merging the text into some other article. Since that would loose the edit history and thus the attribution to the authors of this text which breaks the GFDL license. But from a more practical point: Someone might already have put links to this article from other web sites or have web browser shortcuts to this article. And the old author(s) might come looking for it. So instead this page should be redirected to the article it was merged into.
--David Göthberg (talk) 23:18, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.