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The Emergence of Biomathematics and the Case of Population Dynamics A Revival of Mechanical Reductionism and Darwinism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Giorgio Israel
Giorgio Israel
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics Universita di Roma “La Sapienza”
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Abstract

The development of modern mathematical biology took place in the 1920s in three main directions: population dynamics, population genetics, and mathematical theory of epidemics. This paper focuses on the first trend which is considered the most significant. Modern mathematical theory of population dynamics is characterized by three aspects (the first two being in a somewhat critical relationship): the emergence of the mathematical modeling approach, the attempt at establishing it in a reductionist-mechanist conceptual framework, and the revival of Darwinism. The first section is devoted to the analysis of the concept of mathematical model and the second one presents an example of a mathematical model (Van der Pol's model of heartbeat) which is a good prototype of that concept. In section 3 the main trends of mathematization of biology and the cultural and scientific contexts in which they found their development are discussed. Sections 4 and 5 are devoted to the contributions of V. Volterra and A. J. Lotka, to the analysis of the differences of their scientific conceptions, and to a discussion of a case study: the priority dispute concerning the discovery of the Volterra-Lotka equations. The historical analysis developed in this paper is also intended to detect the roots of some recent trends of mathematization of biology.

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Science in Context , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1993 , pp. 469 - 509
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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