Should more of us be theoretical biologists?

‘Biology is more theoretical than physics’ was the provocative title of an article several years ago that laid out some examples of biological theories that preceded or predicted the discovery of important entities in advance, including genes, receptors, enzymes, tumor suppressors. Entire processes in biology were also theorized before their discovery, including how neurons function and carry out computations; how the inheritance of genes is sometimes linked to that of others; and ‘clonal selection’, the process by which immune cells multiply after matching with antigens to respond to an infection.

In a new piece for Asimov Press, Ulkar Aghayeva writes about why theoretical biology hasn’t had as much recognition, whether it’s harder for theories to be developed and tested due to the complexity of biology, and about some of the impacts that this theoretical work has had, including inspiring entirely new fields of experimental work. It seems to me that a huge amount of biology traces back to ideas that had previously only been theoretical, extrapolated from a couple of observations here and there, before being tested, refined or overthrown. And sometimes, even theories that were once cast aside have made a comeback decades later, like innate immunity, which was basically forgotten for about eighty years. Perhaps more of us should be theoretical biologists.