I agree with Wilson – but only in part. We should not discourage students from entering science simply because they have poor mathematical backgrounds. Some people have succeeded in science without strong math skills. Many more have acquired mathematical skills because they have had scientifically-motivated questions they wanted to solve.
However, in my experience (which is more limited than Wilson’s), the problem we face in ecology and evolutionary biology is not that we are scaring away students who do not have formal mathematical training. Instead, it is that, partly because of their histories as observational sciences, ecology and evolutionary biology have come to be seen as the sciences for people who hate math. And, rather than combatting this view, we endorse it. At many US and UK universities, a student can obtain a BS in biology without taking a single course in mathematics or statistics. In some cases, a student can obtain a PhD in biology with no more than a basic high school math background. In my opinion, when students come to us because they are interested in ecology and evolution, we should encourage them, regardless of their mathematical backgrounds. They are young, and as Wilson points out, not all of them have had the opportunity to learn math. But, once they have come to us, we should impress upon them that gaining a foundation in mathematics is critical to their careers. Not every scientist needs to be able to develop novel statistical techniques to analyze his or her data, but we need to understand enough about data analysis to know which data to collect, and when we collaborate with statisticians we need to understand whether what they are doing with our data makes sense. Not every scientist needs to build formal mathematical models of his or her system, but we need to know enough to understand which models that are built can tell us something about our systems and which are, to paraphrase Wilson, just clogging the annals of biology. So, by all means, we should encourage students in ecology and evolution regardless of their mathematical backgrounds. But, if we fail to teach them the importance of mathematics in biology, we are failing as educators, and we are failing in our responsibility to the next generation of scientists. Tucker Gilman University of Manchester --
