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JPR Advance Access originally published online on July 15, 2006
Journal of Plankton Research 2006 28(10):965-967; doi:10.1093/plankt/fbl022
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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Reply to Horizons Article ‘Castles built on sand: dysfunctionality in plankton models and the inadequacy of dialogue between biologists and modellers’ Flynn (2005). Shiny mathematical castles built on grey biological sands

Xabier Irigoien*

AZTI, Herrera Kaia Portualdea, Z/G, 20110 Gipuzkoa, Spain

* Corresponding Author: xirigoien@pas.azti.es

Received June 20, 2006; accepted in principle June 28, 2006; accepted for publication June 30, 2006; published online July 15, 2006
Communicating editor: R.P. Harris

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

Two discussion papers (Harte, 2002Go; Flynn, 2005Go) give me the opportunity to debate two common views about biology: (i) biology is a grey science and (ii) biologists only look for complexity, not large unifying theories (that can be used in models).

  1. Biology is not a grey science—all you need to know about how an organism works, what it does and even how it got to be here today are written inside the organism in a very precise digital code called DNA (and we are learning to read it). There are two reasons why biology is usually considered as a grey science. There is one that exact science practitioners tend to accept: that the expression of the instructions is flexible in relation to the physical environment, phenotypic plasticity. The other is one that modellers tend . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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