Related papers: Integrating Evolutionary Biology into Physics Clas…
The University of Maryland (UMD) Biology Education and Physics Education Research Groups are investigating students' views on the role of physics in introductory biology courses. This paper presents data from an introductory course that…
Educators and policy-makers have advocated for reform of undergraduate biology education, calling for greater integration of mathematics and physics in the biology curriculum. While these calls reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary…
Evolutionary biology shares many concepts with statistical physics: both deal with populations, whether of molecules or organisms, and both seek to simplify evolution in very many dimensions. Often, methodologies have undergone parallel and…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
This work examines how experiences in one disciplinary domain (biology) can impact the relationship a student builds with another domain (physics). We present a model for disciplinary relationships using the constructs of identity, affect,…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
As the frontiers of biology become increasingly interdisciplinary, the physics education community has engaged in ongoing efforts to make physics classes more relevant to life sciences majors. These efforts are complicated by the many…
Teaching physics to biologists requires far more than making the course for engineers mathematically less rigorous and adding in a few superficial biological problems. What is needed is for physicists to work closely with biologists to…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
In the present article the recent works to formulate laws in Darwinian evolutionary dynamics are discussed. Although there is a strong consensus that general laws in biology may exist, opinions opposing such suggestion are abundant. Based…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…
We present outcomes from curricular changes made to an introductory calculus-based physics course whose audience is primarily life science majors, the majority of whom plan to pursue post-baccalaureate studies in medical and scientific…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed…
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…
We outline an unified introduction to the evolution equations of classical and quantum systems intended for a high school students audience. The attempt consists in circumventing the lack of mathematical knowledge with the use of simplified…
A common feature of the recent calls for reform of the undergraduate biology curriculum has been for better coordination between biology and the courses from the allied disciplines of mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Physics has lagged…
An elementary understanding of the relevant length, mass and energy scales at the molecular level can be used to explain the order of magnitude of material properties such as mass density, latent heat, surface tension, elastic moduli and…
A central question in developmental biology is how size and position are determined. The genetic code carries instructions on how to control these properties in order to regulate the pattern and morphology of structures in the developing…