A lowland tropical evergreen forest in East TimorWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, HINRICH KAISER
This classic paper describes the flaws in the current biological paradigm by pointing out how difficult it would be to use biological methods to fix a broken radio. The trouble? Most of the discipline is descriptive but not predictive, and lacks a formal language. Taking a page from engineering may help biologists make sense of complex living systems, the author argues.
Y. Lazebnik, "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis," Cancer Cell, 2:179-82, 2002. Free F1000 Evaluation
2. Diversity doesn't follow productivity
Although ecologists have long subscribed to a hump-shaped model for the relationship between the primary productivity and plant species richness in a particular area—as productivity rose, the model holds, so does species richness, until some ...
