The biologist’s task is more than just learning facts they must attempt to understand the messy, complex web of life, writes Andy Lloyd

I disagree with your correspondent (Letters, 19 January) who thinks biology is preoccupied with memorising facts. I have heard this tired assertion many times in staff rooms during a career as a biologist who also taught physics and chemistry. Biology does indeed have elegance, with the theory of evolution and the structure of DNA giving an overarching understanding of the subject. Yet together they have produced a messy, ad hoc, complex and confusingly tangled web of life.

Lucky the chemists and physicists. Atoms with consistent structures obeying laws that seem to hold throughout the universe so that the inner workings of stars in distant galaxies are as explicable as the working of our own sun. The unfortunate biologist is stuck with attempting to unravel the twists and turns of processes within living organisms created without a designer or overall plan yet arguably the most complex entities in the universe.

Andy Lloyd

Amersham, Buckinghamshire

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