Why is probability useful in biology?

Answer 1

It is extremely useful in doing any kind of research-based analysis. For example, let's just say you are studying a large number of mice, collected in the field. You want to examine their health based on their environment, and you are specifically looking at environmental toxins. You survey the farmers at each collection point, and ask what fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc. they use. You record all of the data, and do testing on the mice to determine what their toxin levels are. Then you also wish to see what problems may be associated in the mice with a specific toxin. But you have some mice that are way off the charts in terms of averages for a certain element or toxin. Does this taint the result? Did these mice somehow contact those toxins abnormally (i.e. "experimental contamination")? Should you throw those "outliers" out of the data to keep them from skewing the statistics? What do you do with these? Here is where a good knowledge of probabilities and of statistics will really come in handy.

As they say, figures don't lie, but liars can figure. One's use of proper mathematical science can render the biological science either useful or useless.

Answer 2

Not that useful, per say, in biology,, but very useful in its specialised subjects - like Genetics, Medicine,, Pathology & Epidimeology.
U have to asses microbial / viral spreads according to circumstances / environment etc.. using Probability (with scientific paramaters)... otherwise, it would be searching for a needle in haystack... u can say it works as a manual computer in Science...

Answer 3

Because you can ask questions like, "What is the probability that bone marrow cells are in S phase?" This is relevant because biological systems have so many variables, that they don't behave in absolute predictable ways (due to the limited knowledge we have about them). But the behavior of a group of biological units can be approximated based on the observed probabilities of their behavior.

Answer 4

very useful in genetics