What?    

The Enterprise Biology Software Project sees biology as a collection of elegant puzzles all of which have surprisingly well-known solutions.  For the most part, however, these solutions are well-known to our biology - but not to us.

Why is this the case?  What can we do about it?  

Since we already know that biological puzzles are made up of many little parts, our first step toward finding a solution consists of assembling a collection of parts and then figuring out how they fit together.  Success is easy to spot.  It appears as "pictures" that take the form of equations.   

Equations appear wherever order exists in biology.  We now know that one of the richest sources of order can be found in the connections between parts.  Apparently, something important seems to be gained by maintaining parts in exact proportions - one to another.  In effect, it offers us an opportunity to explore biology as a mathematical science.  

Did you know that each biological part is defined by an equation, which, in turn, belongs to a larger family of equations?  Also, did you know that we can take a part out of the biological hierarchy to study it, but we cannot take the hierarchy out of the part?  What does this mean?  It means that unless we put our experimental data back where they belong in the hierarchy, the data lose their ability to tell us what we want to know.  Why?  When used to look for changes, most isolated data quickly collapse into a semiquantitative state where they become ambiguous and cannot be trusted.  Why?  Because they don't play by the rules.  How do we prevent this?  Learn to play by the rules.