Biology can be hard to intuit, in part because it operates across vastly different scales, from single atoms all the way up to entire ecosystems. Students of biology therefore often first meet its agents and mechanisms through metaphors: molecules are charged balls connected by sticks! evolution designs organisms to maximize their fitness! mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell! While metaphors give us qualitative handles to grasp, they often oversimplify complex ideas. This is because most metaphors fail to address specifics ' especially regarding numbers. Consider another common bio-metaphor: DNA is the blueprint of the cell. That's useful for conceptual understanding, but how big is this blueprint' Is it as big as a novel or an encyclopedia' How much space does it take up' It's possible to look up or calculate the answers to these questions; the human genome is 6.2 billion base pairs, which takes up about 10 cubic microns.1 But how big is that compared to the total volume...
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