Why should we bother building mathematical models of biological systems? Scientists from other fields might wonder why one would as such a question - physicists, climate scientists, economists, engineers, and chemists all use mathematical models to understand the world.

Some biologists do too - individual proteins are studied with quantum mechanical models by biophysicists, enzyme reactions are modeled by biochemists, physiologists have mathematical models of the circulatory system, and population geneticists model the evolution of gene frequencies in populations.