I'm a physicist who has worked in genomics and found biologist's attitudes toward math to be fairly weird. Some get it, most don't. But the way physicists think about math is for the most part antithetical to the way mathematicians think about it. To a physicist, math is a language for talking about things with in-built protections against contradictions. Math looks more like a very special natural language to us, which attitude drives mathematicians nuts.

The odd thing is that this difference in attitudes between physicists and biologists seems to me to be at least as much historically contingent as really dependent on the subject matter. Physics is hugely sprawling too, and a great deal of it is only passingly-mathematical.

If Darwin had been more mathematically minded he could have easily come at the problem of the origin of species from a viewpoint as strongly idealized and mathematically compact as Newton did with regard to physics. Newton was admittedly blessed with a very-nearly ideal system to study (the solar system) but was able to apply his ideas to other systems using a wide variety of increasingly sketchy approximations.

But I'm still pretty sure a mathematical mind on the order of Newton's could find a way to state evolution by variation and natural selection as a theorem rather than a theory, that follows necessarily from the laws of probability and the facts of chemistry (many of which Darwin didn't know, but still). It is at the very least a fun idea to speculate about: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...