Martin Nowak and the Origin of Life Martin Nowak has stirred up his share of trouble in academia — most recently by disproving a popular and long-held strategy of evolution. The debate played out in the pages of Nature, one of the world's premier scientific journals. Nowak and his co-authors, including eminent biologist E.O. Wilson, faced off against more than a hundred researchers who disputed Nowak's claims about a kin selection. In the realm of academic spats, it was epic. But Nowak appeared unfazed as he recounted the event at an informal Sunday morning gathering in Cambridge. "One-hundred and thirty-seven scientists signed a petition that we were completely wrong but no one has actually explained why were are completely wrong," he said. Nowak didn't set out to provoke these fights. Instead, an unlikely and seemingly innocuous tool has led him into them: mathematics. Nowak is an Austrian-born mathematician and biochemist who leads the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, a research team he founded in 2003. The team's work, largely supported by The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation, is aimed at bringing the rigor of mathematics to the wet-lab world of biology, especially evolution. Nowak sees the widespread application of math to biology as inevitable — "a kind of maturation process," as he told the New Scientist magazine last year. "Without a mathematical description, we can get a rough handle on a natural phenomenon but we can't fully understand it.... The beautiful thing about mathematics is that it can decide an argument. Some things are fiercely debated for years, but with mathematics the issues become clear." Indeed, Nowak sees signs that his fellow researchers are coming around to his ideas about kin selection — an evolutionary strategy that favors the survival of an individual's close relatives — and to the mathematics that underlies it. Ant debate: E. 0. Wilson is in his 80s and has studied insects, particularly ants, for a