Hm. I think it’s a great thing to debate, but I think the issue, as identified by the author, is how calculus is taught to various audiences. I think it is a bi

Hm. I think it’s a great thing to debate, but I think the issue, as identified by the author, is how calculus is taught to various audiences. I think it is a bit short-sighted to suggest people with ambitions in the life-sciences do not need to know how calculus can be used to describe the world. I think my experience suggests that even outdoor types who are drawn to field work should learn calculus in some functional way if they want to do science. I did an undergrad in environmental sciences and biology, but understanding the role of modeling in theory and practice is key to those fields and makes heavy use of calculus. I went on to get a PhD in ecology, but I used calculus explicitly and implicitly routinely. There is great satisfaction in writing out ideas and hypotheses about the world and then translating them into math and then code so that you can play with those ideas. Sometimes that just requires algebra, but it usually pulls in calc. The other risk is that by not learning broadly about the fields that are foundational to conducting science you simply limit your options. Maybe that field tech job loses its luster after a while and you start to want to understand how plate tectonics affected how the dirt got this way. Need calc. Personally, I switched to industry and do a combination of data science and engineering and calculus continues to be useful to me in practice and as a way of reasoning about the world. On the flip side, you can always learn it later when it does become explicitly needed. But again I think the problem is teaching geologists and biologists to do epsilon-deltas but not showing them how to specify and simulate a model based on rates of change of growth or propagation of waves or whatever. A lot of coursework is not thoughtfully conceived or delivered and the concept of weeder courses is super lame. But thats not the fault of calculus. +1 for requiring statistics too but virtually all of the above applies there too.