Out of curiosity, are you saying that someone with higher biological numeracy would be better equipped to answer the questions you've posed in your simple intuition example?
I'd say, arguably, yes. And not necessarily because those examples use numeracy directly - but rather because a biological numeracy would provide a foundation to an intuition that would prevent the beginner's mistakes in those examples.
I argue that that biological numeracy is a prerequisite (and a consequence) of having a properly scaled biological intuition. And those examples test that intuition.
Thanks for clarifying. I find this topic quite interesting. I was thinking about the process to create recombinant DNA vs the PCR process and, as a thought experiment, wondered how biological numeracy might have played a role in the development of each. I feel like PCR is a great example of biological numeracy in action (as you pointed out), but I think part of the beauty of the recombinant DNA process is that it demonstrates our understanding of the physical attributes - size, structure, shape, etc. of biological molecules, perhaps even more so than numeracy.
Those "physical attributes" are most grossly characterized with those same measures- size, shape, length, stiffness, etc. And if you have access to those simple attributes you get a lot farther than if you just think about a genome as a magical information store.
