When people say math doesn't matter and is useless, I see it as rather akin to standing in Adam Savage's workshop and wondering why he has collected so much useless stuff and proudly declaring their inability to understand or utilize the contents.

As a bonus, here's another IMHO highly underrated gem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution Not only are there characteristic patterns intrinsic to evolution (in all its forms, far beyond just biology), there are characteristic patterns to interacting evolving systems. And that's, like, basically everything in the world. Super useful tool.