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> cells are extremely crowded and busy places Cells are extremely crowded and busy... and random and violent places. Molecular biology dances in a nano moshpi
by mncharity 9y ago
> cells are extremely crowded and busy places
Cells are extremely crowded and busy... and random and violent places.
Molecular biology dances in a nano moshpit from hell.
The Inner Life of a Cell is badly misleading. It reinforces many educationally toxic misconceptions. Yes, the graphics technology was limiting. But the video doesn't attempt to mitigate the negative impact. For instance, adding a couple of frames of Goodsell's crowded proteins, fading to sparseness, could have reduced its reinforcement of the "big empty cell" misconception.
And it doesn't just hide almost everything (crowded), or slow everything way down (busy), or show completely aphysical rendezvous and docking (random), but it also strings together carefully selected snapshots to tell a misleadingly peaceful narrative (violent).
That kinesin walking along, towing a vesicle? Its "feet" are actually madly flapping around. It is randomly "stepping" back and forth - only its net motion is biased. And between one net step and the next, that big vesicle has been slammed around to every position within reach of that tether. It's a random walk on a leash. Reality isn't a donkey quietly towing a slowly-moving barge. It's a balloon flapping madly in a hurricane, tethered to an intoxicated panicked mouse clinging to a rope.
Biology rides a ragged energetic edge, between things being too strong, too expensive to dis/assemble, and being smashed to pieces too quickly.
More generally, the video illustrates a pervasive problem with science education media. Even when done "well", some aspects are done with great skill and care, while other aspects are silently left utterly bogus. Pity the students, who lack the knowledge to sort out which is which. So rich ecologies of misconceptions are established. And are intractably expensive to displace. It's so easy to create content that leaves students worse off than if they had seen nothing at all. So that's, in general, what we create.
The violence of nanoscale is a critical, defining characteristic. That so many biology undergrads are unclear on it, let alone high-school and primary students, shows just how very far we have to go before teaching deep understanding, transferable knowledge, and cross-cutting principles, finally becomes a reality. Or more upbeat, how breathtakingly awesome science education might eventually become.
(FWIW, the top section of my very crufty http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms might help some with getting a handle on at least the size aspect of small things.)
- Balgair 9y ago> It's a balloon flapping madly in a hurricane, tethered to an intoxicated panicked mouse clinging to a rope Welp, my desk is now covered in coffee. Thanks for that one, I'll be stealing it ;) It may be better to think of a cell as more of a liquid crystal than anything else, considering the densities. The synapse of neurons is incredibly dense with structures and scaffolding proteins. Even most grad students still think that the ER is a soma kinda thingy, but it goes all the way up the dendrite to just kiss the synaptic buton. The ER is really more of a cell inside a cell, or rather the cell membrane is just a latex bodysuit for the ER. It's always amazing to me when I heard guys like Elon and Kurzweil talking about MMIs and how you are never gonna actually die, you'll just upload your brain, somehow. Like, they really have no idea how clueless we are in biology. Eric Schmidt goes to parties in West LA about living forever. It's crazy. We are decades away from even a cursory understanding of 1 cubic mm of brain tissue, with all the neurons, astrocytes, glia, mesenchymal cells, etc. Like, we just found out that the immune system is in your brain too, like 3 years ago. I actually think Elon has better odds of putting 0.6 of a Saturn V on Mars and not having it explode before we have a MMI.
- abecedarius 9y agoWhat do you mean by MMI?
- mncharity 9y ago> desk :) > liquid crystal [...] cell membrane is just a latex bodysuit for the ER Has anyone seen an attempt to collect or catalog such analogies? "One way to think about <concept>, is <one-liner or short story>." Maybe something like http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ , but for analogical conceptual understanding, instead of rough quantitative understanding. My very fuzzy recollection is bionumbers grew out of one grad student thinking "I don't have a quantitative feel for my area", and starting to collect numbers. Could we do that for stories? > upload your brain [...] crazy Well, there's https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ (clueless physicist meets unfamiliar field). But also... part of what makes science work, is fear of being embarrassed by getting it wrong in front of the community of one's peers. And to avoid that, extensively sanity checking with local peers. Trying to think clearly without those, using literature and smarts, but disconnected from the field(s), is hard. And bonus hard points for multidisciplinary questions.