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This is one of the most important parts of biological intuition that is very hard to get access to. Even PhD graduates often stumble when asked even about the
by jfarlow 8y ago
This is one of the most important parts of biological intuition that is very hard to get access to. Even PhD graduates often stumble when asked even about the order-of-magnitude of some of these values.
It's not dissimilar to the general order-of-magnitude of speeds associated with various computer components (RAM, CPU, Cache, HD seek, network latency, etc.). But there are many more components in a biological system, and their interactions up and down the physical scales are sometimes not obvious.
A simple example of intuition: once you've sequence your DNA, how would you go about changing it? Which DNA? Is the 'sequence' you got back an average sequence across just those cells that were sampled? Is the DNA you would want to change both copies, in each cell, in every tissue?
Another example is running through how a PCR reaction works.
The actual result of the process often trips people up the first time because it's not immediately clear that there is an infinite pool of each component in the system to permit self-reactions in later steps of the process. Once a component is used in the first part of the process, it's still there in later parts of the process.
- trisomy21 8y agoOut 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?
- jfarlow 8y agoI'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.
- trisomy21 8y agoThanks 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.
- jfarlow 8y agoThose "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.
- trisomy21 8y agoTotally agree.
- mncharity 8y agoYou might like the top section 'remembering the sizes of things' of my wasn't-intended-to-be-public slowwwlllyyy-loading page http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms . It's basically chunked powers-of-ten, so two 1000x frames ("micro view" um->mm, and "nano view" nm->mm) get you down to 'atoms look like sand'. It seems to provide useful scaffolding - a place to hang some flavors of rough-quantitative knowledge. It seems to at least sometimes work nicely with bionumbers "how big is a X" searches, as "N um"-like answers permit "oh, so it's about this (tactile kinesthetic) big - so it's bigger than Y and smaller than Z and about the same size as W - hmm, so I wonder how many X's there are in a mumble - new search: 'how man X in a mumble'". But that's purely anecdotal, and from very limited experience.
- 2020-3030 8y agoThanks for mentioning your site and have you seen http://scaleofuniverse.com/ http://scaleofuniverse.com/ ? I sometimes use that site as a lecture tool when a larger context of time and space is useful.
- mncharity 8y agoInteresting mix. In addition to videos, there are interactives like https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/ https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/ and https://www.nikon.com/about/sp/universcale/scale.htm https://www.nikon.com/about/sp/universcale/scale.htm .