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On the other hand, biology is so complicated that you have to simplify things down to abstractions that let you communicate and reason about causal stories, and
by aheilbut 7y ago
On the other hand, biology is so complicated that you have to simplify things down to abstractions that let you communicate and reason about causal stories, and that's what these sorts of figures are good for.
- anigbrowl 7y agoCompletely agree, but the clip-art approach doesn't help - it's often easier to understand casual relationships in terms of colored dots for partitions or very basic parameterization like node size in a graph, than to with clip art of tiny livers or brains. Many of the more successful abstractions seem like they would make for extremely fun games. I've seen a few Fantastic Voyage! bio-themed videogames but they are usually either stupid memory games designed to teach technical terms, recycled space invader games with bacteria clip art, or simulations like FoldIt that are fun puzzles but don't really capture the dynamism and system behaviors that make biology so interesting. If you'll forgive me venting my spleen, I really really want a game that lets me run the immune system. I don't need it to look like the inside of a bio textbook, I need it to model the information-production-distribution-processes and their strong resemblance to dynamic wargaming.
- reubens 7y ago+1 would like to see this game too. As a medical student, however, I can vouch for the utility of clip art in visualisation. You get delivered so much visual information that if there is coherence to it, you have more chance of processing it correctly.