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I should have loved biology

• lr4444lr 4y ago
  This is the natural result of state standardized education. It has its pros though, like getting a functionally literate and numerate workforce of average people when done decently. It will rarely serve people of the author's level of intelligence. That's one of the cons.
• 3qz 4y ago
• dinvlad 4y ago
  I'd even claim that we don't really fully understand how computer systems work anymore. Let me explain. When someone creates a new system, we could argue they have a complete understanding of it, since they build everything from the "ground up". Although even then, they use a particular level of abstraction - not necessarily needing to understand how third-party libraries work, or how it all translates to machine code etc. Imagine now this person (or a team with equal understanding of the system) leaves, and another team joins. How are they supposed to "understand" it? They would have to piece together everything very much like we're trying to do in biology. Even when the original creators left a "plan" in the form of code, docs or even being accessible for Q&A, they cannot possibly verbalize all the minute details, because the complexity of the system is so large that they would have to spend an equal amount of time on explaining as on developing it. And that doesn't even account for random things or reasons they themselves forgot, or never understood in the first place. As a result, we're left with only a partial understanding of the system, the level of which goes down the larger the system is. And as more teams join and develop their own pieces and leave, this knowledge gets diluted so much that it becomes hopeless to even reason about the whole thing. So, I'd argue we can only strive to understand the most important pieces. And, just like we see in biology, the process of their discovery is mostly just educated trial-and-error, aided by the tools like better diagrams to speed up the process. And maybe that's OK, if the ultimate goal is to get to some practical results like curing a disease or expanding the business. We can discover the mechanisms that lead to reaching these goals, but if they aren't relevant, then it's just going to be an academic exercise and another data point in the trial-and-error (until someone discovers how to use it for some new goal!).
  • Phurist 4y ago
    You do not need to know every implementation detail down the stack, just the the general concepts behind it all. But in case you do need to know a specific part of the stack very thoroughly, you can just read the source code and come up with an understanding quite soon. That is not the case with biology, if you want to know a part of the stack thoroughly, you in essence have to come up with the "source code" your self.
    • dinvlad 4y ago
      > just read the source code That's the problem though - code is not enough for understanding. Very well-written and documented code can be, but it's not a given. And the complexity grows exponentially the more of the code there's. Unfortunately, many managers think the way you describe, while discounting the intangible knowledge that's only in the heads of engineers, and leaves with them. So they treat engineers as disposable units while thinking that possession of the code will guarantee transfer of knowledge.
• 8bitsrule 4y ago
  Exactly how I feel about it. I grew up in a town in the middle of a wilderness, surrounded in all directions by dozens of miles of amazing things in lakes, swamps and forests. What did we learn about them in the classroom? Nothing, seldom even mentioned. Then I learned to drive. What do I remember from HS bio? Lists and lists of lists, uglenas and pseupodas. Way to kill the buzz.
• towaway15463 4y ago
  Biology would be much more interesting if it were explained from a mechanical point of view. At the smallest scale it is a form of nanotechnology after all.
• Daniel_sk 4y ago
  Modern biology is maybe able to fully disassemble the simplest living forms - but assembling these microstructures synthetically is still way beyond what our tools can do. It’s same like a microchip where a whole chain of small steps lead to factories and these produced the chips. And we don’t know how the original cell/life factories looked like, we just have the cells that are now self-assembling (they are now both the highly complex factory and the product). We can take a cell and modify the code, but it’s hard to do it from scratch because you would need to skip bilions of steps that lead to these microstructures. I have been recently thinking what is actually life - could it be a manifestation of a fundamental physical law? And this article had an interesting take: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1620001114 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1620001114 “How nonequilibrium thermodynamics speaks to the mystery of life”
  • conradev 4y ago
    I enjoyed this paper on the relationship between entropy and life – lots of overlap with that article: "Life and its evolution are time-oriented, irreversible phenomena that have produced a steady increase in complexity over billions of years. The second law of thermodynamics is the only fundamental law in physics that distinguishes the past from the future and so this law, and its statistical underpinning, offer the only physical principle that can govern any macroscopic irreversible phenomenon, including life." https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/12/1211/htm https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/12/1211/htm
• blain_the_train 4y ago
  i feel like it's like a lisp macro, but it's more like a neural net. is that a fair assessment?
• joshuahedlund 4y ago
  If I’m an experienced programmer who is fascinated by molecular biology and would love to transition from e-commerce to biotech, what sorts of jobs would I look for or what would I do to prepare for such a switch?
  • Myrmornis 4y ago
    The easiest and fastest and most financially preferable option would probably be to join the software engineering team of a fairly software-oriented biotech company and then, once you're established, let it be known that your personal career advancement aims are to move more in the direction of scientific work. That would be fine at many companies, assuming you can make them think of you as a valuable asset for your software skills.
    • brooksbp 4y ago
      A lot of job descriptions I see are looking for people who already have the scientific formal education background and expect them to do the software engineering aspect too. I haven't really seen generic Software Engineer job descriptions where a science background is the secondary requirement. If you have any pointers I would greatly appreciate them!
      • Myrmornis 4y ago
        Hm, we must be thinking of slightly different things. Lots of biotech companies have pure software positions. Here are some examples of software positions that require no scientific background whatsoever: https://boards.greenhouse.io/invitae/jobs/4196489?gh_jid=4196489 https://boards.greenhouse.io/invitae/jobs/4196489?gh_jid=419... https://www.recursion.com/careers?gh_jid=3992017 https://www.recursion.com/careers?gh_jid=3992017 "A biology background is not necessary, but intellectual curiosity is a must!" https://ekgn.fa.us6.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/CX_1/job/924/?utm_medium=jobshare https://ekgn.fa.us6.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperienc...
• wanderingmind 4y ago
  A lot is discussed here about cellular life. There are equally fascinating things about complex societal life systems. For example most people fascinated about life in this thread are likely highly paid programmers looking for a hobby. Most actual biologists who work on this for a living are worried about meeting their ends and paying mortgages that they likely have no time to wonder about amazing aspects of their day to day work.
• salmoforest 4y ago
  The author references and includes illustrations from a really beautifully done book called "The Machinery of Life". I immediately bought it after seeing those pictures. Does anyone else have recommendations for beautifully illustrated biology books/textbooks?
• Fomite 4y ago
  As a biology major who became an epidemiologist, I felt the same way about math - it turns out I'm decent at it, and use it literally every day of my career, but it took halfway through college to have someone approach math in a way that made sense, rather than "for its own sake".
• intrasight 4y ago
  I dropped out of tech after a couple years to go study neuroscience. Even though I returned to software, I do not regret for a second that I went to study something so broad and deep and mysterious. I know that huge areas of neuroscience will remain opaque to science for decades to come. I am blessed to have had a few years contact with that complexity and mystery. If anyone reading this, at any age, wants to take biology for a spin, by all means do so. You only live once.
  • technological 4y ago
    Do you suggest any starting material or steps on how to get started
    • EthanIsADev 4y ago
      I would love to know as well. I have always been interested in Neuroscience from the outside but have had no idea where to start.
      • intrasight 4y ago
        Two that I can recommend are Eric Kandel's Principles of Neural Science, and Larry Squire's Fundamental Neuroscience. One of the most amazing things in nature are the pentameric ligand-gated ion channels. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4412168/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4412168/
  • sh4rks 4y ago
    Also to anyone reading this - don't feel compelled to drop out of anything to study something you find interesting. You can very easily find good resources online and do a bit of study everyday.
    • intrasight 4y ago
      Humans live a LONG time. While you don't have to "drop out" to study biology, I don't believe that you can fully experience such a field without making it a full-time thing for a while. You can go get a masters in some arcane area of biology and only sacrifice 2-3 years of your 40 year career. I asked if my lack of a biology degree would be a hindrance. My advisers answer was "no", and that a) they need people who think like engineers, and b) you get dropped onto the forefront of knowledge and start chipping your way forward. It is very unlike tech work in that respect.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  I mean we call it the miracle of life. For thousands of years religions have existed to comprehend it.
• _8j50 4y ago
  Weird seeing this. I was a natural at biology didn't even have to study and aced any exam to the point where kids would let me cheat on other exams so long as they cheat off of me on biology (not proud if it now but "everybody did it then"). I didn't pursue anything related to it because it just wasn't my personality. I hated hospitals or touching body parts or even talking to random people. And I hated school with a deep passion (still do long after) can't do much with just 4yr degree in biology might as well lock me up in prison in solitary. Goes to show, you don't need to be natural at something to do well in it and even if you are a natural doesn't mean it's your thing. There are very few things you can't make yourself learn and be good at by compensating for talent with effort and perseverance.
  • tintedfireglass 4y ago
    Holy shit this sounds me!
• burglekutt 4y ago
  The Machinery of Life is a wonderful book. Nice to see it getting some love in this article.
• todd8 4y ago
  I had been putting off quantum physics and time was running out. I was worried forth semester physics at MIT was going to be tough, but then through some miracle of providence the EE department decided that a solid state chemistry chemistry class plus Into to Biology could be substituted for quantum physics. Because I had already taken a solid state chemistry class, all I had to do was take a basic introductory biology class; how difficult could that be? It turns out that biology is hard, very hard. The other students that filled the large lecture hall weren’t ordinary first year students; they were pre-med students. Instead of relaxing by the swimming pool reading a colorful text with pictures of jelly fish and beetles, it felt more like I was taking swim lessons with a few hundred sharks. The lectures by Professor Luria were great (he had won the Nobel prize four years before) but the number of facts seemed impossible to remember. My fellow students were writing down literally every word written or uttered during each lecture. There wasn’t any mention of jelly fish or bugs or pea plants, but there were complex diagrams depicting even more complex biochemical pathways. I was accustomed to math classes and engineering classes and computer science classes. Biology was very different, more facts and less study of how to apply fundamental principles to prove some theorem or solve some engineering problem. I survived the Biology class, but it would have been a lot easier for me to take the physics class.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    Biology classes kinda get easier in the later years (at least they did for me), because although they start of with a lot of "don't worry about why this happens, just know that it happens", we got to the "this is why it happens", and it all starts to fall into place. There are some fundamental principles, so far as we actually know them, in biology, however it does seem to be taught in a broad-to-narrow direction that imo does a disservice to those wanting to really understand the mechanisms.
    • popcube 4y ago
      because at least in molecular biology, there are no basic rules, how can we know any "rule' if the only example is p53? but it is useful, so this is now condition.
• pdm55 4y ago
  The fascinating biology, that is happening right here and now, is to witness COVID evolving to evade the effects of our manufactured vaccines. As quickly as we prime our immune systems with RNA vaccines, coronaviruses, duplicating within human cells, produce a variant in some human, somewhere, that can evade our newly generated antibodies. It's evolution at a bewildering pace. Is this evolution happening because we have devised means of travelling so quickly? Travellers taking the virus to new populations. The more people infected, the more variants arise? Or is it because vaccinations mean we cull the less-virulent variants of the virus? If we had had no vaccinations, what variants would have evolved, and at what pace? Why can we eradicate some viruses like polio or smallpox, but, seemingly, not this one? One would have to guess that it's because its means of transmission - through aerosol droplets from sneezes and coughs - is so effective. Will COVID become as common as the common cold, but forever more deadly?
• deleted 4y ago
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• keeptrying 4y ago
  I have always wanted to learn medicine slowly - over years. So I read medical text books slowly over years. I find it amazing that we give so much agency to doctors over our health while we know relatively very little about our own bodies and health. And biology is a big part of that learning. I now study medical books on my soare time. Would recommend “Clinical Methods” as your first foray. You will understand your doctor and the biology is immediately applicable in your Daily life. Ie how to deal with fevers in your kids. After that learn about your skeletal system and biomechanics. Next Neuro degenerative disease and the brain. Once you’ve caught the learning bug, you can go into 1st year Med School curricula and then the rest from there. Some big parts of medicine is relatively useless - psychology for example. Would recommend learning meditation ina real way and reading “Right Concentration.”. Learning about jhanas and mental states. I remember as a kid when they asked me what I wanted to do, I never understood why I couldn’t do all of the above.
  • smokey_circles 4y ago
    > psychology for example while I'm pretty despondent with the replication crisis in psychology, medicine isn't much better. but to dismiss it outright is pretty ignorant. curious how you explain the state of America if your assertion is psychology and mental health are "relatively useless" fields
    • keeptrying 4y ago
      the western medicine solutions are useless. Eastern techniques seem to be much more practically useful for handling mental health tecniques.
      • TheDong 4y ago
        > the western medicine solutions are useless. We have done science here, made hypothesis and tested them. "Western medicine", including therapy and anti-depressants, have been shown to have real, significant, reproducible positive impacts. It's also difficult to compare to "eastern techniques" since that's a fairly vague term. Perhaps drinking tea, meditating, and getting acupuncture has a more positive impact on one person than taking an anti-depressant, but for another person, anti-depressants may be wildly more effective. Perhaps arranging ones house and diet to maximize "positive chi energy" will help one person, but have no impact on another. What eastern techniques are you specifically claiming are practical and useful, and for what scenarios? Are the studies that show anti-depressants to have effect wrong, or are they useless because they're inferior in your opinion?
• paxcoder 4y ago
• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Me too! At the time I did not realize just the quality of undergraduate education I was getting in the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Jack Dodd was Professor of Physics and had just won the NZ Hector Medal [1]. Phenomenal teacher - his passion for understanding was captivating. True of most of the faculty. The same Hector Medal by the way was awarded in 1916 to none other than the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford himself [2]. Yeah that Rutherford. But my humble first year intention was medical intermediate on track to medical school. I absolutely loved biology, and loved the labs most of all. But it was in those labs where I hit a brick wall. With every lab (e.g. dissections etc), we were required to pencil draw our work. A significant part of our grade was on the caliber of fine artistry. I was a scientist damn it! Not an artist. The best I could do was stick figure level illustration. Needless to say I did not shine as a life scientist, so I moved my major into physics. Looking back I have often wondered how many burgeoning life scientists had their careers cut short in those labs. I have also wondered if I would have stayed stymied artistically my whole life if that had never happened. I love art and would love to be able to draw. Just never went there again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dodd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dodd [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford
• y0ungarmanii 4y ago
  I originally went into premed in college and struggled a lot, I had other family members who were premed & or doctors and didn't understand how I could be getting C's in biochem or physiology. I finally gave up realizing there was no chance i was getting into medical school with bad GPA and switched to EE where I admittedly had to study a lot less and got much better grades. People underestimate just how difficult bio is and i think the high volume of information and importance of memorization is just training you for medical school where the volume of material you need to study is magnitudes more. I don't envy anyone who went through it. When it came to physics, math, circuits, etc. you could really get away with just doing a couple practice problems and understanding the core concepts. The experience of going through two very different fields and being an utter failure in one made me believe that people's brains can just be wired differently.
  • JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Sounds like learning a new (human) language vs. learning a new math concept. Every attempt I've made into learning a new language has been a failure. I've resigned myself that only through immersion will I ever learn a new language. I suppose there is no equivalent in the medical field. :-)
    • y0ungarmanii 4y ago
      Funny enough my only bad grades in high school were with languages, I think your analogy is apt. I could understand bio and learn it but performing at the level needed to be a doctor was not going to happen. Although, I have no regrets very happy with where I ended up!
      • R0b0t1 4y ago
        Doctors aren't actually that good at their jobs once you start recording patient outcomes. It probably makes no sense to continue the current method, but the AMA is the one that controls it, and making it hard makes the value of their labor more expensive.
• _gabe_ 4y ago
  Biology seems like an amazing subject, and this article helped frame it in a way that seems approachable as a programmer! One thing I don't understand after reading this and several comments, is I'll often hear stuff like "biology is so complex. Everytime you think you understand a piece you find out it's another abstraction on top of another complex system". And then, immediately people say stuff like one comment that I thought was pretty funny: "they are structurally like a cathedral built by a blind deranged architect.". And also from the article: > Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed. It’s all a big slop of global mutable state. My question is, all these comments describe how biology is an indescribable complexity, and then conclude its so complex because it's just a bunch of random coincidences that built up over time. Just because biology is one big glob of mutable global state, does that mean it wasn't intentionally designed? I know certain algorithms like video encoding/decoding and coding compilers may seem like random pieces of code when you first encounter it. You may also question whether the original authors were just writing "bad code" since it's all so interconnected. But then you learn a thing or two and realize that the process itself is very interconnected, and you can only cleanly separate so much of it, but you'll still be left with a hairy piece of code that's kind of messy but necessary. Why can't it be the same way with life? We study these astronomically complex systems, and then we talk about how we're still so far away from understanding the system as a whole, then we conclude it's just a soupy mess that all came together randomly. How can we come to a conclusion like that without being able to understand all the intricacies as a whole? How much of biological complexity is necessary complexity, and how much is accidental complexity? And by the way, I am a believer in intelligent design which is why I raise these questions. I just find it amazing that we can simultaneously speculate about the wonders of life, and then chalk it all up to a bunch of random coincidences haha.
• rsp1984 4y ago
  It's not just biology. It's basically every subject in high school. The amount of knowledge in the world has exploded in the last 100 - 150 years, yet our school system refuses to adapt and pretends we're still in the early 1900s. Back then you actually could get a good and reasonably in-depth overview of what makes the world work before going to college or work. But those kinds of aspirations are completely futile these days. People in the ministries of education and other responsible bodies will argue that high school's purpose is not to educate on a subject in depth but to give a broad overview of many subjects but that's completely besides the point. Because the point is that the only way that they are able to "give you a broad overview" these days is by force-feeding you ever more facts and knowledge in sliced up classes, compressed into ever more shallow and boring text books and then letting you puke it all out in brain dead exams, many times a year for many different subjects, in parallel. Bulimia learning. Which is beyond sad, because basically every subject can be the source of wonder and amazement if taught the right way and with enough time to explain and explore. Which is why we need to let our kids choose the subjects they are interested early in school and get comfortable with the fact that they won't have any knowledge about other subjects when they leave high school. There simply isn't any other way.
  • josht 4y ago
    O Captain! My Captain!
  • popcube 4y ago
    In my country, we keep teaching the 200 age old part of sphysics or mathematics in high school.
  • verisimi 4y ago
    Perhaps you're labouring under the illusion that education is for your good as opposed to the good of those who manage people? Why change a winning formula?
    • rwnspace 4y ago
      The practical purpose of public schooling is to A) catch the odd prodigy to send to the big leagues with the private school kids, B) get the well-behaved used to 9-5 hours, and C) have somewhere to keep the rest while the parents work. University used to be just the first group, nowadays it includes the second.
• oldstrangers 4y ago
  For the love of everyone with a large monitor set your body element to margin: 0 auto; body { max-width: 500px; margin: 0 auto; font-family: vollkorn, serif; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.2em; }
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  DNA is like source code written one line at a time with a million branches each with a different engineer that merge once or twice after 20 years of random hacks whose merge conflict resolution is non deterministic and error prone yet amazingly produces syntax errors very rarely*. I take umbrage with the idea this is a technology from millions of years in the future. It’s literally the background noise technology that just shows up if you do nothing for 16 billion quarters. *unless you merge with a first cousin.
  • Avamander 4y ago
    If you're making a comparison to code, then DNA is just so much more. It's an approximately four billion years old legacy codebase, where execution depends on so much more than just one "line".
• DrScientist 4y ago
  To the general point - there isn't enough posing of questions and letting students struggle with them before giving the answer. Rather than just giving the answer.
• machiaweliczny 4y ago
  I loved biology but knew it was intractable to me compared to simple machines made by mere humans ;)
• Yaina 4y ago
  I think the horrible truth about the education system is, is that it discourages wonder. In college, you have 5 courses per semester, possibly homework and an important test at the end. The homework has to be finished, essays need to be written and facts need to be learned for tests. All of this times 5. I think the most mentally draining part of it all is the constant context switching. In the end the hunger of students to delve deeper is not super high, and a lot of lecturers want to stay close to the courses structure they originally planned out (sometimes years or decades ago). A good lecturer can make one course go a little better, but IMO it's the system that discourages interest.
  • mettamage 4y ago
    It didn't with me. In fact, with computer science it encouraged it. I had a hard time learning programming, but one TA was amazing. He helped me get through it, slowly I got the required skill set needed to have a more comfortable experience to understand CS material. All anecdata of course. With that said, are there any studies done on this? I have a hunch the answer is not really. If there are some, then my hunch is: not all that much.
• throwawayarnty 4y ago
  Biology is particularly difficult to learn in school or from any book because one cannot “do” much biology on pen and paper. Math, physics, and certain parts of chemistry can actually be done on pen and paper (or by computer simulations) because it is based on solid theory with mathematical underpinnings. The only solid foundation biology has is descriptive theories from Darwin and maybe Mendel. All other biology must be studied through experimental data, which means wet lab and analysis. Just reading about a result (which is how school is done) doesn’t mean you are a good biologist no matter how well you can regurgitate the textbook.
• asmithmd1 4y ago
  the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. I would disagree, we see the object code. If we had the source, with comments, genetic engineering would be much easier
  • bognition 4y ago
    It doesn't really make sense to talk about DNA as source code vs object code vs whatever. Biology doesn't have the same clean levels of abstraction that we've developed in computer science. DNA functionally operates at many levels. It long term storage, local working storage, and it is used to compute. It's a single molecule that does everything. Then you have to throw in all the secondary processes that modulate and regulate DNA replication, transcription, as well as activation/deactivation. While it can be useful to lean on the abstractions we've developed to try to understand what DNA is doing those abstractions can only be taken so far.
    • asmithmd1 4y ago
      Yeah, I was kind of making a joke. But to stretch the analogy... Maybe there is a common source that is cross compiled to different chemistries producing a seed object code cell.
    • gnramires 4y ago
      Indeed, I classify the main difference between life (biological systems) and technology (civilization engineered systems) is about the structure of complexity. Human civilization is severely time-limited (or just time-pressed). We can't wait millions of years running a simulation to optimize a little widget. We need to rely very much on high level design and comparatively little on efficiency and optimization. On the other hand, life cannot afford huge DNA (very costly), or energy waste (generally disfavorable from evolution). So human built systems tend to be of a low "Compute complexity": the computational complexity of obtaining solutions and solving problems themselves (like civil engineering structure problems, or design of objects) must be fairly low. For life, systems can be amazingly intricate, every tiniest cell a wonder that would probably take thousands of years for civilization to maybe be able to replicate. But it all ranges from about 130kbp to 8Mbp[1], which would be around 16Mbit/2Mbytes at most. So it fits (uncompressed) in a diskette (floppy). Even now with powerful computers, we're still mostly constrained by cognition (specially human), you see simplicity all around you. So if you look at the human world, you see (computational) simplicity everywhere, but the natural world has undergone trillions of generations of optimization to arrive at almost perfect (in an almost literal way) little machines, complicated but with a hidden amazing (size) simplicity. I think there's a connection to be made to algorithmic inference as well. Originally we came up with ideas for Universal Inference (from ideas from by Solomonoff, Kolmogorov among others) [2][3], the most glaring candidate was the "size prior": evidence explainable by the least algorithmic information ought to be most likely (Solomonoff inference). Later, there were promissing ideas around an additional term: the "speed prior" (from Schmidhuber[4]) -- the biological word is one where the "size prior" (simplicity is most likely) works almost perfectly, and human civilization is one where the "speed prior" (computationally easy is most likely) is helpful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_genome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_genome [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_probability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_probability [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_prior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_prior Side note: I think intellectually one of the ways we're really far behind is recognizing Algorithmic Information theory as a foundation for statistics and metaphysics. We're very stuck making little progress on the metaphysical realm (which physics is advancing more into) because of a lack of widespread acceptance of those advanced tools for science. Algorithmic inference gives a solid basis for comparing metaphysical models and deep questions about the cosmos.
• The_suffocated 4y ago
  I think this is not a biology-only phenomenon. I have the impression that chemistry and mathematics are also not taught well in many (if not most) high schools. Physics education in contrast seems to be in better shape.
  • formerkrogemp 4y ago
    Let's just agree that US high school education is generally abysmal.
    • barry-cotter 4y ago
      If you think US high school education is abysmal where do you think does it better? US Asians do very well compared to other Asians, US whites to other whites, etc. https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...
      • brnaftr361 4y ago
        Is the purpose of education to make people take tests and get high scores that bureaucrats can wave around, routing their success? Or is it something a little more profound?
        • barry-cotter 4y ago
          If they can’t do well on tests designed to measure skills the students have been failed. They have not learned skills. The US education system is quite good at teaching skills. A large majority of countries do worse. The skills that PISA tests are a prerequisite for almost any more rarefied learning that is often held up as the real purpose of education. Being able to read for meaning, extract information, combine knowledge from two texts, distinguish between what is stated and what’s implied, even to figure out something is implied, all of those are the kinds of things we expect an educated person to be able to do. PISA tests them. Trying to make people care about academic subject matter is very difficult because most people do not care and do not find it useful. Thus they forget most of what they learn in school. Insofar as education is forcing the tastes of one class on everyone else it can burn. Most people don’t care, just like most academics don’t care about sports. Forcing sports on them would also be an injustice.
• HorizonXP 4y ago
  I did my undergrad in electrical and computer engineering. My career has been focused on software. Yet, all through high school and into university, I took biology courses. I did my masters in medical imaging. I wrote the MCAT. I’ve always loved biology. The intricacy of the systems, and how they work together is so fascinating and really presses the same buttons as computing.
• planarhobbit 4y ago
  For most of us, these great awakenings come with age. They are rich, sublime flashes of clarity and intellect to be enjoyed (first and foremost) and nourished (thereafter) with more such awakenings. The simplest of deductions lead us to wonder how, what, and if. This is the tunnel through which some people end up believing, through disbelief and astonishment, that there is a grand design at play and that it is a thing of beauty and wonder.
• bognition 4y ago
  There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner. In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stories you learned in molecular biology but with the tools you acquire in organic chemistry. Equipped with those tools I relearned the Krebs cycle and photosynthesis as real chemical reactions that make sense rather than a chain of facts to be memorized. The class left me with a deep and profound reverence for life. Every process in a cell has a mechanism that can understood with chemistry. However, the magic of life exists where those processes come together and interact in incredibly complicated ways. It's seductive to think that we should be able to tease apart this complicated processes and figure out how "life" works, and maybe someday we will. However, it's easy to underestimate the level of complexity and interconnectedness in these systems. Many of us understand how hard it can be to debug a distributed system. Imagine trying to reverse engineer a distributed system with tens of thousands of interconnected services and messaging queues that all just sort of evolved and were not built with clean engineering practices.
  • ciconia 4y ago
    > In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. In high school I really hated biology and chemistry. It was just a bunch of abstract stuff. What made me (re)discover biology was taking up gardening. To me gardening is like applied biology. After a while you really start to get a sense of how it all works and just how unbelievably complex life systems are: photosynthesis, the carbon cycle, the different water cycles, how soil life affects the plants that grow in it, and how incredibly resourceful plants are in interacting with their environment (not to mention insects and other creatures higher up the food chain...)
  • robbiep 4y ago
    I majored in biochemistry as well. I was so unbelievably hooked. The ground up principles. It led me to medicine
• ta988 4y ago
  There are additional factors that make molecules in cells not subject to pure diffusion rules. Charge depending on the pH of the area ( even if in such a crowded space it is likely not really a pH anymore), and molecular interactions. Proteins (and virtually any other molecules but proteins and to a lesser extent nucleic acids are particularly good at that) can stick or be repulsed by their overall composition (external charges, hydrophobicity) but they can also stick to each other. Biology is fascinating but you can't isolate it long from chemistry and physics if you want to understand it.
  • Pulcinella 4y ago
    Yeah see the art of David Goodsell. I believe he said the concentrations of the various biomolecules are roughly accurate based on calculations he does before starting painting. Cells are incredibly crowded. The human body being 60-70% water is usually presented in pop-sci as “wow we are mostly water!” but that’s actually very concentrated for chemical reactions. You usually don’t perform reactions that concentrated in a lab whether it’s biochemistry, organic chemistry, inorganic, analytical, etc. It’s a wonder all this stuff doesn’t just gunk up and precipitate out of solution. https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell/ https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell/
    • oldsecondhand 4y ago
      > It’s a wonder all this stuff doesn’t just gunk up It does gunk up but it takes a few decades.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • adrian_b 4y ago
      All the living cells spend continuously a lot of energy as long as they are still alive for avoiding the appearance of precipitates inside the cell, e.g. by pumping out of the cells the ions of calcium and sodium and pumping inside the cell the ions of magnesium and potassium, because the former are much more prone to produce precipitates than the latter. This continuous ion pumping is a major component of the energy consumption of a living being when it is idle, apparently doing nothing.
• popcube 4y ago
  yes, biology education in schools are terrible. remembering so many things actually is important, students keep reminding new thing even they in master degree...but the fun of science do not show in text book.
• telesilla 4y ago
  "Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed. It’s all a big slop of global mutable state". Brings me to wonder, could we ever create anything so marvellous as what biology does so effortlessly.
  • inciampati 4y ago
    Because the system survives by optimizing for efficiency and reliability.
    • jnwatson 4y ago
      It is also helpful to have a 3.7-billion-year head start.
  • huachimingo 4y ago
    Conway's Game of Life
• abrax3141 4y ago
  Seems like the author has a limited sense of wonder. Just because the teacher didn’t say “Isn’t X amazing!” He didn’t realize that it was amazing. Hint: Everything is amazing. Start looking at the world that way and you’ll do way better in everything you do. If teachers had to tell you all the amazing things in the world they wouldn’t have time to tell you how things work - which is also amazing. (I’m locked out of additional comments so have to respond to my critics by edit: I’m a molecular biologist and a computer scientist. I find the names are part of the wonder. It’s hard to describe how this can be true unless you have a wholistic sense of what wonder means. Maybe I have an overactive sense of wonder. )
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• bowsamic 4y ago
  One of my favourite course I took when studying physics at university was “Biological Nanomachines”. I find it absolutely bizarre that trying to gain a physical intuition for biology is not the norm. Throughout school I hated biology because it really did just feel like rote learning. This is embarrassing but I had such a poor understanding of what a cell was by the end of HS biology that I still had an image in my mind of a little conscious being that makes choices: “the cell wants to x” is language that we can’t use in a HS classroom
  • barry-cotter 4y ago
    > “the cell wants to x” is language that we can’t use in a HS classroom If you can’t use language like that you’re giving up on getting anything through to over half of the class. Trying to impart information to people who don’t care and aren’t interested is amazingly hard. Not using agentic framing makes it harder.
    • bowsamic 4y ago
      I don’t think we should teach wrong things because they are easier. It may be true that it’s easier to teach biology if you gives cells individual agency, but it’s just false
• Verath 4y ago
  During the first part of the pandemic I watched the lectures for the Introductory Biology course [1] from MIT OpenCourseWare. I cannot recommend those highly enough! Almost every lecture brought up and highlighted something really cool and fascinating. Like how RNA sequencing over the last couple of years has gone from expensive to almost free, and what its uses are. Or time-lapse of bacteria adapting to antibiotics. Or just the first lecture showing a video of someone sticking a syringe into a cell. There were even some labs that could be done via a normal web browser. For me this was so much more engaging than the biology I was thought in high school, where we mostly learned things from outdated books. [1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-2018/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-...
  • feet 4y ago
    To anyone who watches these, watch the basic chemistry series and organic chemistry lectures if you can find them. Follow that up with biochemistry to get a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of life
  • steakknife 4y ago
    Anything with Dr. Eric Lander from MIT (e.g. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secret-of-life-3 https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...). Hands down the best lecturer I've ever encountered.
  • nextos 4y ago
    > [...] where we mostly learned things from outdated books I can recommend 3 really good books, SICP-level good: 1. Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin et al. How to model DNA, RNA and proteins as probabilistic languages / generative models. There is also a companion book with all exercises solved. 2. Physical Biology of the Cell by Phillips et al. A massive amount of quantitative cell biology models that use simple undergrad physics. Originated from a Caltech course. After reading this book, all other intro to biology books look like a bag of tricks. 3. An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Alon. Bacterial circuits from the perspective of an electrical engineer. Sadly, NSF discontinued funding for a totally epic Cold Spring Harbor Summer school for postdocs that taught [2,3]. A shame, we need more quantitative biology and less bags of tricks.
• tony_cannistra 4y ago
  It seems like the larger argument here (which I wholeheartedly agree with) is that the role of skilled teacher (whether it be human, book, YouTube, whatever) simply cannot be understated when it comes to creating that “spark” in a learner to develop and pursue their own passions. What’s interesting to me, and what follows from this, I think, is that we therefore have a lever for creating more passionate people: create more extremely skilled teachers. It’s obvious to me that this idea isn’t new; I just wonder why it’s so deprioritized at almost every level of education. (Not least the highest.)
  • akira2501 4y ago
    > create more extremely skilled teachers. I think this puts the cart before the horse, and presumes that you can find the right balance of teacher skills to student requirements and that you can maintain that balance year after year. I honestly think you get more mileage thinking the opposite direction. If you want students with passion and a life long commitment to knowledge, then they're going to need to develop those skills first. At that point, in our modern world, a single oracle of generational knowledge isn't a particularly useful addition. What you want is generalists that know how to motivate students and to help them find and utilize the resources they need. You might only need a bunch of librarians and proctors and can skip the specialists of the "oral tradition" entirely.
  • Pulcinella 4y ago
    Money, power, control. Defund schools and create horrible working and learning conditions for those who stay. Create a problem and then say you are the only one who knows how to fix it. Prey on peoples’s fear, especially fear for their children. Sow mistrust and bigotry in their communities. Unfortunately far, far too many in power who actively and intentionally do not have the best interests of students at heart. “There should be no such thing as ‘good schools’ and ‘bad schools.’ All schools should be great.” shouldn’t be be a controversial opinion, but every time I’ve brought it up people get uncomfortable because parents now how precarious their child’s education can be. They’ve seen what has happened in other schools and they don’t want anything bad to happen to their child’s education. So even if things could be better, they fear change and anything that could rock the boat because they don’t won’t it to get worse. And they aren’t wrong to be afraid: how many times has a politician promised to fix education and it turns out the fix is something like one more layer of standardized testing, or cutting art classes, honors classes, special education services to “focus on the fundamentals” while class sizes balloon and the money from those cut classes and services just goes poof?
• civilized 4y ago
  Pet theory: for most of human history, biology has been an increasingly complex detective story, a notepad of mysteries laying on a table next to an unfathomably massive evidence room stuffed with barely organized facts. This appeals to certain people and not to others. Only recently has it become possible to approach it from more of an engineering perspective, which appeals to a different set of people.
  • czbond 4y ago
    can you expand this thought? I'm on your path but not to your destination yet. Can I summarize it as: Earlier, biology was "hunt and peck" or "observe" ... and now we're moving to a more "rigor of process & ability to create as seen in the past few decades of computer science now applying to biology" type of world?
    • civilized 4y ago
      Here's a story to illustrate. Recently there was a headline about some project at MIT that used CRISPR to figure out the function of every protein in a human cell (or something like that, I'm sure I misinterpreted it in some way). I told a friend who is an actual biologist, and he said of course they didn't literally do that, that would be impossible. So I guess what they really did was.... something-something with CRISPR that gave information about a wide range of proteins in the cell, or something. They added a lot of facts to the library. But they marketed it as if they had made a huge stride towards understanding how the whole machine works. That gets people like me more excited. We'd like to know how the machine works and then use that to make it work better.
      • sapsan 4y ago
        I believe the parent refers to this [1,2,3] study. Indeed, this was about targeting many (11,923) genes with Perturb-seq (CRISPR screen with single-cell RNA-sequencing readout). There are two human cell lines used in the study (K562 and RPE1). For functional annotation, authors focused on 1,973 targeted genes that had strong transcriptional phenotype after the perturbation. As there's some correlation structure, that's what they studied, annotating clusters of individual perturbations using public databases (like STRING [4]) and literature. Seems like a lot of great work has been done here though stating that we now know all the functions of all the genes might be a bit of a stretch indeed. [1]: https://news.mit.edu/2022/crispr-based-map-ties-every-human-gene-to-its-function-0609 https://news.mit.edu/2022/crispr-based-map-ties-every-human-... [2]: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00597-9 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00597-9 [3]: https://gwps.wi.mit.edu/ https://gwps.wi.mit.edu/ [4]: https://string-db.org/ https://string-db.org/
• fabian2k 4y ago
  Biology did seem more like a recitation of facts in school to me, but it was very different in university. I think part of it was having a pretty bad teacher, but also the school textbooks are just so much worse than the introductory textbooks for university. I think some parts are fixable, others are difficult. A part of the problem is that you need to cover some parts in more depth if you want to really make sense of them. Without some basic chemistry and thermodynamics knowledge the entire metabolic pathways seem very arbitrary. This is probably hard to fit into the amount of time you have in school for those subjects.
• SilasX 4y ago
  Low effort comment, but, wow. This article is a super thorough version of the shower thought that, biology is a lot cooler once you reframe it as the study of naturally occurring self-replicators.
  • popcube 4y ago
    this is all the selfish gene want to talk about
• axg11 4y ago
  I think what is described here comes down to the fact that we don't have much (any?) _deep_ understanding of biology. The most concrete aspects of biology are observations. For example, anatomy is very well understood because it's essentially observations of structures within living organisms, as field it has been relatively stable for a long time, hence there are well-established methods for teaching anatomy. There's a huge gap between the fundamental units of biology (biochemistry) and the resulting emergent behaviour (living things). We don't have a good bottom-up system to predict the emergent behaviour so we're mostly left with observing from the top down and poking/prodding sub-systems, hoping to gain some insight. When so much of biology is observation without deep insight, it shouldn't be a surprise that biology is difficult to teach, and even more difficult to find beauty in for new students.
  • shpongled 4y ago
    I would argue that depends on your definition of deep - we are certainly getting better at developing both genetic and chemical tools that allow us to probe specific pathways/sub-systems of biology, and read out the resulting perturbed phenotype(s). > There's a huge gap between the fundamental units of biology (biochemistry) and the resulting emergent behaviour (living things). We don't have a good bottom-up system to predict the emergent behaviour so we're mostly left with observing from the top down and poking/prodding sub-systems, hoping to gain some insight. I think this is just about the last thing that we will ever solve/figure out. There are just a mind-boggling number of parameters, feedback loops, dynamic modifications, interactions, etc that are effecting cellular state (let alone organism state) - something that I think many CS oriented folks ignore when talking about "DNA as source code" (perhaps if program behavior depended on the size of indents, font, variable names, how many lines of code you wrote, the proximity in source location of different functions, etc).
    • AlecSchueler 4y ago
      > (perhaps if program behavior depended on the size of indents, font, variable names, how many lines of code you wrote, the proximity in source location of different functions, etc) I think I've seen all of those functionalities implemented in esoteric programming languages! Nice comparison.
• nitwit005 4y ago
  I suspect most biology majors would be plenty interested in these topics. The barrier tends to be the foundational knowledge they have to get through, like statistics and organic chemistry. I presume the author now has that foundation, so it's unsurprisingly much easier to approach.
  • Pulcinella 4y ago
    Yeah it doesn’t help that things like HS Chemistry and Chem 101 classes aren’t really Chemistry, it’s all the things to you need to know to get started doing and learning Chemistry. It would be like if we saved learning how to read and write or learning Arabic numerals and basic number sense until early high school.
• xyhopguy 4y ago
  > I wanted to conjure models I could play with in my hand. I wanted a museum where I could walk around inside the epithelium during an immune response. I wanted to put ideas into physical space, like on a pinboard—TLRs go here, with the other innate armament; CD4+ T cells are there, in the adaptive world—but I wanted it to be as searchable, copy-pasteable, shareable, and composable as text. VR anyone?
• begueradj 4y ago
  Unfortunately, nowadays there is more censorship in biology than in politics
  • onychomys 4y ago
    Speaking here as a guy who started his career in organismal bio and is now working at the cellular level, all I can say to that is [citation needed].
• JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  To be fair, he wouldn’t have known what DNA and RNA were which he mentions many times in the article, if he hadn’t learned the acronym soup and the basics that biology’s wonder is built upon.
• the_only_law 4y ago
  I did love Biology. In fact, I think it was my first real interest before computers or programming. Some aspects of the field still fascinate me, but I know if I ever bothered to engage the interest I'd be broke.
  • rjsw 4y ago
    The Biology teachers that I had at school were a lot better than those for other subjects, there were not many other jobs that they could do.
• P-NP 4y ago
  6th paragraph: Someone should have said this to me: Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
• khaledh 4y ago
  When I watch animations of how the cell works at a molecular level [0], I can't help but wonder how can this level of sheer complexity in dna transcription, protein production, and many other supporting functions in a single cell works in perfect harmony. It's mind boggling. I admit that I'm biased, but I don't think this could have evolved through random processes. I'm a believer in Intelligent Design. https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY https://youtu.be/fpHaxzroYxg https://youtu.be/fpHaxzroYxg
  • kosherhurricane 4y ago
    > I don't think this could have evolved through random processes. It's a logical fallacy that complex processes cannot be created from random events. It certainly can, and evidence is abundant. Biochemistry of life is an advanced form of brownian ratchet [1]. It started simple, but can get to absurd level of complexity due to selective pressure, and memory via genes. And selective pressure is nothing but maximizing for greatest replication. There are many interesting philosophical questions inside biochemistry, but a Judeo-Christian Diety is not the most interesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
  • al2o3cr 4y ago
    So you look at everything that we've been able to figure out, things we didn't know about even a few decades ago, and you conclude "WELL I CAN'T SEE THE REST OF THE PUZZLE RIGHT NOW SO I GUESS MY IMAGINARY FRIEND DID IT" So goddamn stupid that it's just sad.
    • cercatrova 4y ago
      This is known as the God of the gaps argument [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
      • khaledh 4y ago
        Ok let's stay scientific. What are the odds of forming a single enzyme (necessary for life) composed of a chain of roughly 200 amino acids, each is drawn from a pool of 20 possible amino acids? 20^200, right? The estimated number of atoms in the entire universe is 10^80 atoms. Can you explain what process would consistently keep winning the protein lottery with those kind of odds?
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  When I was in college, I took Entomology and Zoology for my bio requirement. The first one was because the teacher had such high ratings in the student reviews. At one time, I could name all the orders of insects. No longer. It did seem like just a bunch of memorization to me then. Much, much later, I took an Extension course in Molecular Biology, and what a difference! I still think the diagrams they draw for biological processes in Molecular Biology of the Cell are just stunningly beautiful, and completely blow away anything you'll ever see in a CS text. But expecting to have those revelations when you don't know how anything works yet is foolish. You have to pay your dues.
  • brooksbp 4y ago
    I pre-ordered the 7th Edition a month before release and it still hasn't shipped. The demand for this new edition is nuts!
• AndrewVos 4y ago
  If I wanted to learn biology as an adult, are there any books that explain stuff in the same vain? Bonus points for pictures!
• rob_c 4y ago
  Yes it's all a mixed wet bag of chemicals with probabilities but thankfully we've spend a significant amount of time separating and understand a lot of these molecules in isolation to try and understand the Jigsaw of life. I don't normally come to the defence of the biological sciences but why would you expect it to be anything else? If you're blindly reciting then either you don't understand or haven't been tough enough to understand the parts of the puzzle. Unfortunately this is also a consequence of modern teaching methods I would argue but that's another problem all together...
• wintermutestwin 4y ago
  I remember taking biology back in the 90s and thinking "this stuff is really interesting. Even though I have minimal practical use for this knowledge, I'm going to come back to this in a couple years when I can explore it in VR because that would be a far superior learning medium than a crappy textbook." one of these days ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• czbond 4y ago
  I was very into Chemistry and Biology until I found Computer Science. C.S. was/is fascinating, so many interesting problems. Until I found out C.S. to a majority of the world really just means coding - the most boring activity I can imagine. (to me... I have some parts of "H.D." in the ADHD, so don't downvote me). I thought C.S. would lead to a career of solving difficult Automata, algorithmic, etc problems. Nope.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    Hah yes, an unfortunate realization was that programming as a career strips away many of the things that made me interested in the first place.
  • chongli 4y ago
    Solving difficult problems is a very difficult job to get. Most employers do not want their employees solving truly difficult problems because it's too hard to replace someone capable of that. This is why the world of work has been so heavily organized around avoiding these difficult problems in favour of boring/repetitive tasks.
• codeflo 4y ago
  I have to wonder where this person’s school circumstances. For example, why was the triangle area formula only memorized and not demonstrated to them? I thought this should be standard everywhere in the world? Maybe they just don’t remember, it happens early (age 11-12 for me IIRC). Similarly, and this is from two decades ago at this point, some basics of gene expression and cell differentiation were covered in my later biology classes, including some of the evolutionary steps. Details are of course fuzzy now. But I clearly remember that learning we share so many genes and so much cell chemistry with even basic bacteria threw me into a bit of an existential crisis when I was 17 — making me question what if anything is so special about humans. When they were students, some people were simply unwilling to follow any train of thought that was unlikely to be test-relevant. The author almost admits as much: “Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was.” That’s a perfectly fine way to approach school, I’m not judging. But then maybe don’t complain that you didn’t learn anything?
  • rjtobin 4y ago
    I interpret the article quite differently. The triangle example (which as the author writes is actually an example from “Lockhart’s Lament” on American math education) isn’t about whether triangle-area-formula was ever justified to students. It’s that students aren’t given the chance to really ask the question themselves - a chance to approach math, or biology, in the way that a mathematician or biologist does in reality: trying to work it out for themselves, and being invited to wonder at just how improbable textbook biological facts are etc. I agree with your point that some students will be more inquisitive, and will need less prompting to do the above thinking themselves. But many (most?) students are not like this, and it’s a shame that many of these students could enjoy a subject that they instead come to loathe.
• eesmith 4y ago
  > I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA. I should have loved biology in high school, had it been centered on evolutionary principles, rather than (in my US classes) seemingly disconnected materials with at most a week on evolution. Because "controversy." I noticed this essay doesn't used the word evolution at all, preferring "heredity." Evolution is what ties the fields of biology together, from biochemistry and microbiology to anatomy, animal behavior, and ecosystems. I didn't start to understand what I was missing in my biology education until I started reading Stephen Jay Gould essays in college.
• localhost 4y ago
  I have a PhD in Organic Chemistry and just last week I visited my PhD supervisor's research group. My research was on understanding the mechanism of enzyme-catalyzed decarboxylation reactions. This is very detailed physical-organic reaction kinetics to seek to understand the basis for some of the remarkable acceleration that the enzyme provides (10^6) over model systems in aqueous solution. Reflecting on this, I find it sad that I never really saw how to place this research into the much broader biological context in which it exists. This goes back to how we teach the subject as the linked article discusses so nicely. There is no sense of wonder. There are no questions that are posed to the reader, just "facts". Consider this question - look outside at a tree. Where did all the carbon in the tree come from? You may have heard that carbon fixation in plants use a process called "photosynthesis" that involves iron ions. Where did the iron come from? If only we taught by using storytelling techniques and posing questions to students, perhaps we might have more engagement with science than we have today.
  • mncharity 4y ago
    > If only we taught by using storytelling techniques and posing questions to students The sciences are a richly interwoven tapestry of stories, so the question arises, might it be taught like that? I suggest the bottleneck is that crafting such stories is very very expensive, and very poorly incentivized. To see this, try taking an existing story, and sampling the neighborhood. In some way broaden or retarget it. Take the "tree carbon source" story. Perhaps make it rough quantitative, say flow vs time of day, as in a "plants consume O2 too - rainforests are only net producers for a couple of hours around noon" story. Or vs lifetime. Or use ocean primary producers, and sketching dissolved gas flows - how recently was consumed CO2 part of the atmosphere? Or sketch a global daily-or-seasonal "inhale/exhale" graphic. Or deep-time context - when did such fixation begin historically, and how has it changed since? Or flow residence times for different biomes? Or a correct telling of "treed sunlight released as campfire redshifted light and heat". Or ... My experience has been, that if you ask simple, obvious, important-for-integrated-understanding accessible-down-to-K questions, you're pervasively dropped in primary literature searches. If you're lucky, the secondary research literature will catch you. Tertiary literature, like professional "everything about X" too-big-for-a-doorstop tomes are sometimes of helpful, but online are generally unavailable or copyright violations. Sometimes phython/mathematica/R/etc scientific code is regrettably required. Education and outreach content is generally useless - because of scope and focus limitations, when not incoherent and incorrect. And there's much effort, even by the American Chemical Society, to kill off sci-hub. Which will make this all even less plausible. So I suggest the absence of accessible powerful integrated stories (aka science education that doesn't suck), is a failure of the science research community, not the "science" education community. Because only they have the expertise to create them. Or at least, a failure of research funding to incentivize it. And thus a collective failure to appreciate the magnitude of awesome being left on the table. Assuming sufficient awesome might overcome indifference. Which is less than clear. "The Sun is yellow" is very popular story. From preK to the most used intro astronomy college textbooks. It's pervasive among even first-tier astronomy graduate students. Also to be found on astronomy education research's lists of most common misconceptions in astronomy education. We've known Sun color for at least a century, had detailed limb tint numbers for decades, and now years of intensive work on stellar atmospheres for occultation, and "science" education content has managed to remain uncoupled from all of it. Getting it right would permit weaving with stories of blackbodies and planetary energy flow and color vision and more. Perhaps someday someone will pay someone enough to care, or finally become sufficiently embarrassed to change. But if anyone expects that will happen this decade rather than next, or the one after, I'd really appreciate to hearing why. On a more upbeat note, it's been noted that almost all (US) professors in the sciences have been through a small number of institutions. So maybe imagine someone with too much money funding a dozen awesome scientific storytelling programs, and waiting a decade or three? Or maybe creating good science stories might be promoted as a hobby, for people who were in the sciences but left and so have time on their hands? Sidestepping the massive resource allocation challenge by making it unpaid work.
• cercatrova 4y ago
  Not sure where the author went to school, but when I was in school, this is in fact how we learned biology, as well as mathematics and chemistry. Maybe our teachers were good, but we derived facts like the area of a triangle through geometric as well as algebraic means, and same for biology.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• pixel_tracing 4y ago
  I guess I’m a prime example of this article. I originally majored in biology (racked up enough credits so that if I wanted to I could have a biology degree within 1 semester), then switched to chemistry and eventually graduated with a chemistry degree and a minor in computer science. My passion for biology came when I attended Human Anatomy & Physiology. I learned about neurons and action potentials, chemical gradients and how diffusion can cascade these changes. These machinery like interactions made the cells come to “life.” I then switched my major to chemistry to understand these interactions. My favorite class was Physical Chemistry. Both of these fields are saturated by two types: the pre-med schooler and the academic, these two types are fighting for prestige and status. I believe the schools mostly cater to these types so they can get into their relevant higher ed (masters, PhD, and medicine) schools. This ends up robbing the undergrads who are actually interested of the material (you end up with what’s described in the article). In contrast computer science was a breath of fresh air :) I wish bio and Chem fields were like that.
• UIUC_06 4y ago
  I got interested in bioinformatics in the early 2000's. The sequencing of the human genome, and of course that of many other organisms, was a huge enabler of "systems thinking" as applied to biology. It isn't really fair to blame bio teachers for not teaching this in the 80's or even early 90's. Prior to that, it was mostly memorization. Some biologists and chemists were putting together the basic facts that came together and gave us an "aha!" moment. They won Nobel Prizes for a lot of that. Without Kary Mullis and PCR in the 80's, we wouldn't know 0.01% of what we know now.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Dynamic systems theory is very powerful organizing principle / concept that makes biology make a lot more sense. It also helps to constantly remind yourself that academic science divisions - in particular physics, chemistry, and biology - are fairly arbitrary and nature doesn't care much about them, and this becomes very clear from a system-based view. Without a grasp of basic physical concepts like conservation of mass and energy and the direction of entropy, life is an impenetrable mystery. For example, imagine a river flowing downstream with eddies on the sides - those eddies have an upstream flow component, driven by the overall downstream energy flow. Living cells do the same thing: they capture physical and chemical energy from their surroundings and use their networks of nucleic acids and proteins, and their encapsulation structures, to reverse the normal downstream flow of entropy. Everything else follows pretty logically from there. How do cells communicate with their surroundings? They take up materials, excrete wastes, collect sensory data, engage in chemical messaging, and so on. How do cells maintain their nucleic acid and protein networks? By constantly repairing and rebuilding and replicating them using inputs of energy and materials. What is reproduction? A systems-level cellular reboot that also introduces novelty in the form of mutations and rearrangements (which may be useful, or not). For a good intro to systems-based thinking in biology: (2020) Systems Biology: A Very Short Introduction, Eberhard O. Voit https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198828372.001.0001/actrade-9780198828372-chapter-4 https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/... If you want a deep dive into the modern view of the dynamic, 3D genome, this is a great source (which also explains why just knowing the primary sequence of a genome doesn't necessarily lead to an understanding of disease states, failure modes, etc.): (2015) The Deeper Genome: Why There Is More to the Human Genome Than Meets the Eye, John Parrington https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25660581-the-deeper-genome https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25660581-the-deeper-geno...
  • ampdepolymerase 4y ago
    Voit looks gimmicky. Uri Alon's treatment (An Introduction to Systems Biology) is much better.
• jugg1es 4y ago
  In reference to the part where he talks about wanting it to be easier to create 3d models in biology - the complexity of organic molecules is very, very high. Not only are they complex, but they change shape a lot. In fact, the more realistic a 3d representation of an organic molecule is, the less likely that it would help you actually understand it. Microbiology is messy.
• thanatos519 4y ago
  I didn't even take biology because I thought the physics/math end of the stack was the ultimate truth. I was not even wrong!
• causality0 4y ago
  Indeed. I changed my major from biology after class became an endless series of PowerPoint slides depicting protein chemical reaction sequences we had to memorize.
• TheCoreh 4y ago
  The obsession with taxonomy and categorization really ruins a lot of subjects in school. It kinda makes sense _why_ they are covered like this: It's really easy to “split” the syllabus into even chunks; it is a good fit for the memorization-based study techniques that are pervasive and it leads to a very “homogenous” learning experience regardless of the maturity and interests of each student. My main problem with it is that it leads to very rigid thought structures devoid of curiosity or contextualization: The belief that the map is the terrain; that the universe is static, predetermined and discretely categorized under conveniently human terms; that scientific knowledge is either divined or standardized by a class of bureaucrats; that things are sorted over a “rank” of lesser to greater according to a direction towards objective progress. It also generally sucks out a lot of the “fun” of learning about the world (though I understand sometimes taxonomy/categorization _can_ be fun in its own right). As an example, grammar only really “clicked” with me when I was already in college: I was finally able to see it outside of the “prescriptive memorization hell” that I was subjected to in school, and instead perceive it under descriptive terms of Computer Science.
  • closeparen 4y ago
    I sympathize, also being bad at and unhappy doing this kind of study. But to be fair to biology, its fundamental thing is the incredible variety of creatures in the world; their stunning diversity as well as similarities, family resemblances, and interactions.
  • randcraw 4y ago
    I agree. I know many who were driven away from appreciating biology due to its excess of nomenclature and memorization thereof. It's made worse because few terms reveal much depth of meaning about what it labels. Biology is made superficial because the language of the subject describes only surface, no depth. That's not biology's fault. No language could hope to convey the full ‘personality’ of each character in a tale as rich and complex as unfolds in Lewis' “Life of a Cell”. But maybe biology is ripe, now that we understand enough of its major 'characters' and their 'behaviors', for us to introduce more abstract models of biology using concepts and language that make for more intuitive players and their relationships. In this way, we might tell a more comprehensible and engaging narrative based on a much smaller set of reusable base models — the way that applied math expands on the concept of a computable function or the way electrical engineering builds on gaussian processes that model signals. At the very least, I would LOVE for each chapter in a molecular bio textbook to be split into two parts — a short overview of the topic that follows with only the major components and activity described, and only then, to dive into the details. Seeing a city from high above it is an enormous help before trying to appreciate it on foot.
• pflanze 4y ago
  Previous discussion (Nov 2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422
• bilsbie 4y ago
  It really makes you realize how much room for improvement there is in education.
• fastaguy88 4y ago
  I think this essay applies to most of the sciences (perhaps excluding physics), in part because it is really hard to test whether a student was amazed by a particular insight, and much easier to test facts. Biology is amazing. Every cell has the same DNA, and in humans, that DNA is several meters long. In a cell that is 25-ish microns in diameter! But chemistry is amazing too - how do all those air molecules become uniformly distributed in a volume? How did Avagadro figure out that number? The problem with teaching science is that the amazing stuff that is accessible to a high-school student was figured out 100 - 400 years ago, and we’ve learned a lot since. And for biology and chemistry, there are all those details. (I guess math might be worse, since we teach things that have been understood for thousands of years, but at least the old stuff is obviously useful.) I think it’s really hard to teach and test on the exciting stuff. What’s exciting to me may be “who cares” to the next person. But it’s great when it works.
• brainzap 4y ago
  I should have loved X but school happend.
• pgrepds 4y ago
  I disagree that biology, or by proxy any other science, should be written in such a way that a non-expert in the field should understand everything without consulting wikipedia or any other source. Studying a natural sciences includes learning a certain vocabulary and grammar. The reason for this is simple. We agree on certain definitions, words and sentences, to minimise the possibility of ambiguities and misconceptions. This is a very important aspect of any science. In the same sense, abstracting things is important. Abstraction gives us the opportunity to apply the results from one seemingly foreign field to another. It is not the task of science to create enthusiasm for the result for people outside the field in technical articles or textbooks as this post tries to endorse. The excitement for a certain topic should be given by the teachers and, to be honest, this was also always the case in my experience, but I might have been very lucky. Furthermore, the vast generalisation “Instead, we’re told that if you ever find yourself wanting the area of a triangle, here’s the procedure” couldn't be further from what I've experienced. I’ve never been given a “procedure” in math without being taught why and how it works.
• User23 4y ago
  This is part of why I’m grateful for my Christian faith. I view the scientific endeavor with endless wonder, because it’s incredibly satisfying to better understand creation. I don’t need to be convinced the cell is a glorious marvel. It’s certainly not the only way to have that intellectual posture, but it’s a powerful one.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  There were animations of DNA -> protein translation, it felt very much like good old (map f list) :)
• paradox242 4y ago
  This is why I have such a low opinion of the educational system in general. It somehow finds a way to present the extraordinary in the most mundane way possible. There are few no places these days that smother the wonder and curiosity in a child more than public school.