5 ms·

I should have loved biology (2020)

342 points by tyre 2mo ago

GnarfGnarf 2mo ago
I should have loved Latin. I should have loved Greek.
Nicholas_C 2mo ago
>It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?
- intrasight 2mo ago
  I read it shortly after it came out when I was in high school and it was sort of a mind blow - perhaps just because in the early 80s we didn't really get exposed to so many interesting ideas.
  - stevenwoo 2mo ago
    Back then I got most of my books used from Half Price Books (prior to being able to do a quick internet search for a review) so bought both this and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of… mostly off the title and cover blurbs and once I was able to grok both was happy to have made it through and kind of underwhelmed probably due to the hype building my expectations too high.
- marssaxman 2mo ago
  It is unique; you've certainly never read anything else quite like it. Hofstadter is a deep and careful thinker who loves language and wordplay. He writes in order to communicate something he has spent a long time thinking about, not merely for the sake of cranking out a book. I've read a number of his other books, and some of his ways of thinking have stuck with me for years and shaped the way I see the world.
- soulofmischief 2mo ago
  It's a good book, despite its flaws. It offers a lot of deep insights and I think it really inspired a lot of people, myself included.
- GPerson 2mo ago
  The author prefers people read his newer book I am a strange loop since it more directly represents his views. He’s apparently frustrated that nobody gets the point of GEB (which is to discuss consciousness).
- zem 2mo ago
  I wasn't a huge fan, to be honest. some good ideas, but overall the book felt self-indulgent. "metamagical themas" is a far better book if you want to read one thing by hofstadter, and "le ton beau de marot" if you want a deep dive into something.
- ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
  If you like the mathematical aspects of computer science and computability theory, cranking out proofs using lambda calculus and Turing machines fascinates you, and you think Lisp is an elegant language, you may like it. For the average developer, it's unlikely to be interesting.
- sublinear 2mo ago
  It's definitely signaling for the majority of people still talking about it today. Though, that's not saying much that you didn't already know about the groups you mentioned. Being that it's more of a Gen Xer pop-sci book, it's not to "prove smarts", but to share a vibe. It belongs on someone's shelf next to their copies of The Naked Lunch and Aja. Maybe even a signed copy of A New Kind of Science? I'm not trying to be dismissive. It's just true. Nobody is even ashamed of it, nor should be. It's an interesting and still relevant perspective, but because there's no resolution to this line of thinking, many find it underwhelming. There's no "aha" moment to be found in any of this. Just lots of introspection. You gotta take the good with the bad though. The tall grass is an easy place to hide.
srean 2mo ago
This is one of those perennial HN favorites https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20biology&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20bi...
- underdeserver 2mo ago
  Yep, and given that the original author posted it in 2020, should probably be marked (2020).
- tyre 2mo ago
  yes! I first found it on HN. The other front page piece on Thickness reminded me of it. Always happy to pass along a good article to the next generation of Posters
  - srean 2mo ago
    Yes. Every generation needs to rediscovery the old chestnuts. That's why I think old but good textbooks should stay available and new text books should cute them. That is how knowledge is retained over generations. Some dislike new text books that rehash the same old material. I think it is necessary to do it even if there is nothing new to add other than new artwork and a contemporary typeface.
intrasight 2mo ago
I realized after getting a degree in engineering from CMU that I should've loved biology so I went back to school after working as a software engineer for a year and studied neurobiology. And since then, I've suggested that people early in their career should take a break and go back to school and study something totally different.
- ajmurmann 2mo ago
  In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig suggests something very similar. He makes the point that students should go and work a job before picking what to study because they'll see where the value comes from (he of course puts it in much better words)
  - foobarian 2mo ago
    I've heard this advice a lot with respect to graduate school/PhD work. And indeed, the students that came from industry jobs tended to be much more impressive; some of that was probably from the "real-world" experience, and some probably from a self-selection effect where folks who came in from a presumably well paying job had to have really wanted it and were therefore more motivated.
  - esafak 2mo ago
    That might be difficult given the job market now compared to Pirsig's time. Of course you could get menial job but that won't tell you much about the real job you want, just about what work is like in general.
    - ajmurmann 2mo ago
      Definitely true. I still frequently think about this and how I'd value school so much more now. I think I'd literally be excited about every subject.
- 59percentmore 2mo ago
  With what money?
RivieraKid 2mo ago
One of the threads like this one has prompted me to start reading the book Molecular Biology of the Cell several years ago. I need to get back to it.
janalsncm 2mo ago
Physics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too. The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read. Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy. One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it. Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.
- Onavo 2mo ago
  > One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Well, a lot of places would penalize you if your data is incorrect, so most of the focus ends up on execution rather than the why. If you were angling for a high GPA for whatever reason, you cannot afford to experiment too much during lab work. It's another case entirely of course if you are conducting research.
  - n4r9 2mo ago
    > the focus ends up on execution rather than the why Exactly right. School teaches you that the point of running an experiment is to try and get the same result as the teacher, while performing a ritual with steps called "hypothesis" and "method".
  - janalsncm 2mo ago
    Really a shame because understanding why your results were incorrect is much more important than stumbling on the right answer by accident.
  - throwaway219450 2mo ago
    I would say this is fine for lab work as part of a course. The majority of people have never worked in a laboratory environment before, beside what their school could offer. Precision balances, calipers/micrometers, electronic measuring equipment, fume hoods, etc. Especially chem and bio where you start working with more dangerous reagents and very specialized instruments. Were you able to follow instructions to get the experiment to work? Did you correctly apply what you know about experimental error to get sensible results? Were you able to actually get those steps done in the few hours a week you had? Did you write it up legibly and keep good notes? "Labs" are not research projects. Those come later and are usually also heavily guided. As a mentor you do not want to set a stupid-hard undergraduate project that might not work, unless you really discuss it with the student. It's demoralizing and the majority of the student population only needs to show that they did some original thinking, tried out some hypothises and wrote up the results in a coherent way. Good schools offer extra-curricular/summer programs to push motivated students that are considering research careers.
jhbadger 2mo ago
>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology] You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!
criley2 2mo ago
I absolutely experienced this in college. I signed up as a computer science student, as one does. I took all of the freshmen classes across broad topics, and the first biology class was basically just like the article describes. Words and memorization and microbiology and boring stuff. Who cares, let's get back to the dorm room to play CounterStrike on the school LAN. But then I took the second required biology course. And rather than be about memorizing the krebs cycle, it was macrobiology. Ecology, evolution, and everything I hadn't realized I wanted to learn about the world around me. I instantly fell in love and 99'd the class. I changed my major to Biology, went pretty heavy into biology and chemistry, and didn't take more than a few Java classes in Comp Sci. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology. I'm still a software developer, mind you, but I wouldn't trade the Biology degree for anything. Learning statistics, experimental design and experimentation, and just having the opportunity to deep dive into the physical world from the biggest to the smallest details, it was life-changing. I still ended up learning data models, algorithms, and probably would be a better engineer if I had dug in deep on comp sci, but I like to think the biology degree helped me be a better developer for different reasons.
noname123 2mo ago
This is a very romantic view of life sciences. Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response. The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America. The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.
- doctorpangloss 2mo ago
  > or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); one thing's for sure, there are certain spaces for people who lack people skills, and that seems to be associated with "STEM" skills
  - noname123 2mo ago
    Yes for me, it's mutually beneficial and gives me a quick way to polarize, filter out people I don't want waste time associating with (and vice versa too - people who are institutionalist, professional managerial class (PMCs); thank you for making my point!)
yipinwong 2mo ago
If i had access to articles/blogs/YT/TT/AI like this, I'd have had become Leornardo Da Vinci. I used to be inquisitive but coming from a poor neighborhood, I had no access in the olden days. This type of article should persist.
- jedbrooke 2mo ago
  maybe a stupid question, but, don’t you have access to all those things now? What’s stopping you from becoming Da Vinci now?
  - owebmaster 2mo ago
    He probably thinks his vibecoded things are in some genius level
  - lukan 2mo ago
    Limited time and energy left? On the other hand, Da Vinci became Da Vinci without those tools either and whether he became the genius if he would have offloaded his thinking to AI from small on, is up for debate I guess.
alpn 2mo ago
[2020] previous discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590
- dang 2mo ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: I should have loved biology (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 - April 2024 (253 comments) I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments) I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
  - MezzoDelCammin 2mo ago
    is there a way to pin comments like this up top? I've just spent 5min doing the same by hand, before scrolling all the way down to see this one
    - dang 2mo ago
      I'm sorry for the duplicated effort! We don't pin those comments to the top because it would nudge the conversation in too meta a direction. It's better that they hover partway down the page. What I do is ctrl+F 'ycombinator' on the thread before posting one, though of course that doesn't avoid race conditions.
teekert 2mo ago
I did always love biology, not because of my teachers, but because of my own wonder of it ("I sort of get how an engine works, but how do humans work?"). And I became a biologist, and thinking about the things this author describes indeed still blows my mind. I get the high level of a lot of things now, but every time I need to do a deep dive, I feel like "how the hell can this even work". But it works, and it works incredibly well. I still think it's the nicest field to be in (even though I love computers and Linux and FOSS as well).
- ngriffiths 2mo ago
  Agreed, I loved my biology courses and lab work and had always had a similar sense of wonder about it all. It's interesting, I'm not sure that came from any teacher in particular and I bet there are plenty of people who just never feel it no matter how you teach the subject. That said, those are beautiful illustrations referenced in the article and they have a ton of teaching value, and I think a lot of core concepts that went over my head would have been way more accessible using tools like that.
loourr 2mo ago
This resonated strongly. I hated biology as a kid but have been blown away at the wonder of it all as I've started to study it as an adult. I wish more of the magnificence and wonder of it all was conveyed vs the rote memorization that is so commonly taught.
saintaardvark 2mo ago
I had a similar experience with nature. My dad was the outdoors type, a conservation officer who loved hunting & fishing; I wanted nothing more than to be inside reading an encyclopedia. I have always liked science, but biology was just one subject among many. When I became an adult, I gravitated to computers because there is so much to learn about them. My focus has been infrastructure, but I've picked up software development, assembly, kernel hacking, data science, and a dozen other things along the way (mostly at amateur levels, but I'm always happy to learn). I have have other interests (economics, homebrewing, astronomy, sociology, making music), but in each of those cases I learned what I wanted to after a few years & moved away. When covid hit, I picked up natural history through iNaturalist -- and that has so far been very very different, much more the same kind of endless opportunity for discovery that computers felt like. There is so much weirdness in biology. Parasitic wasps with genes that came from viruses that suppress caterpillar immune systems, male spiders that have appendages (pedipalps) that look like boxing gloves, the many kinds of bumble bees around me, introduced species, nests, microorganisms -- it's insane. It's higher up the stack than the stuff the author is describing, but no less wonderfully complex and fascinating. The quote from Lewis Thomas really hit home for me: "People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that" [cell|insect|weird relationship|phenology|behaviour]. Kudos to the author for putting this all into words so well, and for adding a dozen books to my must-read list.
- jll29 2mo ago
  Yes, the article is about awe and the fact that there isn't enough of it because we get fed into our brains what happens "matter of fact" by the education syste, without taking time to wonder and be surprised.
baist0 2mo ago
OMG! it's true! I have skipped so much!
zabzonk 2mo ago
As an ex-microbiologist, the thing I can't stand is how smelly life is. Be in the same room as gangrenous flesh and your intestinal fortitude will be severely tested. Other than that, I don't mind it, but I still prefer silicon.
randomImmigrant 2mo ago
Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did). I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology. Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems. What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people. But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization. But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies. The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure. But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.
caramaolas 2mo ago
[dead]
drc500free 2mo ago
This is why I loved biology; I must have had better high school teachers than the OP, because basically all of what he writes was conveyed.
vipshek 2mo ago
This article is ostensibly about biology but it's really about pedagogy—how traditional education squeezes out the sense of discovery and turns many subjects into rote memorization exercises. This reminds me of the pedagogical philosophy of Seymour Papert, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's "genetic epistemology" argues that knowledge and understanding is created by interacting with environments, which traditional educational approaches fail to provide. Papert combined Piaget's ideas with the emergence of computing to argue that children should be taught subjects in a hands-on, exploratory way - and not just for teaching computing! The idea is that by programming in simplified languages, children can discover ideas in subjects like mathematics and grammar - deriving them as they try to solve problems instead of having them dictated to them. Suppose that biology was taught in a game-like environment where students were designing cells or organisms in some way. Maybe the game could be structured so that each organelle could be "discovered" by the student as they designed the cell to survive in some environment. Perhaps that'd make the purpose of each cell component more grounded and memorable. Papert's book Mindstorms covers all this in detail, and I highly recommend reading it. I feel like it's especially important today given fears of how AI will affect childhood education. At best, I hope that computing can be a boon to education instead of a detriment if it's woven into pedagogy thoughtfully.
- BeetleB 2mo ago
  Education serves two purposes: Understanding and developing skills for employment. Unfortunately, there usually isn't enough time to teach both for all subjects. The latter usually takes priority. I saw this happen twice in my university life. I took the honors version of CHEM101. 80% of it was more about exploring and discovery, and 20% was more traditional problems, calculations, etc. For people like me who were not chemistry majors, this was great. For the chemistry majors - they really struggled when they got into CHEM102. The same happened with Quantum Mechanics I. The professor didn't want to teach all the bra-ket notation, and more or less skipped much of the linear algebra aspects of QM - focusing on a purely calculus approach. He then retired. The professor who taught QM II saw what the professor did, and said "WTF?!" He spent most of the semester reteaching QM I. As a result, those like me who went on to grad school had to retake QM II at the new university to make up for all that wasn't taught to me.
ecshafer 2mo ago
I like this blog and its a romantic view of Biology, and I agree with the sentiments. However I would say its a narrow view of large issue: Lack of Rigor and Depth in School. Biology doesn't get enough into the nuts and bolts, and instead focuses on regurgitation of facts, with not enough experimentation. Mathematics doesn't have enough of a focus on rigor, proofs and building models from first principles, just a formulaic approach of decomposing equations and fitting them into patterns to solve. History is a list of facts, with a little bit of essays connecting ideas, where you might say how the Leviathan affected Enlightenment thinking but you don't actually read the Leviathan, and learn how Napoleonic warfare changed things, but don't read primary evidence. Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.
ricardo81 2mo ago
I did (and do albeit somewhat in a neglected way) love biology. As much as I admired pure science (maths / physics) there is a certain romantic-ness to the real world application of chemistry and the emergence of it I suppose at the most scientific PoV, but really just that it's so complex and we appreciate the emergence of it. I wrote biology-online.org shortly after education and it's achieved a few thousand years worth of page views. wikipedia tends to cover all those informational queries nowadays and I've been programming for 20 years since. It's so easy to forget that much of our inspiration comes from biology (and ecology of course) and its emergent behaviour. When I hear hype about anything I think about how it's taken 4 billion years for anyone to say it and you simply can't forget we're standing on the shoulders of giants.
derefr 2mo ago
We say often that the purpose of an undergraduate degree, whether taken in a specific domain or in the liberal arts, is not to teach any subject in depth, but rather to give a broad overview of the subject. This is sometimes explained (excused?) as ingraining into the learner a kind of index of the state of a field and the methods of its practice, a thing that can be relied upon as a kind of highway map of knowledge, an intuition to direct the learner from then on onto the right arterial roads, from which their own research can then guide them to the actual street and building, per se. But I would argue that the true function of an undergraduate degree, in surveying the subfields of a field, is to simply expose the learner to those fields, and hopefully bait them into an appreciation for one of them: to find the learner a specific cragged surface along the frontier of human knowledge that captivates them not only to explore it, but to solidify the foundations of their understanding of the field as a whole so that they feel better equipped to explore it. (Certainly, while not everyone who graduates with an undergraduate degree can say they found such a thing, then at least everyone who continues within academia to become a researcher on the frontier of knowledge, will likely say they found their love of the subject they would eventually research some time during their undergraduate studies.) I bring this up because it feels like early (elementary and secondary) education should be designed around the same goal, to the same degree if not moreso: to expose the learner to the many amazing things there are to be passionate about within every field of learning. As a business would say, “you must convince your customer that they have a problem, before you attempt to sell them the solution.” In other words, you must convince the learner that there is a promised land of continual wonderment on the other side of the huge inferential gap that separates them from those knowledgeable in a field, before they will ever be intrinsically motivated to cross that gap, and thus to accept your offer of tools and exercises to bridge that gap. The funny thing is that everyone except the teachers and staff of primary/secondary schools, seem to know intuitively that this is the right order to approach education in. No science communicator on YouTube tries to lecture in the dry way schoolteachers do. No historian at a museum presents their subject to a tour group without a compelling framing narrative. No space center tries to teach you orbital mechanics before first convincing you how damn cool it is to ride in a rocket or do a space-walk, or how wonderfully alien the surface of another planet is. Aquariums hook you with the fleeting flashes of color of live fish you’ve never seen before first, never pushing the information about them on you, simply expecting your own building curiosity get the better of you as you decide to start reading the placards beside the most-interesting exhibits. We have a special field, Early Chidlhood Education, that tries to guide educators into best attunement with the expectations and capabilities infants and young children bring to the table. But we have no similar field of Late Childhood Education. We just have “education” (which is almost more the cargo-cult reverse-engineering of traditions inherited from aristocratic finishing schools, than it is a coherent theory of how to produce well-educated adults) and then, very separately, the loose assemblage of knowledge of our public educators, academic-topic communicators, edutainment media writers, etc. (which has, as far as I know, never been put together to be studied as an academic subject, let alone taught as a discipline.) We can see fictional schoolteachers (your Mrs. Frizzles, your John Keatings) and on-camera educational personas (your Bill Nyes and Carl Sagans) doing a perfect [if implausibly-well-resourced] rendition of what an educator trained in such a field would be like, if it existed—yet we don’t expect real schoolteachers to engage with students on anything like that wavelength. We don’t expect real textbooks to present the world to children the way such a field would encourage. We don’t expect governments to evaluate late-childhood educational quality by the metrics the researchers in such a field would propose. And while part of this is surely because we expect public education to serve certain public goods — one of those being to produce adults who are employable in the average entry-level job, jobs that in turn require certain skills and knowledge (and so to force children to absorb those skills and that knowledge whether they feel any interest in it or not) — that’s no excuse for making the process of ingraining that knowledge downright adversarial. Not when it would be both faster, cheaper, and less laborious to both the teachers and students (at least when measured by some long-term Total Cost of Education), to have the kids actually be enthusiastically cooperative in their own education. But the downright-weird thing to me, is that even private schools don’t generally approach education this way. And nor do most homeschooling parents. They’re all either traditionalists of the “finishing school” bent who think the best possible education is each individual having a set of learned tutors there to force knowledge down their throat in a personalized way; or they’re believers in kids’ “drive to learn” (and so tend to provide no structure whatsoever, leaving kids to be “self-driven” — i.e. to either flail or hyperfocus on the few things they already know are cool, receiving little exposure to things outside their bubble, and so missing out on entire subjects because the existence of those things just never occurred to them.) Is the problem just a lack of imagination? “This is how I learned, so this is what learning is”? Or is it that approaching education this way would require that schoolteachers actually be both passionate and knowledgeable about something; and that each school retain enough such teachers that together they can share with their students a passion for every subject the school hopes to expose the kids to? And maybe the wrong “type” of people go into education (maybe people passionate about the process of education itself, or about giving kids opportunities, or something), so it’s actually challenging to build a school where every teacher is carrying the spark of some particular academic passion they wish to share with the students? (Personally, I hypothesize that you could get by just fine with people holding a Masters or PhD in a subject of interest and no “education in education” at all, just common sense and empathy enough to not expect children to perform intellectual miracles. And hiring for that doesn’t seem to be too hard; there are vast swathes of “over-degreed” under-employed people, currently stuck doing something utterly divorced from their passion, who’d love to instead be communicating their love of a subject to the next generation. As long as the school can promise that that won’t translate to torturing unwilling students with rote memorization, and then giving them tests they know the kids will fail, because they never studied, because they had zero interest.)
boricj 2mo ago
Isn't biology the applied reverse-engineering of a billion years of DNA evolution, where the laziest solution that works wins, is all written in assembly, with tremendous amounts of dead code and hardly any refactorings? I've already seen the horrors that lurk inside of poorly-written 90s video games. Hard pass.
samuell 2mo ago
I liked the connection of the central dogma of biology (DBA to RNA to Proteins) with Lisp programs. I connected that to streaming flow-based programs though, as opposed to cell-to-cell signaling which shares many characteristics with, Erlang style, fire-and-forget message passing: https://livingsystems.cc/posts/flowbased-vs-erlang-message-passing/ https://livingsystems.cc/posts/flowbased-vs-erlang-message-p...
naet 2mo ago
I loved math, chemistry, and physics, but I hated biology for some similar reasons to the author. In chemistry or physics I felt like I was actively problem solving, learning about systems and how to manipulate them. By contrast in my biology class I felt like all I did was memorize different names of things. In college chemistry I enjoyed lab work and I've always loved the outdoors and the natural world, so maybe bio would have been a good fit for me in some ways... but I never took another biology related course after the first one turned me completely off the subject.
- Fomite 2mo ago
  In contrast, I loved biology and felt its applications call to me, and it took me like five years after struggling through calculus to go "Oh, that's what that's for."
initramfs 2mo ago
One of the motivating reasons I majored in Biology my sophomore year was that the Vatican was took centuries in accepting the heliocentric theory, and I thought if they got evolution wrong too, then there might be more work to do. But then I realized that a lot of biologists are religious, and it didn't have to be an antagonistic competition.
cubano 2mo ago
Like 7 years ago I read the most amazing book on biology..it described that inside cells literal skyscrapers of protein-based structures and machinery took individual ATP molecules and stripped them of an outer electron thus creating what I believe is called a "proton gradient". This imbalance of electrical charge across a membrane is LITERALLY what creates life. Everything that living things do to recreate themselves is powered by this machinery and, as I remember this book telling me, the idea that a cell could suddenly pop into existence with all this truly incredible and unbelievable complex machinery is exactly like the idea of taking all the parts of a 747 and throwing them into a large box and then opening the box and a fully functional 747 is there waiting to take off. The use of proton gradients gives an insight not only into how life got going in the first place, but also, perhaps, its deepest mindfuck point: the evolution of complex eukaryotic (nucleated) cells, which arose just once in 4 billion years of evolution. There are no signs at all of some sort of gradual path to eukaryotic cells as evolution would lend us to think. Just the sudden appearance of this self-replicating nucleic cell which allows ALL multi-cellular life to exist. I was utterly shocked that it took me 53 years to learn this most amazing of all facts I've every learned, and to be honest it makes the whole Black Hole fascination seem pedantic and almost trivial. Of course I hate myself for not remembering either the name of this book or it's incredible author, so yes I know I suck.
- Murmuring9087 2mo ago
  The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life?
akssri 2mo ago
This article should be of interest to this crowd. "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis - Yuri Lazebnik" https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)00133-2 https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)0013...
edg5000 2mo ago
Is anybody in here both engineer and biologist? How far away are we from the complexity of the human body? Pretty far I guess. Although we're producing features at molecular size now with lithography. I choose engineering because I felt I could pay the bills with that. But we have so much to learn from biology that could be applied in engineering perhaps?
fl4tul4 2mo ago
I should have studied a 'real' topic instead of computing, and then tackle issues therein (ie, in my chosen topic) using programming as a TOOL to help me realise things, and experiment. All my career is about computing, for computing sake, now I find myself in trouble in this AI-driven world as I don't have a base to stand on, with interesting problems, and a lot of programming is just being 'generated' in a black-box. And no, I'm not talking about becoming a major software ARCHITECT, solving deep infrastructure problems and whatnot. I'm thinking on day-to-day issues. Whatever, just a minor rant - if it helps future generations realising that and change course, my job is done. Cheerios
ChaitanyaSai 2mo ago
We run a microschool and our single most important realization is this. We need to allow for meaning before mechanics. Schooling has a gravitational pull that inverts this because of our obsession with Measurement. We learn, and we can learn relentlessly, when things matter. We are meaning makers. But when well-intentioned curriculum remove the process of making meaning and give you the final product, it just takes away reasons for learning. And no matter how we dress it up, this ends up staying shallow because it is only the surface level learning that is visible and measurable and held to account. Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics > Measurement This is the natural order we should try to preserve despite all the systemic pulls to measure as a poor proxy for asking "are we doing our job well" Wrote about it here: https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-paradoxically https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...
- 121789 2mo ago
  this is all meaningless AI nonsense. maybe you can recommend reading dostoevsky before learning the alphabet for 4 year olds. or you can realize there's a balance and meaning first is not the right strategy either. good luck with your blog.
  - ChaitanyaSai 2mo ago
    It's more of a dance than a balance because the way we learn is going from the whole to the parts and back. Meaning first does not mean asking/getting them to grasp something complex. It is about showing and creating a world where the thing in question matters and has value. Teaching alphabet first without being able to show why (not explain) is absolutely wrong. The way we bringing meaning is by reading to them, creating a place where reading clearly has evident value because we derive value, fun, joy. There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics). How we introduce phonics with meaning is not a question that's asked because schooling philsophies often implicitly mirror the latest neuroscience trend (behaviorism, spare the rod spoil the child, cognitivism, it's not meaning it is the cogntive skills) Also, there's really little value in criticism without having anything constructive to offer. How would you arrive at a balance?
interludead 2mo ago
Avery's experiment is memorable not because "DNA carries heredity" is an important fact but because protein looked like the plausible answer and a relatively simple experiment overturned it...
MezzoDelCammin 2mo ago
Is there a tradition for this blog post to appear every 2 years? 2024, 253 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 2022, 271 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 2020, 298 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422
tobin1994 2mo ago
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jll29 2mo ago
One take-away: At the very least, each school library schould provide: • Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid • David Goodsell, The Machinery of Life • William W. Cohen, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology • Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology • Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
hypertexthero 2mo ago
Paul Lockart paper shows Not Found, so here’s an Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170514160142/https://maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170514160142/https://maa.org/e... The paper shows a dotted line dividing the triangles and showing the areas to be equal, which makes things clearer.
IAmBroom 2mo ago
I should have loved history. It was my worst subject (until Power and Statics in college). It was about memorizing dates and big generalizations about events. Now I'm active in a historical recreation society. I have learned to translate 3 ancient languages (and Latin, with great difficulty). I can intricately describe minutiae about what a late-1390s Englishman would know, and do on a daily basis. I can rant about "his" political opinions on France, the two popes, the various ruling families, Italians and Italian literature... I have organized and attended classes on: Chinese rice winemaking, primitive latitude tools, fiber and cloth production, religious daily artifacts, recipe redaction, ... Hated History. Got a "C". My only "C".
- cindyllm 2mo ago
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esafak 2mo ago
It is the same for all subjects. Classes don't talk about how and why things came about, which is half the fun. It is all a pile of facts to be memorized to pass some test, not for its own sake. I think it is best to learn on your own, and use class for consolidation.
taeric 2mo ago
I'm sympathetic to this; but hard for me to really think this is actionable. Odds are quite high that someone did push for these perspectives a few times, but someone didn't have the vantage point to appreciate them at the time. That can be a really hard thing for people to realize. We will ask, "why didn't someone use this really compelling framing to get me hooked on something?!" And then move to something like "how come nobody has ever said just walking an hour a day will get you in pretty good physical shape?" Thing is, plenty of people say stuff like that. And don't mistake this as blaming the listener! The point is messages can often come when you flat out aren't prepared for them. So, what do we do? We spend time on the rote muscle memory of facts. In the hopes that that will prepare you for the next time a message comes and you are then ready for it. Ideally, you rinse and repeat this. Constantly. All too often, the cycle gets subverted, though, and you forget to reopen yourself to the messages that came before.
tsoukase 2mo ago
The cell is a factory. You can have deep dive with the book Molecular Biology of the Cell, although it's used in university. It's the SICP of biology. The latter was published in 1985 the former in 1983. I read it in 1995 and it's amazing how much was known then. I haven't followed a cellular/genetic path to experience the evolution.
effnorwood 2mo ago
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abhinav_sk 2mo ago
I remember so well, being in boarding school in the 11th grade and really learning about evolution(might be late haha). It gave me my first ever existential crisis. I really resonate with this article because the awe of biology was so understated in school. It felt like the driest subject ever.

342 points by tyre 2mo ago

I should have loved Latin. I should have loved Greek.

>It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?

intrasight 2mo ago
I read it shortly after it came out when I was in high school and it was sort of a mind blow - perhaps just because in the early 80s we didn't really get exposed to so many interesting ideas.
- stevenwoo 2mo ago
  Back then I got most of my books used from Half Price Books (prior to being able to do a quick internet search for a review) so bought both this and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of… mostly off the title and cover blurbs and once I was able to grok both was happy to have made it through and kind of underwhelmed probably due to the hype building my expectations too high.
marssaxman 2mo ago
It is unique; you've certainly never read anything else quite like it. Hofstadter is a deep and careful thinker who loves language and wordplay. He writes in order to communicate something he has spent a long time thinking about, not merely for the sake of cranking out a book. I've read a number of his other books, and some of his ways of thinking have stuck with me for years and shaped the way I see the world.
soulofmischief 2mo ago
It's a good book, despite its flaws. It offers a lot of deep insights and I think it really inspired a lot of people, myself included.
GPerson 2mo ago
The author prefers people read his newer book I am a strange loop since it more directly represents his views. He’s apparently frustrated that nobody gets the point of GEB (which is to discuss consciousness).
zem 2mo ago
I wasn't a huge fan, to be honest. some good ideas, but overall the book felt self-indulgent. "metamagical themas" is a far better book if you want to read one thing by hofstadter, and "le ton beau de marot" if you want a deep dive into something.
ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
If you like the mathematical aspects of computer science and computability theory, cranking out proofs using lambda calculus and Turing machines fascinates you, and you think Lisp is an elegant language, you may like it. For the average developer, it's unlikely to be interesting.
sublinear 2mo ago
It's definitely signaling for the majority of people still talking about it today. Though, that's not saying much that you didn't already know about the groups you mentioned. Being that it's more of a Gen Xer pop-sci book, it's not to "prove smarts", but to share a vibe. It belongs on someone's shelf next to their copies of The Naked Lunch and Aja. Maybe even a signed copy of A New Kind of Science? I'm not trying to be dismissive. It's just true. Nobody is even ashamed of it, nor should be. It's an interesting and still relevant perspective, but because there's no resolution to this line of thinking, many find it underwhelming. There's no "aha" moment to be found in any of this. Just lots of introspection. You gotta take the good with the bad though. The tall grass is an easy place to hide.

srean 2mo ago

This is one of those perennial HN favorites https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20biology&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20bi...

underdeserver 2mo ago
Yep, and given that the original author posted it in 2020, should probably be marked (2020).
tyre 2mo ago
yes! I first found it on HN. The other front page piece on Thickness reminded me of it. Always happy to pass along a good article to the next generation of Posters
- srean 2mo ago
  Yes. Every generation needs to rediscovery the old chestnuts. That's why I think old but good textbooks should stay available and new text books should cute them. That is how knowledge is retained over generations. Some dislike new text books that rehash the same old material. I think it is necessary to do it even if there is nothing new to add other than new artwork and a contemporary typeface.

intrasight 2mo ago

I realized after getting a degree in engineering from CMU that I should've loved biology so I went back to school after working as a software engineer for a year and studied neurobiology. And since then, I've suggested that people early in their career should take a break and go back to school and study something totally different.

ajmurmann 2mo ago
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig suggests something very similar. He makes the point that students should go and work a job before picking what to study because they'll see where the value comes from (he of course puts it in much better words)
- foobarian 2mo ago
  I've heard this advice a lot with respect to graduate school/PhD work. And indeed, the students that came from industry jobs tended to be much more impressive; some of that was probably from the "real-world" experience, and some probably from a self-selection effect where folks who came in from a presumably well paying job had to have really wanted it and were therefore more motivated.
- esafak 2mo ago
  That might be difficult given the job market now compared to Pirsig's time. Of course you could get menial job but that won't tell you much about the real job you want, just about what work is like in general.
  - ajmurmann 2mo ago
    Definitely true. I still frequently think about this and how I'd value school so much more now. I think I'd literally be excited about every subject.
59percentmore 2mo ago
With what money?

RivieraKid 2mo ago

One of the threads like this one has prompted me to start reading the book Molecular Biology of the Cell several years ago. I need to get back to it.

janalsncm 2mo ago

Physics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too. The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read. Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy. One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it. Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.

Onavo 2mo ago
> One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Well, a lot of places would penalize you if your data is incorrect, so most of the focus ends up on execution rather than the why. If you were angling for a high GPA for whatever reason, you cannot afford to experiment too much during lab work. It's another case entirely of course if you are conducting research.
- n4r9 2mo ago
  > the focus ends up on execution rather than the why Exactly right. School teaches you that the point of running an experiment is to try and get the same result as the teacher, while performing a ritual with steps called "hypothesis" and "method".
- janalsncm 2mo ago
  Really a shame because understanding why your results were incorrect is much more important than stumbling on the right answer by accident.
- throwaway219450 2mo ago
  I would say this is fine for lab work as part of a course. The majority of people have never worked in a laboratory environment before, beside what their school could offer. Precision balances, calipers/micrometers, electronic measuring equipment, fume hoods, etc. Especially chem and bio where you start working with more dangerous reagents and very specialized instruments. Were you able to follow instructions to get the experiment to work? Did you correctly apply what you know about experimental error to get sensible results? Were you able to actually get those steps done in the few hours a week you had? Did you write it up legibly and keep good notes? "Labs" are not research projects. Those come later and are usually also heavily guided. As a mentor you do not want to set a stupid-hard undergraduate project that might not work, unless you really discuss it with the student. It's demoralizing and the majority of the student population only needs to show that they did some original thinking, tried out some hypothises and wrote up the results in a coherent way. Good schools offer extra-curricular/summer programs to push motivated students that are considering research careers.

jhbadger 2mo ago

>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology] You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!

criley2 2mo ago

I absolutely experienced this in college. I signed up as a computer science student, as one does. I took all of the freshmen classes across broad topics, and the first biology class was basically just like the article describes. Words and memorization and microbiology and boring stuff. Who cares, let's get back to the dorm room to play CounterStrike on the school LAN. But then I took the second required biology course. And rather than be about memorizing the krebs cycle, it was macrobiology. Ecology, evolution, and everything I hadn't realized I wanted to learn about the world around me. I instantly fell in love and 99'd the class. I changed my major to Biology, went pretty heavy into biology and chemistry, and didn't take more than a few Java classes in Comp Sci. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology. I'm still a software developer, mind you, but I wouldn't trade the Biology degree for anything. Learning statistics, experimental design and experimentation, and just having the opportunity to deep dive into the physical world from the biggest to the smallest details, it was life-changing. I still ended up learning data models, algorithms, and probably would be a better engineer if I had dug in deep on comp sci, but I like to think the biology degree helped me be a better developer for different reasons.

noname123 2mo ago

This is a very romantic view of life sciences. Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response. The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America. The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.

doctorpangloss 2mo ago
> or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); one thing's for sure, there are certain spaces for people who lack people skills, and that seems to be associated with "STEM" skills
- noname123 2mo ago
  Yes for me, it's mutually beneficial and gives me a quick way to polarize, filter out people I don't want waste time associating with (and vice versa too - people who are institutionalist, professional managerial class (PMCs); thank you for making my point!)

yipinwong 2mo ago

If i had access to articles/blogs/YT/TT/AI like this, I'd have had become Leornardo Da Vinci. I used to be inquisitive but coming from a poor neighborhood, I had no access in the olden days. This type of article should persist.

jedbrooke 2mo ago
maybe a stupid question, but, don’t you have access to all those things now? What’s stopping you from becoming Da Vinci now?
- owebmaster 2mo ago
  He probably thinks his vibecoded things are in some genius level
- lukan 2mo ago
  Limited time and energy left? On the other hand, Da Vinci became Da Vinci without those tools either and whether he became the genius if he would have offloaded his thinking to AI from small on, is up for debate I guess.

alpn 2mo ago

[2020] previous discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590

dang 2mo ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: I should have loved biology (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 - April 2024 (253 comments) I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments) I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
- MezzoDelCammin 2mo ago
  is there a way to pin comments like this up top? I've just spent 5min doing the same by hand, before scrolling all the way down to see this one
  - dang 2mo ago
    I'm sorry for the duplicated effort! We don't pin those comments to the top because it would nudge the conversation in too meta a direction. It's better that they hover partway down the page. What I do is ctrl+F 'ycombinator' on the thread before posting one, though of course that doesn't avoid race conditions.

teekert 2mo ago

I did always love biology, not because of my teachers, but because of my own wonder of it ("I sort of get how an engine works, but how do humans work?"). And I became a biologist, and thinking about the things this author describes indeed still blows my mind. I get the high level of a lot of things now, but every time I need to do a deep dive, I feel like "how the hell can this even work". But it works, and it works incredibly well. I still think it's the nicest field to be in (even though I love computers and Linux and FOSS as well).

ngriffiths 2mo ago
Agreed, I loved my biology courses and lab work and had always had a similar sense of wonder about it all. It's interesting, I'm not sure that came from any teacher in particular and I bet there are plenty of people who just never feel it no matter how you teach the subject. That said, those are beautiful illustrations referenced in the article and they have a ton of teaching value, and I think a lot of core concepts that went over my head would have been way more accessible using tools like that.

loourr 2mo ago

This resonated strongly. I hated biology as a kid but have been blown away at the wonder of it all as I've started to study it as an adult. I wish more of the magnificence and wonder of it all was conveyed vs the rote memorization that is so commonly taught.

saintaardvark 2mo ago

I had a similar experience with nature. My dad was the outdoors type, a conservation officer who loved hunting & fishing; I wanted nothing more than to be inside reading an encyclopedia. I have always liked science, but biology was just one subject among many. When I became an adult, I gravitated to computers because there is so much to learn about them. My focus has been infrastructure, but I've picked up software development, assembly, kernel hacking, data science, and a dozen other things along the way (mostly at amateur levels, but I'm always happy to learn). I have have other interests (economics, homebrewing, astronomy, sociology, making music), but in each of those cases I learned what I wanted to after a few years & moved away. When covid hit, I picked up natural history through iNaturalist -- and that has so far been very very different, much more the same kind of endless opportunity for discovery that computers felt like. There is so much weirdness in biology. Parasitic wasps with genes that came from viruses that suppress caterpillar immune systems, male spiders that have appendages (pedipalps) that look like boxing gloves, the many kinds of bumble bees around me, introduced species, nests, microorganisms -- it's insane. It's higher up the stack than the stuff the author is describing, but no less wonderfully complex and fascinating. The quote from Lewis Thomas really hit home for me: "People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that" [cell|insect|weird relationship|phenology|behaviour]. Kudos to the author for putting this all into words so well, and for adding a dozen books to my must-read list.

jll29 2mo ago
Yes, the article is about awe and the fact that there isn't enough of it because we get fed into our brains what happens "matter of fact" by the education syste, without taking time to wonder and be surprised.

baist0 2mo ago

OMG! it's true! I have skipped so much!

zabzonk 2mo ago

As an ex-microbiologist, the thing I can't stand is how smelly life is. Be in the same room as gangrenous flesh and your intestinal fortitude will be severely tested. Other than that, I don't mind it, but I still prefer silicon.

randomImmigrant 2mo ago

Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did). I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology. Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems. What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people. But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization. But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies. The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure. But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.

caramaolas 2mo ago

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drc500free 2mo ago

This is why I loved biology; I must have had better high school teachers than the OP, because basically all of what he writes was conveyed.

vipshek 2mo ago

This article is ostensibly about biology but it's really about pedagogy—how traditional education squeezes out the sense of discovery and turns many subjects into rote memorization exercises. This reminds me of the pedagogical philosophy of Seymour Papert, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's "genetic epistemology" argues that knowledge and understanding is created by interacting with environments, which traditional educational approaches fail to provide. Papert combined Piaget's ideas with the emergence of computing to argue that children should be taught subjects in a hands-on, exploratory way - and not just for teaching computing! The idea is that by programming in simplified languages, children can discover ideas in subjects like mathematics and grammar - deriving them as they try to solve problems instead of having them dictated to them. Suppose that biology was taught in a game-like environment where students were designing cells or organisms in some way. Maybe the game could be structured so that each organelle could be "discovered" by the student as they designed the cell to survive in some environment. Perhaps that'd make the purpose of each cell component more grounded and memorable. Papert's book Mindstorms covers all this in detail, and I highly recommend reading it. I feel like it's especially important today given fears of how AI will affect childhood education. At best, I hope that computing can be a boon to education instead of a detriment if it's woven into pedagogy thoughtfully.

BeetleB 2mo ago
Education serves two purposes: Understanding and developing skills for employment. Unfortunately, there usually isn't enough time to teach both for all subjects. The latter usually takes priority. I saw this happen twice in my university life. I took the honors version of CHEM101. 80% of it was more about exploring and discovery, and 20% was more traditional problems, calculations, etc. For people like me who were not chemistry majors, this was great. For the chemistry majors - they really struggled when they got into CHEM102. The same happened with Quantum Mechanics I. The professor didn't want to teach all the bra-ket notation, and more or less skipped much of the linear algebra aspects of QM - focusing on a purely calculus approach. He then retired. The professor who taught QM II saw what the professor did, and said "WTF?!" He spent most of the semester reteaching QM I. As a result, those like me who went on to grad school had to retake QM II at the new university to make up for all that wasn't taught to me.

ecshafer 2mo ago

I like this blog and its a romantic view of Biology, and I agree with the sentiments. However I would say its a narrow view of large issue: Lack of Rigor and Depth in School. Biology doesn't get enough into the nuts and bolts, and instead focuses on regurgitation of facts, with not enough experimentation. Mathematics doesn't have enough of a focus on rigor, proofs and building models from first principles, just a formulaic approach of decomposing equations and fitting them into patterns to solve. History is a list of facts, with a little bit of essays connecting ideas, where you might say how the Leviathan affected Enlightenment thinking but you don't actually read the Leviathan, and learn how Napoleonic warfare changed things, but don't read primary evidence. Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.

ricardo81 2mo ago

I did (and do albeit somewhat in a neglected way) love biology. As much as I admired pure science (maths / physics) there is a certain romantic-ness to the real world application of chemistry and the emergence of it I suppose at the most scientific PoV, but really just that it's so complex and we appreciate the emergence of it. I wrote biology-online.org shortly after education and it's achieved a few thousand years worth of page views. wikipedia tends to cover all those informational queries nowadays and I've been programming for 20 years since. It's so easy to forget that much of our inspiration comes from biology (and ecology of course) and its emergent behaviour. When I hear hype about anything I think about how it's taken 4 billion years for anyone to say it and you simply can't forget we're standing on the shoulders of giants.

derefr 2mo ago

We say often that the purpose of an undergraduate degree, whether taken in a specific domain or in the liberal arts, is not to teach any subject in depth, but rather to give a broad overview of the subject. This is sometimes explained (excused?) as ingraining into the learner a kind of index of the state of a field and the methods of its practice, a thing that can be relied upon as a kind of highway map of knowledge, an intuition to direct the learner from then on onto the right arterial roads, from which their own research can then guide them to the actual street and building, per se. But I would argue that the true function of an undergraduate degree, in surveying the subfields of a field, is to simply expose the learner to those fields, and hopefully bait them into an appreciation for one of them: to find the learner a specific cragged surface along the frontier of human knowledge that captivates them not only to explore it, but to solidify the foundations of their understanding of the field as a whole so that they feel better equipped to explore it. (Certainly, while not everyone who graduates with an undergraduate degree can say they found such a thing, then at least everyone who continues within academia to become a researcher on the frontier of knowledge, will likely say they found their love of the subject they would eventually research some time during their undergraduate studies.) I bring this up because it feels like early (elementary and secondary) education should be designed around the same goal, to the same degree if not moreso: to expose the learner to the many amazing things there are to be passionate about within every field of learning. As a business would say, “you must convince your customer that they have a problem, before you attempt to sell them the solution.” In other words, you must convince the learner that there is a promised land of continual wonderment on the other side of the huge inferential gap that separates them from those knowledgeable in a field, before they will ever be intrinsically motivated to cross that gap, and thus to accept your offer of tools and exercises to bridge that gap. The funny thing is that everyone except the teachers and staff of primary/secondary schools, seem to know intuitively that this is the right order to approach education in. No science communicator on YouTube tries to lecture in the dry way schoolteachers do. No historian at a museum presents their subject to a tour group without a compelling framing narrative. No space center tries to teach you orbital mechanics before first convincing you how damn cool it is to ride in a rocket or do a space-walk, or how wonderfully alien the surface of another planet is. Aquariums hook you with the fleeting flashes of color of live fish you’ve never seen before first, never pushing the information about them on you, simply expecting your own building curiosity get the better of you as you decide to start reading the placards beside the most-interesting exhibits. We have a special field, Early Chidlhood Education, that tries to guide educators into best attunement with the expectations and capabilities infants and young children bring to the table. But we have no similar field of Late Childhood Education. We just have “education” (which is almost more the cargo-cult reverse-engineering of traditions inherited from aristocratic finishing schools, than it is a coherent theory of how to produce well-educated adults) and then, very separately, the loose assemblage of knowledge of our public educators, academic-topic communicators, edutainment media writers, etc. (which has, as far as I know, never been put together to be studied as an academic subject, let alone taught as a discipline.) We can see fictional schoolteachers (your Mrs. Frizzles, your John Keatings) and on-camera educational personas (your Bill Nyes and Carl Sagans) doing a perfect [if implausibly-well-resourced] rendition of what an educator trained in such a field would be like, if it existed—yet we don’t expect real schoolteachers to engage with students on anything like that wavelength. We don’t expect real textbooks to present the world to children the way such a field would encourage. We don’t expect governments to evaluate late-childhood educational quality by the metrics the researchers in such a field would propose. And while part of this is surely because we expect public education to serve certain public goods — one of those being to produce adults who are employable in the average entry-level job, jobs that in turn require certain skills and knowledge (and so to force children to absorb those skills and that knowledge whether they feel any interest in it or not) — that’s no excuse for making the process of ingraining that knowledge downright adversarial. Not when it would be both faster, cheaper, and less laborious to both the teachers and students (at least when measured by some long-term Total Cost of Education), to have the kids actually be enthusiastically cooperative in their own education. But the downright-weird thing to me, is that even private schools don’t generally approach education this way. And nor do most homeschooling parents. They’re all either traditionalists of the “finishing school” bent who think the best possible education is each individual having a set of learned tutors there to force knowledge down their throat in a personalized way; or they’re believers in kids’ “drive to learn” (and so tend to provide no structure whatsoever, leaving kids to be “self-driven” — i.e. to either flail or hyperfocus on the few things they already know are cool, receiving little exposure to things outside their bubble, and so missing out on entire subjects because the existence of those things just never occurred to them.) Is the problem just a lack of imagination? “This is how I learned, so this is what learning is”? Or is it that approaching education this way would require that schoolteachers actually be both passionate and knowledgeable about something; and that each school retain enough such teachers that together they can share with their students a passion for every subject the school hopes to expose the kids to? And maybe the wrong “type” of people go into education (maybe people passionate about the process of education itself, or about giving kids opportunities, or something), so it’s actually challenging to build a school where every teacher is carrying the spark of some particular academic passion they wish to share with the students? (Personally, I hypothesize that you could get by just fine with people holding a Masters or PhD in a subject of interest and no “education in education” at all, just common sense and empathy enough to not expect children to perform intellectual miracles. And hiring for that doesn’t seem to be too hard; there are vast swathes of “over-degreed” under-employed people, currently stuck doing something utterly divorced from their passion, who’d love to instead be communicating their love of a subject to the next generation. As long as the school can promise that that won’t translate to torturing unwilling students with rote memorization, and then giving them tests they know the kids will fail, because they never studied, because they had zero interest.)

boricj 2mo ago

Isn't biology the applied reverse-engineering of a billion years of DNA evolution, where the laziest solution that works wins, is all written in assembly, with tremendous amounts of dead code and hardly any refactorings? I've already seen the horrors that lurk inside of poorly-written 90s video games. Hard pass.

samuell 2mo ago

I liked the connection of the central dogma of biology (DBA to RNA to Proteins) with Lisp programs. I connected that to streaming flow-based programs though, as opposed to cell-to-cell signaling which shares many characteristics with, Erlang style, fire-and-forget message passing: https://livingsystems.cc/posts/flowbased-vs-erlang-message-passing/ https://livingsystems.cc/posts/flowbased-vs-erlang-message-p...

naet 2mo ago

I loved math, chemistry, and physics, but I hated biology for some similar reasons to the author. In chemistry or physics I felt like I was actively problem solving, learning about systems and how to manipulate them. By contrast in my biology class I felt like all I did was memorize different names of things. In college chemistry I enjoyed lab work and I've always loved the outdoors and the natural world, so maybe bio would have been a good fit for me in some ways... but I never took another biology related course after the first one turned me completely off the subject.

Fomite 2mo ago
In contrast, I loved biology and felt its applications call to me, and it took me like five years after struggling through calculus to go "Oh, that's what that's for."

initramfs 2mo ago

One of the motivating reasons I majored in Biology my sophomore year was that the Vatican was took centuries in accepting the heliocentric theory, and I thought if they got evolution wrong too, then there might be more work to do. But then I realized that a lot of biologists are religious, and it didn't have to be an antagonistic competition.

cubano 2mo ago

Like 7 years ago I read the most amazing book on biology..it described that inside cells literal skyscrapers of protein-based structures and machinery took individual ATP molecules and stripped them of an outer electron thus creating what I believe is called a "proton gradient". This imbalance of electrical charge across a membrane is LITERALLY what creates life. Everything that living things do to recreate themselves is powered by this machinery and, as I remember this book telling me, the idea that a cell could suddenly pop into existence with all this truly incredible and unbelievable complex machinery is exactly like the idea of taking all the parts of a 747 and throwing them into a large box and then opening the box and a fully functional 747 is there waiting to take off. The use of proton gradients gives an insight not only into how life got going in the first place, but also, perhaps, its deepest mindfuck point: the evolution of complex eukaryotic (nucleated) cells, which arose just once in 4 billion years of evolution. There are no signs at all of some sort of gradual path to eukaryotic cells as evolution would lend us to think. Just the sudden appearance of this self-replicating nucleic cell which allows ALL multi-cellular life to exist. I was utterly shocked that it took me 53 years to learn this most amazing of all facts I've every learned, and to be honest it makes the whole Black Hole fascination seem pedantic and almost trivial. Of course I hate myself for not remembering either the name of this book or it's incredible author, so yes I know I suck.

Murmuring9087 2mo ago
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life?

akssri 2mo ago

This article should be of interest to this crowd. "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis - Yuri Lazebnik" https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)00133-2 https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)0013...

edg5000 2mo ago

Is anybody in here both engineer and biologist? How far away are we from the complexity of the human body? Pretty far I guess. Although we're producing features at molecular size now with lithography. I choose engineering because I felt I could pay the bills with that. But we have so much to learn from biology that could be applied in engineering perhaps?

fl4tul4 2mo ago

I should have studied a 'real' topic instead of computing, and then tackle issues therein (ie, in my chosen topic) using programming as a TOOL to help me realise things, and experiment. All my career is about computing, for computing sake, now I find myself in trouble in this AI-driven world as I don't have a base to stand on, with interesting problems, and a lot of programming is just being 'generated' in a black-box. And no, I'm not talking about becoming a major software ARCHITECT, solving deep infrastructure problems and whatnot. I'm thinking on day-to-day issues. Whatever, just a minor rant - if it helps future generations realising that and change course, my job is done. Cheerios

ChaitanyaSai 2mo ago

We run a microschool and our single most important realization is this. We need to allow for meaning before mechanics. Schooling has a gravitational pull that inverts this because of our obsession with Measurement. We learn, and we can learn relentlessly, when things matter. We are meaning makers. But when well-intentioned curriculum remove the process of making meaning and give you the final product, it just takes away reasons for learning. And no matter how we dress it up, this ends up staying shallow because it is only the surface level learning that is visible and measurable and held to account. Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics > Measurement This is the natural order we should try to preserve despite all the systemic pulls to measure as a poor proxy for asking "are we doing our job well" Wrote about it here: https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-paradoxically https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...

121789 2mo ago
this is all meaningless AI nonsense. maybe you can recommend reading dostoevsky before learning the alphabet for 4 year olds. or you can realize there's a balance and meaning first is not the right strategy either. good luck with your blog.
- ChaitanyaSai 2mo ago
  It's more of a dance than a balance because the way we learn is going from the whole to the parts and back. Meaning first does not mean asking/getting them to grasp something complex. It is about showing and creating a world where the thing in question matters and has value. Teaching alphabet first without being able to show why (not explain) is absolutely wrong. The way we bringing meaning is by reading to them, creating a place where reading clearly has evident value because we derive value, fun, joy. There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics). How we introduce phonics with meaning is not a question that's asked because schooling philsophies often implicitly mirror the latest neuroscience trend (behaviorism, spare the rod spoil the child, cognitivism, it's not meaning it is the cogntive skills) Also, there's really little value in criticism without having anything constructive to offer. How would you arrive at a balance?

interludead 2mo ago

Avery's experiment is memorable not because "DNA carries heredity" is an important fact but because protein looked like the plausible answer and a relatively simple experiment overturned it...

MezzoDelCammin 2mo ago

Is there a tradition for this blog post to appear every 2 years? 2024, 253 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 2022, 271 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 2020, 298 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422

tobin1994 2mo ago

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jll29 2mo ago

One take-away: At the very least, each school library schould provide: • Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid • David Goodsell, The Machinery of Life • William W. Cohen, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology • Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology • Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

hypertexthero 2mo ago

Paul Lockart paper shows Not Found, so here’s an Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170514160142/https://maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170514160142/https://maa.org/e... The paper shows a dotted line dividing the triangles and showing the areas to be equal, which makes things clearer.

IAmBroom 2mo ago

I should have loved history. It was my worst subject (until Power and Statics in college). It was about memorizing dates and big generalizations about events. Now I'm active in a historical recreation society. I have learned to translate 3 ancient languages (and Latin, with great difficulty). I can intricately describe minutiae about what a late-1390s Englishman would know, and do on a daily basis. I can rant about "his" political opinions on France, the two popes, the various ruling families, Italians and Italian literature... I have organized and attended classes on: Chinese rice winemaking, primitive latitude tools, fiber and cloth production, religious daily artifacts, recipe redaction, ... Hated History. Got a "C". My only "C".

cindyllm 2mo ago
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esafak 2mo ago

It is the same for all subjects. Classes don't talk about how and why things came about, which is half the fun. It is all a pile of facts to be memorized to pass some test, not for its own sake. I think it is best to learn on your own, and use class for consolidation.

taeric 2mo ago

I'm sympathetic to this; but hard for me to really think this is actionable. Odds are quite high that someone did push for these perspectives a few times, but someone didn't have the vantage point to appreciate them at the time. That can be a really hard thing for people to realize. We will ask, "why didn't someone use this really compelling framing to get me hooked on something?!" And then move to something like "how come nobody has ever said just walking an hour a day will get you in pretty good physical shape?" Thing is, plenty of people say stuff like that. And don't mistake this as blaming the listener! The point is messages can often come when you flat out aren't prepared for them. So, what do we do? We spend time on the rote muscle memory of facts. In the hopes that that will prepare you for the next time a message comes and you are then ready for it. Ideally, you rinse and repeat this. Constantly. All too often, the cycle gets subverted, though, and you forget to reopen yourself to the messages that came before.

tsoukase 2mo ago

The cell is a factory. You can have deep dive with the book Molecular Biology of the Cell, although it's used in university. It's the SICP of biology. The latter was published in 1985 the former in 1983. I read it in 1995 and it's amazing how much was known then. I haven't followed a cellular/genetic path to experience the evolution.

effnorwood 2mo ago

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abhinav_sk 2mo ago

I remember so well, being in boarding school in the 11th grade and really learning about evolution(might be late haha). It gave me my first ever existential crisis. I really resonate with this article because the awe of biology was so understated in school. It felt like the driest subject ever.