4 ms·

Missing the trees for the forest. We already have exactly what the article is calling for in biology, and it is called chemistry.

dnautics 12y ago
I sympathize with the sentiment, but biology is not a simple reduction to chemistry (although chemical principles do undergird it, and it is useful to describe biology in terms of chemistry as often as possible) Nonetheless it is appalling how little chemistry biologists know. We were having a dna shearing issue in our lab, and I once asked, "what is the chemical mechanism of shearing" and no one could provide a convincing mechanism, which meant their solutions to the problem were not much better than shamanism. It's even worse with the faddish worship of interdisciplinary-ism... Basically chemical biology (versus the more classical field of biochemistry, which is deep) is littered with dilettantes who were neither good enough to do straight chemistry nor deeply knowledgeable about biology. If there will be a grothendieck or a Hilbert in biology, that person will almost certainly have to have some amount real chemistry training, and also deep chemistry knowledge. Probably training in information theory is important too. In my view, physics is the study of the universe focused through the lens on energetic state functions, with a reductionist bent, chemistry is the study of the universe focused mostly on the diversity of matter with a passing nod to path dependence, and biology is the study of self-organizing information propagation with a strong acknowldgement of path dependence.
- akulesa 12y ago
  Totally agreed - I might steal your last paragraph there! Chemistry is "the details" of biology, but it tells us next to nothing about what we actually care about, probably what you called "self-organizing information propagation" . I think good definition for life shouldn't include any dependence on the chemistry used to manifest it. Agreed?
  - dnautics 12y ago
    yeah, it is just a broad stroke characterization of the feels of each field. Some types of particle physicists would be probably be reclassified as chemists under my scheme, which they would bristle at, although in all honesty they are inheritors of a long line of tradition that goes through the indisputably chemist lavoisier, berzelius, and curie - more than they are newton or maxwell, planck, or einstein.
- pvaldes 12y ago
  If you see a lot of people that don't deep into a particular discipline in a competitive environment, 90% of the cases is because they really don't need it. Not all problems of Biology can be solved with chemistry, in fact much of the really puzzling and big problems of the current biology can not be solved using just one science. For Biochemists chemistry is the only and truly god of course. Geneticists need to know only a little salt of chemistry and a lot of computer skills in fact. Ecologists are much more impressed by math and physics. Taxonomists need basically a good eye for picking subtle differences in 3D structures and an encyclopedic knowledge of the life forms. Early biologists have few concepts to study, so one single people could grasp the majority. This is not possible today because most human research has done in the last 100 years and one single human brain could not cover all the new ideas and concepts emerging at superfast pace.

dnautics 12y ago

I sympathize with the sentiment, but biology is not a simple reduction to chemistry (although chemical principles do undergird it, and it is useful to describe biology in terms of chemistry as often as possible) Nonetheless it is appalling how little chemistry biologists know. We were having a dna shearing issue in our lab, and I once asked, "what is the chemical mechanism of shearing" and no one could provide a convincing mechanism, which meant their solutions to the problem were not much better than shamanism. It's even worse with the faddish worship of interdisciplinary-ism... Basically chemical biology (versus the more classical field of biochemistry, which is deep) is littered with dilettantes who were neither good enough to do straight chemistry nor deeply knowledgeable about biology. If there will be a grothendieck or a Hilbert in biology, that person will almost certainly have to have some amount real chemistry training, and also deep chemistry knowledge. Probably training in information theory is important too. In my view, physics is the study of the universe focused through the lens on energetic state functions, with a reductionist bent, chemistry is the study of the universe focused mostly on the diversity of matter with a passing nod to path dependence, and biology is the study of self-organizing information propagation with a strong acknowldgement of path dependence.

akulesa 12y ago
Totally agreed - I might steal your last paragraph there! Chemistry is "the details" of biology, but it tells us next to nothing about what we actually care about, probably what you called "self-organizing information propagation" . I think good definition for life shouldn't include any dependence on the chemistry used to manifest it. Agreed?
- dnautics 12y ago
  yeah, it is just a broad stroke characterization of the feels of each field. Some types of particle physicists would be probably be reclassified as chemists under my scheme, which they would bristle at, although in all honesty they are inheritors of a long line of tradition that goes through the indisputably chemist lavoisier, berzelius, and curie - more than they are newton or maxwell, planck, or einstein.
pvaldes 12y ago
If you see a lot of people that don't deep into a particular discipline in a competitive environment, 90% of the cases is because they really don't need it. Not all problems of Biology can be solved with chemistry, in fact much of the really puzzling and big problems of the current biology can not be solved using just one science. For Biochemists chemistry is the only and truly god of course. Geneticists need to know only a little salt of chemistry and a lot of computer skills in fact. Ecologists are much more impressed by math and physics. Taxonomists need basically a good eye for picking subtle differences in 3D structures and an encyclopedic knowledge of the life forms. Early biologists have few concepts to study, so one single people could grasp the majority. This is not possible today because most human research has done in the last 100 years and one single human brain could not cover all the new ideas and concepts emerging at superfast pace.