The Path to Biological Numeracy | Hacker News Reader

The Path to Biological Numeracy

book.bionumbers.org

109 pointsyarapavan12 comments

This is one of the most important parts of biological intuition that is very hard to get access to. Even PhD graduates often stumble when asked even about the order-of-magnitude of some of these values.

It's not dissimilar to the general order-of-magnitude of speeds associated with various computer components (RAM, CPU, Cache, HD seek, network latency, etc.). But there are many more components in a biological system, and their interactions up and down the physical scales are sometimes not obvious.

A simple example of intuition: once you've sequence your DNA, how would you go about changing it? Which DNA? Is the 'sequence' you got back an average sequence across just those cells that were sampled? Is the DNA you would want to change both copies, in each cell, in every tissue?

Another example is running through how a PCR reaction works. The actual result of the process often trips people up the first time because it's not immediately clear that there is an infinite pool of each component in the system to permit self-reactions in later steps of the process. Once a component is used in the first part of the process, it's still there in later parts of the process.

Out of curiosity, are you saying that someone with higher biological numeracy would be better equipped to answer the questions you've posed in your simple intuition example?

I'd say, arguably, yes. And not necessarily because those examples use numeracy directly - but rather because a biological numeracy would provide a foundation to an intuition that would prevent the beginner's mistakes in those examples.

I argue that that biological numeracy is a prerequisite (and a consequence) of having a properly scaled biological intuition. And those examples test that intuition.

Thanks for clarifying. I find this topic quite interesting. I was thinking about the process to create recombinant DNA vs the PCR process and, as a thought experiment, wondered how biological numeracy might have played a role in the development of each. I feel like PCR is a great example of biological numeracy in action (as you pointed out), but I think part of the beauty of the recombinant DNA process is that it demonstrates our understanding of the physical attributes - size, structure, shape, etc. of biological molecules, perhaps even more so than numeracy.

Those "physical attributes" are most grossly characterized with those same measures- size, shape, length, stiffness, etc. And if you have access to those simple attributes you get a lot farther than if you just think about a genome as a magical information store.

Totally agree.

You might like the top section 'remembering the sizes of things' of my wasn't-intended-to-be-public slowwwlllyyy-loading page http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms .

It's basically chunked powers-of-ten, so two 1000x frames ("micro view" um->mm, and "nano view" nm->mm) get you down to 'atoms look like sand'. It seems to provide useful scaffolding - a place to hang some flavors of rough-quantitative knowledge. It seems to at least sometimes work nicely with bionumbers "how big is a X" searches, as "N um"-like answers permit "oh, so it's about this (tactile kinesthetic) big - so it's bigger than Y and smaller than Z and about the same size as W - hmm, so I wonder how many X's there are in a mumble - new search: 'how man X in a mumble'". But that's purely anecdotal, and from very limited experience.

Thanks for mentioning your site and have you seen http://scaleofuniverse.com/ ? I sometimes use that site as a lecture tool when a larger context of time and space is useful.

Interesting mix. In addition to videos, there are interactives like https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/ and https://www.nikon.com/about/sp/universcale/scale.htm .

maybe they should consider teaming up with these guys: https://www.osmosis.org/

I talked with someone who did a Japanese startup for learning English. Turns out that while there's an enormous market for learning to do well on English proficiency exams (eg, for college entrance)... there was surprisingly little market for learning to actually understand English.

There's an enormous market for pre-med/MCAT/med-school training. And surprisingly little for actually understanding biology.

As I very fuzzily recall, the bionumbers site grew out of a graduate student shifting domains, and realizing: they had little clue; they needed a rough-quantitative understanding to functionally understand and work in the domain; existing educational content didn't have that as a goal. So they started collecting numbers, and it escalated.

Awesome contents!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com