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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy.

I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless.

Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory.

The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY.

I don't know if I was immature, or if the biology course was a "weed out" course designed to filter out all but the most dedicated, or if biology education is off the rails.

I do know that every subject would benefit from a little storytelling, a little excitement and a good helping of why.

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> The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY.

Biology is pretty notorious for most stuff being arbitrary. There is no model. People who say there's a model, they're talking about something else - sometimes, a literal Platonic ideal of biology, that makes for an appealing pop science course, but not knowledge that like, helps you design experiments or better use drugs or whatever.

From the article:

> It was hard to get through a sentence without having to consult Wikipedia. In immunology in particular the nomenclature is expansive.

This is a common refrain. "Paternal allo-antigens" for example, straight from the literature: people who do immunology research know what that means, they do not get tripped up like this author does.

Programming computers and being good at math does not prepare you at all for understanding this stuff! Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts.

> Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts.

They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance. It is the natural gift of being able to identify the key features of the forest despite the preponderance of obfuscating trunks and branches. It is the gift of seeing some sort of order behind cirucmstances in which almost all the details are accidental.

Math synthesizes complexity; in biology, you have to analyze what's given.

>They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance.

That was Hershey and Chase [0]. Watson and Crick were the first to solve the structure of DNA.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experime...

Point taken, though that article also says "Hershey and Chase concluded that protein was not likely to be the hereditary genetic material. However, they did not make any conclusions regarding the specific function of DNA as hereditary material, and only said that it must have some undefined role."

Arguably, my general point still holds, though with an expanded cast of characters.

my observations which I think broadly agrees.

-Math/CS: inherently better at abstracting & are "proof" centric.

-Life Sciences: inherently better at observing then reasoning and are "argument" centric.

Coming from the CS side this is not a marriage made in heaven as opinions don't matter by design.

As a Math/CS graduate (I focused on mathy aspects of CS): math cs people struggle at working with real world abstractions. They abstract and simplify, but then tend to convince themselves that simplified model and its conclusions are totally all there is to reality.

And if they accept that model is not super perfect, they completely reject model - to find another simplified model that they convince themselves if flawless.

They struggle with the "this is model with such and flaws we need to keep in mind while interpreting".

I'm also from the mathy aspects of CS. To avoid ticking off a local majority I will simply agree that there are technical practitioners for whom accepting the that life science and data it produces are at best "a system of exceptions" is difficult.

And that this lack of flexibility can create hard times when they attempt to fit biology into a banking app because that is what they learned programming is.

On the converse side life sciences may feel everything is debatable and that having a strong personality should mater as much as an absolute mathematical proof.

Schrödinger published a very interesting treatise (What is Life - http://www.whatislife.ie/downloads/What-is-Life.pdf) which inspired a generation of physicists to study biology. Biology is still mostly at the early observational phase (similar to physics in the early Renaissance period), although slowly more systems-level approaches are being applied to be able to model biology with the same types of tools (namely mathematics) that have been so successful in physics.

> Programming computers and being good at math does not prepare you at all for understanding this stuff!

This is something that lots of people, and especially people in the tech industry, keep forgetting. They go ''well i can calculate partial differential equations, did a course on topology ánd created an api based on open data, how hard can this 'biology' actually be???'' and then it turns out that yes, it is hard.

Only in HN a comment like this is not laughed out of the room.

Biology is packed with useful, relevant models, from the lock and key model for enzymes in one extreme to the Lotka-Volterra (predator-prey) for ecosystems population in the other, there are plenty of models who are A) Theoretically sound. B)Has great quantitative explanatory power.

> Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts.

You have a very quaint and naive view of biology. Since the work of Maynard-Smith at the very least, has rigorous mathematics taken an important role in biology. Population genetics,neuroscience, systems biology, biochemistry among others are underpinned by lots of math. People working deciphering all the signaling pathways in the cell are working with what is effectively a complicated,messy but fascinating discretely-encoding program.

>Programming computers and being good at math does not prepare you at all for understanding this stuff! Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts.

Out of all the hn chauvinism I've read over the years this post is a strong contender for the most absurdly delusional. Sorry, being able to program does not make you an ubermensch.

I think there are a few problems that result in this sad state of affairs, and unfortunately they are not constrained to biology (eg 'why isn't mathematics taught with wonder?').

1. Teachers are required to do evaluations, and the way we have settled on doing evaluations is giving students giant, shitty tests. In order to pass these tests, lots of rote memorization is required.

2. Five years of being forced to teach-to-the-test latter, your original wonderment for the material is not going to shine through in period 5 bio.

3. The average teacher is over-worked, over-stressed, and worried about a lot of other baggage that comes along with being a teacher. This last point is true of teachers from public elementary schools all the way to professors at big research institutions (where many lecturers are researchers halfheartedly box-checking a teaching requirement).

4. Teaching - particularly pre-university - is viewed as a relatively low-status career (with a commensurate paycheck), at least in the US. A lot of the people who feel wonderment for these subjects and could teach them well end up being driven away from teaching as a result.

There are teachers who manage to bring joy and wonderment into the classroom, despite all of the problems that lead us here. But we need to address these problems if we want the average bio classroom to be taught with wonder, instead of being 1-hour mind-numbing sessions where you pretend to be studying from your index cards.

I'm somewhat skeptical of this explanation since I went to a private secondary school in Australia where these pressures did not apply, and had the exact same experience with Biology where what we were taught was to memorize taxonomies that made me abandon the subject as early as possible.

One experience doesn’t disprove systemic reasons for the outcomes we’re seeing. Even if hypothetically all teachers were very well paid and the job was regarded as high status, there would be a nonzero chance that some kids still end up with shitty teachers.

I went to public school in Australia, there was a lot of memorization, I can remember my tests were always big on making us label diagrams (here's a kidney match the words with arrows, now do it for the liver, now do it for the heart) etc. But we also did some experimental stuff in Biology. Which at least was memorable to me.

Aside from the ever present dissections I can remember one notable experiment in year 11 involving Agar-Gel plates, we took swabs from various places around our school (Taps in the bathroom, Classroom door handle, AC Vents etc) and incubated the plates and compared what sort of bacteria was found and whereabouts.

Incidentally, for me it wasn't the taxonomies, but rather a teacher who was overly critical of me. He kept insulting my drawings, and since it was India, your parents too join in the "fun". For high school, I switched my stream to computer science almost immediately. It was only in my final years in engineering school (chemical engineering) where I began to get into Machine learning applications for biological processes under a really enthusiastic and encouraging professor (who ended up being a coauthor on a number of papers), that I really began to rekindle an interest in biology.

Funnily, earlier this year, my now-fiancee prepared for and wrote the MCAT, and since I sat along with her during her prep, I decided to give it a shot too, in spite of my relative lack of prep and a full time job on the sidelines. Managed to score a neat 514. Turns out, having a good teacher matters a lot.

If you look at education as a luxury good: I really liked learning economics from an economics Nobel prize winner, math from a Fields medalist, and I'm sure I'm forgetting other luminaries.

I'll tell you something about memorizing phyla, orders, families, genera, and species. If you've never had exposure to any of that, it might seem arbitrary. But now, go out in the woods and try and identify species you see. You can start with birds and mammals because they are the easiest.

As you begin to do so, you can keep a record of them in a spreadsheet or notebook. Look up their biological classifications. All of a sudden the classification system will start to make sense, and help you understand the diversity of the organisms around you.

Biology is one of those subjects where part of the context comes from being outdoors and trying to understand ecological relationships yourself. You don't have to get to the level of a pro biologist, but there is so much you can find out by experiencing nature and trying to understand the basics that anyone can do it.

> As you begin to do so, you can keep a record of them in a spreadsheet or notebook.

This is useful, but probably because you're inverting the order here. You start with the observing and classification and end up using names rather than starting with "learn those names and matches".

Which is why I suspect the obsession of education around the world with biological classification dates to the period where most people lived in the country, not in urban spaces. Us city kids, we didn't get to spend so much time in the woods, to see so many different kinds of plants and animals - and the ones we did, we've already known by their laymen names.

Tangential: it would be helpful if schools explained to kids that all classifications are arbitrary, in biology and otherwise. Their value is in being useful, not correct to some magic metadata tags attached to things.

In context of school biology, I wish we spent more time approaching the classification like: "See that thing in the picture? We classify it as X, because it has $property; subtype Y, because it has $different-property; ... subtype ABC, because initially biologists thought this is different from BCD; now we know it isn't, but the classification remains for now". It would all feel much less boring this way.

There is one important part of taxonomy that is not arbitrary, however. The classification should be hierarchical, reflecting the evolution of the tree of life.

That's absolutely arbitrary too. The tree of life is a lie.

...or at least a very simplified model that breaks down as you move towards simpler and simpler forms of life. That's because horizontal gene transfer is a thing, and when you go all the way back to prokaryotes, there's so much of it going on that any "tree of life" is a statistical picture that's valid only for a select genetic marker that's used to trace dependencies. Pick a different marker, you'll get an entirely different prokaryotic tree of life.

Life ultimately forms a graph

> Which is why I suspect the obsession of education around the world with biological classification dates to the period where most people lived in the country, not in urban spaces.

Honestly, I would be surprised if that "obsession" has been around for nearly all of humanity's existence. If you're a hunter-gatherer (or even just hunt or gather to add variety to your diet and for medicine), being able to classify the biological world in some detail is an essential survival skill.

This is how nearly every STEM class I've ever taken has been (and really, things like history too). I retained a passing interest in math despite my classes. I was lucky to develop a foundational interest in programming before classes had the chance to ruin it. It's simply par for the course of our education system, at least in the United States.

I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they were turned off by their first exposure to a subject.

> I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they were turned off by their first exposure to a subject.

On the positive side, we dont need more scientists. There are too many people trying to be scientists leading to pretty shitty working conditions for PhDs and post docs.

On the negative side, there are too many scientists and professors who should not have been.

That is being caused by exactly the same nonsense that has been happening in high schools. You have to get a high school degree. Why? No one knows. Everyone has a high school degree so you have to get a college degree. Everyone has a college degree so you need to have a masters degree. On and on until the whole thing is a diploma mill and society collapses under the sheer weight of puffed up do nothings grubbing at the controls.

It is not? PhD is not particularly necessary for anything except working in universities and few labs. People who do PhD do it because they want to do science, not because they would thought it is necessary.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy how much I hated biology in high school but how much I love reading medical papers, drug mechanisms of action on wikipedia, watching Chubbyemu or Thought Emporium etc. There's just so much that I would have loved to learn in the field, but the practical starting points were just uninteresting rote memorization I guess so I could never enjoy it or see a practical use case. It seemed like the least interesting science to me, but now I wish I got more out of it.

That or perhaps I can consume an absurd amount of pop-sci garbage.

In school it seemed the same way to me, it was very superficial and my high school teacher was unable to anwer my "why" questions.

At university it was very different, I finally got my questions answered. Part of that was certainly that it was much more in-depth, but the quality of the teaching and also the textbooks was just much higher. For me there were also maybe a few core things I didn't understand in school that are really crucial to put everything into context. The biggest one maybe being a tiny bit of thermodynamics and understanding what enzymes actually do and what they can't do.

I do suspect that a major problem is trying to cover too much material, which makes the courses too superficial and makes it impossible to actually explain how stuff works, what problems are solved by specific biological systems and why they probably work the way they do.

I would say it's also similar with other subjects, like history, which focus SO MUCH in memorizing dates and names, instead of actually understanding why things were happening.

You cant understand why things happen if you don't know when they happen (the other way around works just fine, which is why quizzes on tv love to ask random dates). You need to know when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in relation to when other events happened to help you understand why he did what he did. If you think he conquered Gaul after becoming dictator your entire narrative changes.

It sucks, but you really do need to know a lot of whens to help you contextualize the why. I've got a BA and MA in history and my first year at university was spend memorizing so many things, which was the absolute worst. But it did really does help a lot once you start doing your own research.

well, hmmm... I think you can tell a good story just by painting a picture of the situation.

(and I think of computer makefiles - you don't need to know times, you just need to know what depended on what, and what things combine to cause something)

I think that this is wrong. It is easier to remember sequence of events in logical order then arbitrary dates. You really dont need to remember exact date of when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in order to understand his motivations. You need context in enough details in order to understand motivations.

> It sucks, but you really do need to know a lot of whens to help you contextualize the why.

I always managed to memorize those dates in high school and elementary school. And then I promptly forgot them after test. I blamed my bad memory, but later when I learn how human memory works, I started to blame the way they taught us. People remember stories and systems well. Our memory works on relationships between facts. Most people sux at remembering unrelated arbitrary numbers.

All that done to me was that I seen history as boring pointless class. Historical characters came across as somewhat inhuman, absurd unrealistical creatures. Their behavior made no sense. Yes, they were actual real people, but the way history was taught made them sound like badly written characters from mediocre fiction.

It was only after I started to read history that was focused more on context, motivations and reasons I both starterd to long-term rememeber times+places and also like it.

When you know the date of an event, you can locate others events that are not in a direct relationship with it. You can then situate the evolution of distant lines of events without needing to memorize too many dependency graphs.

> When you know the date of an event, you can locate others events that are not in a direct relationship with it.

No you cant. Because at that point, you know nothing about the other events you are supposed to locate and have no reason to care.

> You can then situate the evolution of distant lines of events without needing to memorize too many dependency graphs.

I am not even sure what that is supposed to mean in the context of high school history. You drew events you know about into lines or graph and still know nothing about how they relate to each other.

Memorizing if something happened at Nov. 20th or Nov. 21st is not usually that important. We don't have exact dates for ancient history and we can still understand the sequence of events.

Understanding that A happened, which led to B happening later on is what matters. Having a ballpark is good for most things. Or do you still remember the exact dates you memorized on your history classes?

If you only learn dates, of course it makes no sense. Its like memorizing mathematical formulas. They also make absolutely no sense if you never see why you would use them.

But you are a MA in history, which is not true for 99% of the population. For everyone else, knowing the order of the events, and why A led to B, is more than enough.

"Evidence" that memorizing dates don't work: no one remembers crap from their history classes.

Edit: > If you think he conquered Gaul after becoming dictator your entire narrative changes.

That's the whole point. You only need to know the order of the events. Do you know the exact date and time when he became officially a dictator?

I also have a theory about history. I think it might be wasted on young people because they lack some maturity and life experience.

I think after you've seen human nature, chaos and conflict, and how people get along, it gets more interesting.

How did people with no fast communication or transportation manage to fashion constitutions or governments that have lasted hundreds of years?

I excelled at AP biology, but college biology was a total drag. Honestly, it's just the teachers, my high school teachers taught with passion in college it was a chore for my professors. At least software has more jobs and better pay, even if it's less fundamentally interesting.

All my high school biology teachers were good. As you point out, there are not as many other good jobs for biology graduates as there are for CS ones.

that's a shame.

I liked the quote in the article:

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

> I excelled at AP biology, but college biology was a total drag. Honestly, it's just the teachers, my high school teachers taught with passion in college it was a chore for my professors.

An AP biology teacher in high school is teaching a class with disproportionately the most predisposed-to-be-engaged students, and its the central part of their job, in which they are secure and focussed. A lower-division biology professor in a university is probably teaching a class with disproportionately the least predisposed-to-be-engaged students, and if they are a tenured or tenure-track professor at a research university, its also not the core of their job (if they aren't, its a core part of their job -- but one in which they are insecure, are more likely to be adjusting to, and which may be one of several jobs.)

> The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY.

WHY is philosophy/metaphysics.

WHAT is science.

honestly i prefer the boring course, but everyone’s different, so at our school they offered the fun one as a regular credit and the boring one as an AP, and i think that worked out well for everyone

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