I should have loved biology (2020)
jsomers.net
jsomers.net
In general, the "what" makes no sense without the history. Why were we searching for DNA in the mid 20th century? What did we already know? Retracing science as an investigation would be much more beneficial to kids than making them remember the conclusions. It's much more portable as a skill to understand the path of investigation than some facts about organelles that they aren't likely to use.
But the real reason I dropped biology when the choice came (and why did it come, dear IB organisation?) is that biology is not seen as the smart kid subject, when compared to physics and chemistry. Part if this is that you can grind your way through memorizing the biochemical cycles, probably easier for most than learning calculus that you need for physics. But part of it is simply reputation, and it's not reasonable.
I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.
But the STORY of physics is fascinating. Why each experiment was done, by who, to prove what etc etc. All the sciences are like a soap opera of personalities and disagreements that make them much more interesting - and memorable - if you know the back story.
That 'thin deep slice' comment really sums it up. No context, just a thing to memorise.
I think physics students should be give The Fabric of the Cosmos my Brian Greene to read before they start doing any actual learning. I bet there's a biology equivalent of a book that is a 'what we know so far and what we don't understand' - if you know of one please let me know.
Most people don't like soap operas and would zone out due to that, you might get a different set of people interested but you wouldn't get more.
> But the STORY of physics is fascinating.
There’s a college some of my kids have been considering that takes a similar approach to their math (and sciences) curricula, starting math out with Euclid and progressing through Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler (maybe Leibniz / Newton? Not sure), at each point motivating the development of astronomy and mathematics by showing how each person developed our understanding of the natural universe.
In comparison, in my college math courses, which were oriented towards engineering majors, I felt at the time like concepts were coming out of nowhere without justification, with no sense of how they fit in with anything else, other than the certainty that I had to keep up or I would be lost a week later.
- Wear comfortable clothes.
- Don’t eat anything before surgery.
The first is so you don’t have tight clothes rubbing your achy body on the ride home. The second is so that you don’t vomit up your eggs Benedict, inhale it, and die an awful death. They’re both in the same size print in the same bullet list.
That stuff should be explained beforehand but I rarely hear it said that concretely. I’ve wondered if rephrasing that like:
- Don’t eat anything before surgery, because it might make you die.
would save lives.
It would make people more scared of surgeries since the wording is stronger, fear of surgeries causes a lot of issues as well including people dying since they refuse to get a surgery.
Seeing the remains of an aircraft fuselage, or what a burned out diesel locomotive looks like -- and in the case of the train, smells like; it was being repaired -- really drives the point home.
A couple more slides on case studies and how they happened -- shout out of Admiral Cloudberg for doing a great job with that stuff; use their articles a lot -- and it's easy to convince people. Make it visceral, and they sure as hell will remember.
Presumably it's the same with a lot of science education as well. Physics and math for the sake of math is just rote memorization, but make them calculate rocket trajectories, then build a few model rockets and shoot them off, and those kids will be way more engaged. Like, I got really into biology when I started making basement hooch in college...
Five minutes here for the blog, your comments, this reply, then I'm out and likely more productive than I was 6 minutes ago.
A great example is the Hershey-Chase experiment[0]. What I realised is science isn't about learning and memorising facts, it's a creative process of prodding the universe in just the right way to learn something about it. I realised scientists have more in common with artists than engineers and that I am definitely more of an engineer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experime...
I still use this when learning new concepts. I try to Llearn what existed before and why the change made sense.
This is rote memorization.
> you should be able to understand why others think it then add in your arguments of what you think
This isn't what you have to do on the tests however, the tests just wants you to repeat the theory from the book, or the theory from your teacher. Many seem to just adopt others theories as their own in such scenarios so people who do that might like it, but anyone who thinks for themselves will hate that since you quickly realize this is just another "memorize this thing" situation but you have to write it as if you buy into the theory.
I'd agree this isn't what you do on a normal test. It didn't sound like GP was arguing these points in a normal test, nor does a normal test match 95% of my APUSH experience either even though that ended in a standardized test.
Sure, you can find some worst case of student and worst case of teacher where this can devolve into being no better than raw memorization. Hopefully you can at least imagine other scenarios are possible too.
The result is that students just memorize the whys, sure you can always go beyond that and have fun in every class but that has very little to do with the teacher bringing it up, because the teachers brings that up in almost every class or at least the books does. So, that they focused on why is still rote memorization just like the focus on facts, sure facts do tell an interesting tale but if people ignore that and just memorize the facts then they aren't any fun. It is the same way with looking at "why", it is just a bunch of facts in the end and most students makes that boring.
> Sure, you can find some worst case of student and worst case of teacher where this can devolve into being no better than raw memorization
No, that is the normal case, almost everyone here did this which is why they have so horrible memories from school. You too probably did this, memorized stuff when the teacher desperately tried to get you to engage with it in more interesting ways, otherwise you wouldn't have thought it is so rare for such teaching to fail, because if you really saw all the teachers that tried you couldn't have had that opinion since you'd see all your classmates zone out and be bored and ask for rote memorization details.
I've never ever seen a schoolbook that was just a list of facts, it just isn't a thing, students still doesn't engage.
You do memorize why's but part of arguing the why's, either to the teacher or in groups, is to add interaction with the details. It may or may not be a barrel of fun but it is, by definition, more engaging. Whether or not that's a personal case is going to be subjective but yes, most people really do like learning via more than rote memorization alone all the time in lieu of mixing it up and engaging on average.
I've definitely had classes where the teacher wasn't able to make the content interesting/engaging - it sucked either way in that case. I'm not as sure the teaching "fails" as much as is "not as good". That students zone out is no measure of a method being universally bad, that the method is single approached and almost all students zone out is a good indicator though and that's what you get with constant memorization only.
The problem is that in school there is far too little time to teach this all. There is already too little time to teach the curriculum material. Thus, if you are interested in such topics, simply go to a decent (university) library.
I read Asimov's Guide To Science about 10 years ago, and came to the same realization that, for most people, understanding why we know what we know is probably more important than what we know. It's better than thinking that science is a series of facts about the world, rather than a process. It treats the current state of understanding (as of the book's writing) in several subjects as a series of developments, each raising new questions and problems, which are studied further.
As a separate class though, it'd be good, and enlightening.
I was always amazed about a past acquaintance whose PhD thesis included game theory applications, as she was studying the breeding and feeding behaviors of some random bird.
I think this is probably the part about biology that people outside of biology appreciate the least. We know a lot about how cells and proteins work now. But despite this fact, it is still extremely difficult to understand exactly what is happening within a given cell in situ. Many measurement methods are likely to destroy or alter the thing you’re trying to measure… think Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - the act of measuring the thing changes its state. Everything is sensitive to temperature, shear, ionic strength, pH, etc… and of course most methods rely on these levers to gain resolution and signal. So you have to have a clear idea of what you think is happening to even select a measurement technique that won’t ruin it. This is part of why, while we know a lot of the fundamentals, it is still hard to engineer functionality in specific environments .. engineering requires a lot of measurement and feedback.
I think that also offers insight into why software can be engineered so quickly. It’s a discipline where you can (relatively) easily place a probe wherever you want and understand exactly what’s happening in a (sometimes) deterministic manner. Everyone else is taking fuzzy shots in the dark compared to software. Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity. In every other engineering discipline, you sometimes have entire meetings to decide how many times to retry something that just failed.
I don't get nightmares about analytic chemistry anymore, but the level of self-loathing you get from doing labs that never work out for reasons that defy understanding make the annoyance of debugging code seem quaint almost.
(I should really say "it used to", but now that I can run an LLM call locally and get a completely different response than the deployed version of a piece of software, with all other factors seemingly being equal...)
I’m so glad to come across this writer though. I was going to send them a note to tell them they have a real talent, until I noticed the long list of New Yorker and Atlantic publications, and thought: they already know. :)
However, other engineering disciplines do also try to build similar abstractions with varying levels of success. We've managed to build simple books of electrical standards that can be used by electricians around the world to build and reason about power systems without having to understand the weird quantum mind of an electron. I suspect we'll get there with biology too, we're just a century too early.
logic: analog>digital
gates: multi-level>binary
timing: ripple>global clock
architecture: logic>ISA/CPU/GPU
memory: register/cache/disk>monolithic VM
language: binary ASM>Compile/Interpreted
memory/device: management interrupt loop>Kernel/OS
Libraries, Frameworks, Virtualization
Semiconductor processing on the other hand is physics. Success is discovered rather than primarily designed. There are development tools, but things like the "pixie dust" used to avoid the superparamagnetic limit in spinning media were not understood for years after they were commercially shipped in hard drives. Biology/Pharma is much more complex/hit-miss and the biotech industry treats most employees quite badly.
It's like analyzing a Swiss watch if the back was welded on. You could send it though a shredder and analyze the fragments and work backwards to determine the size of the gears. But it's impossible to shred just one watch-- you have to shred a hundred thousand at a time, which are inevitably a complex mix of different watch models each with different minute lengths and hour durations.
Something I have felt is undertaught in introductory biology is how unknown human cells still are! No textbooks wants to list off a thousand proteins with "function unknown" next to them, after all. But to surprisingly large extent it's an undiscovered country. Just in the last few years we're discovering entire new species of RNA! https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/enter-glycornas
It strikes me as the mother of all spaghetti code. Is it even possible to meaningfully look at parts of the human body in isolation?
I actually use biological methods all the time, now that I'm a dev. For instance in Biology, gene knock-out experiments are common, where you damage or delete a gene, and see what breaks. You then know that this gene is important for a given thing.
This is the equivalent to the debugging approach of "if I comment out this code, what happens?"
- From quantum fields to atoms
- From atoms to chemistry
- From chemistry to biochemistry
- From biochemistry to cellular life
- From cellular life to multicellular life
- From multicellular life to consciousness
- From individual consciousness to social phenomena
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/en/podcast/ask-a-spaceman/id95882...
This is a common requirement in software QA. "Can we reproduce the issue? Does it happen every time? Is it sensitive to timing of user actions, or anything else? What part of the initial state of the system could affect this outcome? What other external or environmental changes will alter the result?"
Sometimes, the initial failure seems to have an obvious answer, and sometimes an immediate code change is the best first move. But replicating a behaviour does is insanity.
> Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.
MSN messenger in my case haha
Because I was rapidly going back and forth between the keyboard and mouse, it resulted in an unusual style where I use the outline of the keyboard for hand placement, and attempting to use the home row slows me down significantly.
Tribes in particular also had a voice-tree, and while it was shorter than prose it still encouraged a certain degree of touch-typing.
For example, typing VSAF (mnemonically [start][self][attack][flag]) led to text and prerecorded audio for "I will attack the enemy flag." Little of it survives now beyond references like VGZ for "Shazbot!"
The danger is that you won't know enough of the landscape in order to know what piece you need to learn to unblock what you're trying to do...
Anchor your explanation in something with actual practical use.
It's why so many mathematicians are so shit at explaining maths to laypeople. They don't understand that regular people don't give a shit about numbers. They're just a means to an end.
Explaining how to turn numbers into more numbers doesn't land with people who dgaf about numbers.
You need to show how something is useful.
Pretty cheap for individuals as well: https://smart-biology-academy.getlearnworlds.com/courses
I don't work for them or have any monetary interest in them. They just do very cool work and I'd like to see them get more awareness. I wish we had videos like theirs when I was in school.
I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject. There are a lot of factors that determine how receptive we are to learning something - current interests, life experience, how developed our brains are, etc - beyond just the way it is taught. I have a much deeper appreciation for geology now than I did in school, for example, and I’m fairly certain that I’m the one who changed, not the way plate tectonics are taught.
They're mostly not domain experts knowledgeable enough to give individualized deep dives to each of their students, but even if they were it would make their already-difficult task impossible. It's a wonder that any sort of individualized instruction manages to exist at all.
In many countries, teaching is a government position that is pretty impossible to get fired from. Unfortunately, just like in any profession, there are those in teaching who find it that they dislike it but still trudge along because nice benefits (not talking about US), much to the detriment of their students.
We talk about 'passion' a lot in a number of fields, but imho teaching is the only profession where you _NEED_ it.
The policies didn't just crush the teachers. Many of the students didn't care at all. There were behavioral problems, of course. One major issue he saw was that the school just pushed kids through the grades. There was a policy of an automatic minimum grade of 50% if the kid just put their name on the test... and they still at least one kid who would refuse to put their name on the paper!
Another friend of mine also went into teaching, but they refuse to work for public schools because of the bureaucracy, even though that sometimes means taking a paycut.
This definitely happens in the US too. There have been documentaries made which include things like teachers just reading the news or a book whole letting the class do whatever it wants. Then the lawsuits and fight over tenure when the administration tried to fire them. Maybe the pay and benefits aren't great in many areas, but they're better than nothing, especially considering if you can do other things during work hours.
Of course, teacher's real engagement with their subject and students, and teaching experiences (if they're in tune with what works, and also trying new methods) are important. As is whether their districts encourage (and can afford) innovation (in learning materials and media for example).
Regardless, teachers have to begin at the level of their average student (TBD); if the spread is too wide, some will be bored, some challenged. All of this is a lot to ask, moreso for teachers with outside lives to live and grow themselves also.
The most important thing you can teach about anything is an interest in it - otherwise what is retention going to be?
Or to turn it around, introducing subject after subject that students find boring, confusing, stressful or frustrating is a fantastic way to ensure they avoid anything to do with the fields, knowledge and skills we deem most important for a well prepared life.
I do agree that this isn’t a baseline to apply to each teacher in isolation, without the rest of the ecosystem supporting them. Textbooks, other materials and class aids, all supporting the emotional highs of learning, not just prioritizing a material to be covered on a test, etc.
At the university level, professors should be able to expect an opt-in self-selected and self-motivated level of interest for subjects.
Especially if grade school has prepared highly curious excited to learn students. As apposed to subject avoidance or apathy.
But a great teacher is not necessary to find a topic interesting, nor sufficient to spark interest in everyone who lacks interest.
100% agree.
The author seems to be arguing that it’s someone else’s duty to point out what’s interesting. I suppose a essayist or columnist needs to believe something along those lines.
I've met former classmates who got interested in a subject later in life and literally would not believe that the subject had been taught to us in an interesting way in high school. They insisted "I would have loved the subject if they had taught us topic X" or "I would have loved the subject if they had taught us from angle Y" when that is exactly the way our high school teacher taught us. I think when we think back to age 15 we have a hard time remembering how different we were, and we remember things in a way that makes our emotions at the time make sense through our current way of experiencing things.
Just yesterday was a front page top comment along these lines, that teaching endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts would have made all the difference in grade school biology. But really it would be worth about 30-90 seconds of content in the lesson that day and gone barely noticed and probably not remembered.
I don't fully understand why they are separated and taught as separate things, I wonder what the rationale is, apart from expediency.
I was fascinated by biology right up until I took 2 high school classes on it, and then it took years for me to recover. It had nothing to do with a lack of curiosity. In my classes, at least, the focus was on memorization of names of things. No time for wonder and amazement, what's important is that you can write labels on that diagram of endoplasmic reticulum! :)
I didn't take the article so much as the blame game but more saying that the subject of biology generally could be taught in a much, much better way. That certainly rings true for me and, from your comments, seems to ring true for you as well: you loved the subject despite how poorly it was presented to you.
There's more ways of learning now. Things I found interesting but taught fairly dryly, with even drier textbooks for self learning, I can now engage properly by watchign lectures/ listening at 2x speed. Find communities that meme about plate tectonics that makes me want to explore further etc.
I agree, you can't blame an instructor for your lack of interest. Sometimes a subject is portrayed so abusively, you must declare war against it's convolution to protect any potential for curiosity and wonder.
> This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
I like to refer to it as nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, discovered on a planet that experienced a "grey goo" apocalypse. Every possible pore of its surface is now infested rogue units, in a constant arms-race of development. Some have even been yoked into titanic moving megastructures and inscrutable hive-minds.
________
When it comes to the bio-engineering of the human limbs, just remember that you're sacrificing raw force/speed for a system with a great deal of other trade-offs which would be difficult for modern science to replicate.
1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations
2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)
3. Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation
4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials
5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors
6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts
7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected
8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion
9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids
10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)
There's only so far your high tech nano-particle swarm can spread before resources become a serious limiting factor. If you're limiting yourself just to earth, certain resources that a swarm might need to reproduce will be scarce/energy intensive to extract and utilize (mining rare earths, fabricating highly advanced semiconductors, etc.). It's extraordinarily easy, however, to produce billions of cells nearly anywhere on earth because the cells that we have are especially adapted for ease of reproduction in these exact conditions.
I couldn't agree more. Right now we're sipping the natural world's most complex ideas through the straws of simple language and static diagrams, and the constraints of all of these mediums (including school itself) in aggregate naturally lean toward making biology a rote memorization subject. Reasoning about biology in the way that it appears in nature is, in these mediums, going against the grain. It happens, but it's not the default. Your story about having a good biology teacher is this exception, not the default.
Complex things requires easy to use systems that reflect that complexity. That's the subject here - how do we build these methods of communication and understanding?
Right now I don't know of an AI tool that can make a halfway decent biology diagram, let alone a complex 3d animation of a biological process you can talk to and ask questions of. The article was a call to action for this type of tooling.
I'd love to see this thread move from 'my experience in school was good/bad' to 'what if we made something that did X' or 'have you seen Y' :)
We've had the wetware for understanding complex systems for thousands of years. We added symbolics for communicating complex things later.
Nowadays, many people weak in symbolics are excellent in understanding, and many people expert in symbolics are novice in understanding.
I am not sure whether we are missing a symbolic form that is closer aligned to understanding, or whether we've simply overvalued symbolics at the expense of understanding.
We have the cognitive ability to reason about the relationships between about 150 humans. So, if thats a plausible upper limit for how many genes we can hold in our head too, then we’re toast. Each cell has thousands of distinct proteins, and many more small molecules. When we knock out one gene, we regularly see hundreds change in response. We just can’t hold that large of a system in our head. Parts of it, maybe, but genes are so interconnected that it’s very hard to draw a sensible boundary between distinct “parts”. Also biology behaves in really unintuitive ways. Feedback loops, randomness, long tailed distributions. These are very important concepts for biological systems. Humans are also notoriously bad at thinking about all of them.
It’s just too big and too weird to try to think about a single cell. Forget tissues or organs.
So, I think computational modeling will be really important to teach to students early. We have to rely on computer models because its too complex for our brains.
It's going to be a few hundred years before we get to that point, if we ever get there.
Bio is just really complicated, there may never be anything like a 'easy to use system.' We're still on the beach of it's ocean, counting the colors of stones.
For instance, in developmental bio (going from one cell to a functioning infant) we have three theories of how a cell determines what it should develop into: 1) The English model: The daughter cells get told what to be by the mother cells 2) The American model: the daughter cells take a look around themselves and determine what to be by taking a poll of the other nearby cells 3) The Las Vegas model: it's all random with lots of apoptosis and going broke.
They very fact that we think these models are right is very concerning to the field. We know deep down that none of this can be correct, but have not been able to disprove it all that well. To be clear here: dev biologists are nearly certain that their theories are crap, based nearly entirely on gut feelings. That's how gun-shy biologists are with any whiff of a 'grand theory'. That's how complicated things are.
It's not a given that bio can really ever be reduced back down to something understandable and simultaneously reflective of the 'real' state of things. That's not something nature is obliged to provide us.
[0] https://news.stanford.edu/2015/09/28/cell-division-skotheim-...
At least in the UK (the States may be different), you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned.
At A-Level standard, you are taught the physical basis of epigenetic modification (what he describes as switching genes on or off - although that in itself is a too-binary simplification, it's more to do with up- and down-regulation of expression). You're also taught other fascinating processes such as alternative splicing - where a single gene can express many different proteins.
During my first year of undergrad at a so-so Russell Group university, the history of biology featured prominently in lectures - especially those on the evolution of genetics as a field. The inherent fuzziness of categories and concepts in biology was also made very clear. I distinctly remember a lecturer telling us (in response to a question about why we say bacteria don't have membrane-bound organelles, when the topic of the lecture - the magnetosome - was clearly an exception to this rule) that when we say something is 'always true' in biology, we mean it happens 80%+ of the time, and when we say something 'never happens' in biology, we really mean that it happens less than 20% of the time.
I do agree that there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?) - but I think this case is overblown by the author.
> you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned
> there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?)
But note that the author was almost certainly only talking about high school biology.
I think the situation is that in the US, an AP Biology (bio class for seniors in high school) teacher has to trade off teaching the concepts with teaching to the AP test all the seniors will take, and that test prep does involve stuff like memorizing the Krebs cycle so that you can forget right after the test. My teacher did a pretty good job of this balance and I got a lot out of it, but mileage may vary. Next, the kids will do well on the test and that will let them dodge their university's biology requirement. That class would have been much better. (I'm was in exactly this camp.)
> In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions.
So - not just for biology - what are some good books or other learning resources that encourage questing, curiosity and wonder?
The first one that comes to mind is Feynman’s Lectures.
Children. Best before they enter a school (or anything resembling something similar).
Biology is a leaky abstraction, it's very hard to do anything with rigor without having a strong foundation in the fundamentals. You see the same discussion on hacker news when it comes to music, people are more interested in mapping programming concepts to music notation and complaining about western music presentation than the music itself. For biology, you need need to have a firm understanding of the central dogma and biochemistry if you want to do anything beyond surface level empirical trial and error. Most people, especially the "hacker types", only have a vague understanding of the former i.e. DNA translation and transcription and that's about the limit. You absolutely have to gain an intuition for biochemistry if you want to do things with rigor, otherwise you will just be the biotech equivalent of a bootcamp web developer, fit for washing test tubes and not much else.
Among textbooks, Molecular Biology of the Gene by James Watson et al. is a good starting point to understand the central dogma: DNA -> RNA -> Protein. Likewise Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al. for cell biology.
An Introduction to Systems Biology by Uri Alon is good for the more mathematically inclined once you're ready to get more advanced, though you should really have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of molecular and cellular biology first.
None of this is for the faint of heart, but it's not especially difficult either. It's unfortunate that it's hard to get hands-on experience with biology once you've graduated from college, which helps a lot to connect the dots, but there are still plenty of great resources out there.
Funny thing : having never seen the term "central dogma" before, I looked it up, and Wikipedia says that this one (directly calling out your reference) is an incorrect version, in fact has been proven wrong in the last decades, while the original Central Dogma holds.
Even funnier thing : I kind of lied : I saw that term for the first time two weeks ago... when watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. Where it's a location. But then I guess it also throws around terms like "apoptosis" (which I did knew and which made me raise an eyebrow) as sciencey sounding words (still somewhat appropriate to the context in a metaphorical way), so of course it couldn't resist "Central Dogma" as a play on words between biology, location, and (anti-) "Orientalization" of Christianity !
> The first one that comes to mind is Feynman’s Lectures.
The early books by Richard Dawkins. Also later books when he writes about biology and not about religion.
A Brief History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben
In German: Josef Reichholf, "Mein Leben für die Natur".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense...
Seeing biology in light of processes on (evolutionary, developmental, ecological) timescales is one of the 2-3 realizations that made biology interesting for me.
To me, birding always seemed to be the worst kind of Feynman's stamp collecting. But there's so much more beauty and joy hidden in knowing what lives around you in detail; your connection with your surroundings will grow deep.
To quote: >So much more of the natural world feels close and accessible now. When I started birding, I remember thinking that I’d never see most of the species in my field guide. Sure, backyard birds like robins and western bluebirds would be easy, but not black skimmers or peregrine falcons or loggerhead shrikes. I had internalized the idea of nature as distant and remote — the province of nature documentaries and far-flung vacations. But in the past six months, I’ve seen soaring golden eagles, heard duetting great horned owls, watched dancing sandhill cranes and marveled at diving Pacific loons, all within an hour of my house. “I’ll never see that” has turned into “Where can I find that?”
The war between subdisciplines never end.
Learning about molecular biology often begins with memorising what the cell is made of. I understand that many students find this dry and tedious. But it is in a way necessary, because only once you have this foundational knowledge can you go on to begin to understand the amazing complexity of how it all actually works.
Ecology is similar. Yes, taxonomy can be a drag (certainly in high school, or even early college). But you need to learn something about what's out there before you can start to think about, and wonder at, how it works. Ecology is an amazing subject, as complex and intricate as anything in molecular biology. (In a way, it's even more cryptic than the latter, because most of the experiments can't be done in a lab.) The problem is that most people have no clue what's out there, and so they never see the beauty that surrounds them, or realise the wonderful web of life playing out all around them.
Come for a walk with me through the woods, and let me tell you something about how ants grow their own food, or go to war with a neighbouring tribe, or treat their wounded with antibiotics. Or let's take a look at a dead tree, and see how the fungus has softened the wood, how beetles have burrowed through it, how they in turn attract woodpeckers, whose holes are then re-used by owls.
Due respect to Feynman as a physicist, but he had no clue about ecology. We are not collecting stamps, we are collecting the stories they tell - stories you'll never hear if you don't look at a few stamps first...
I found that the first semester of biochemistry at university alone changed my understanding of biology. The quality and depth of the education was so much higher than what I had in school before. A large part is of course that it is so much more focused, you could not go to that depth in a general purpose school education.
It does go again in a different direction later. Once you learned the general principles you might have to learn all the inconsistent details that are present in the actual biological systems. And the immune system is certainly one of the worst offenders here. There are a lot of really fascinating aspects about it, especially how it adapts and learns. But you quickly get to a points where you're just overwhelmed by the incredibly amount of different parts that play a role in it.
That's a totally different problem. Nobody can expect a teacher (or scientist, or ...) to be equally interested in all subfields. Of course, they should know "what is needed" - whatever that means, for example to teach the part of biochemistry that is in the curriculum. I, as a mathematician, for example don't care much about statistics or number theory. As somebody generally interested in biology I don't care about biochemistry. So, as long as he didn't just say "fuck off", you can't blame your teacher for liking something else than you did.
Also I bet that dude knew where all of the morels grew.
The man had a photo of an orangutan on his desk facing class with the name plate "moker joe". "An orangutan could get about 50% on this test", he'd say and walk around saying to the kids he knew weren't studying "Moker Joe's gonna get you Craig". Some of the smart kids pointed out to him that Moker would probbably get way less than 50% at random probability. "yeah but the kids moker's gonna get don't know that".
Anyway it's definitely more interesting this time around and only taking one class at a time.
This is only mostly right. Every cell in your body has an astonishingly similar amount of DNA, but every cell division (and even steady state DNA repair) offers the opportunity for mutations. So your cells are all astonishingly similar, but there can be detectable differences.
One implication of this is that cells that are closer to each other in developmental history will have more similar DNA. One of my colleagues in graduate school used this to do phylogenetic lineaging, where he looked at markers in DNA from whole organisms to reason about which cells are closely related, and which cells have a more distant developmental ancestor.
Biology is super cool! I hope that everyone finds a little bit of it that they can enjoy. :)
I just wish we had a better way to see it. Some sort of approach that would allow us to observe molecules in real time :| An electron microscope of some very dead extracted material just isn't the same.
I think that's why we see people who've learned to program before college get that much more mileage from their courses
They're not smarter, they've just faced the problems we're trying to solve, which gives them the motivation to care about the solutions they're presented with
But all the premed students hated it lol
Besides that, every other bio course I ever took was just rote memorization (except ones taught in math/engineering departments). Bio 101 was maybe the hardest class I ever took because it was so damn boring to memorize all those random facts.
The problem is that biology is a subject where you need a lot of fundamental knowledge before you can start to understand how things actually work - simply because the systems involved are so complex and have so many interacting parts. You need to learn an awful lot of facts before you can start putting the puzzle pieces together to see the big picture. But once you do, the view is amazing!
As an aside, I lament that the author equates "biology" with "molecular biology". He completely ignores the wonders of ecology - the beauty of biodiversity, the marvel of trophic cascades, the intricacies of ecosystem functioning. In fact, I think the challenges he sees for molecular biology are heightened for ecology: what you learn of it in high school is often even drier, you need even more background knowledge to be able to see the big picture, and research is even more challenging because experiments can seldom be done in a lab. Yet, once you've dug your way into it, you get to see systems at work that span the globe, that are as complex as anything that happens in a cell, just more vibrant and tangible and alive.
The other organ systems are similar. Once you know about the organ systems development and genetics are well motivated and easier to pick up. And from there you have a pretty good scaffold from which to fill in the rest of human biology.
All is done in environment full of water. Water itself is good solvent for some reactions. However, in many of other reactions it acts as reagent and before chemical process is started the water needs to be removed. Biochemistry laughs at water. Another thing is the temperature. Considering human (but there are many organisms without internal temperature control, and there is much colder than in our bodies) it is only 37 deg. C. Many chemical reactions are endothermic, they require a lot of energy to pass the activation barrier. In the laboratory we can keep the reaction under the reflux, which means constant boiling for hours or sometimes even days. Another thing is the pH. Some reactions require to be done in more or less acidic or basic environment. Biochemistry also laughs at pH and all is done in 7.4 (considering human). And finally, stereochemistry. It is also very important how the molecule is oriented in space. Things like proteins need to fold in specific manner.
If someone looks on the biochemical pathways they are indeed very complex. But it is not without purpose. It is amazing.
I should have loved curiosity, but what I’ve found are people looking to justify existing thinking.
Do you find yourself subject to that as well? If so, have you found a way to mitigate it?
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments)
Discussed at the time:
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
FWIW I don’t think it’s a bad thing to repost articles that were last posted years ago. I didn’t see this article when it was posted in 2020 and 2022, and I probably wouldn’t have seen it ever if you didn’t repost it now.
This may be a result of academic laziness - the question begs, especially when the answer is known. But showing your work is tedious in some fields, and impossible in others. The questions posed in biology must be formulated to be answerable a-priori with evidence that often appears to be biased towards confirmation outside of the domains of specialized experts.
It's hard to inspire wonder in the juxtapositional environment where any discovery will, at minimum, produce a magnitude more questions - all to be relegated to labels until another wave of motivation and technological processes facilitate another plateau of progress to be confronted.
Biology is hard. It's like reverse engineering, from scratch, the watch you found on the beach; 50 years and 50 miles away from the watch factory.
Finding some temporary unifying mechanism or principle to organize understanding with is the only way to make progress, but the history of biology is packed with ideas that eventually hardened into dogma and blocked progress until somebody managed to blow them up.
Evolution is the difficult-to-understand answer to this; we tend to anthropomorphically and erroneously assign intent and purpose in a chicken/egg and begging-the-question way.
Life continues until it doesn't; to assign any more gravitas to our collection of localized complexity is the same awe that a plebeian holds when presented with a meatball-and-spaghetti-on-a-wall painting of modern art; ignorant to them that it was all that remained after a rather particularly sticky food fight.
There is a big difference between reading about cool biology versus doing biology as a profession.
Biology is a brutal career that requires an army of hands to realise a vision.
At this point I'm thinking I got the worst of both worlds... (I jest! But on bad days I do feel like that)
Which is a pity. Biology is the very definition of complexity science and while more fundamental physics research becomes increasingly esoteric and unproductive, life sciences provide an opportunity and a tangible challenge to invent new mathematics and computational tools that are a quantum leap versus our current toolkit.
E.g., morphogenesis has attracted people like Alan Turing and Rene Thom but it feels that there is still a vast universe to be understood more fundamentally and accelerating that pace might be even of vital importance for our welfare.
However, if you try teaching a "bad at maths" kid how to solve a quadratic equation, explaining how to factorize and why it works is a bad strategy. They _prefer_ using the formula IME. They don't want to understand the concepts, they want to pass their exams, and rote memorizing the formula is a faster/more reliable way to do it.
I'll admit that maybe I'm just a bad teacher. After all, I'm not a teacher, I'm a CS grad who has done some teaching.
But think of the average class, with 40 students. The teacher needs all of them to learn to perform some tasks. He'll choose the one-size-fits all solution, even if it's less beautiful, less motivating for the kids that find maths to be fun.
I'm not saying we should go back to having schools for "gifted kids". They have well-documented problems, and I'm not at all qualified to pick one side of the tradeoff. All I'm saying is that boring biology classes are there for a reason, not just teachers without passion.
It's quite a bit of extra boring practice but worth it IMO.
Because this is beyond what your typical high school teachers can discuss, quickly followed orders of biochemistry university textbooks, and thankfully now - a few decades on - I get paid for life-long learning, grateful for each moment of awe.
Hypothesis: If writing educational material is like throwing a dart, you have a bigger target if you aim for just "clear" — if you aim for "clear ∩ engaging" you have less chance of being "clear".
size(clear ∩ engaging) < size(clear)
And if you're really pressed for time (and/or uncaring), you might aim for "passable" rather than "clear"; something that your colleagues would OK, but that isn't particularly great. This is a larger target than "clear".
size(passable) > size(clear)- kids who're already engaged, though aren't studying on their own and need some bare explainations
- kids who don't want to be engaged and won't be anyway
- kids who could be engaged depending on some other factor that no other kid cares about
Teaching to a class of 30+ kids means you can't take any extreme bet on what will work as a teaching method, and going for the most energy efficient way is a good practice in general.
https://www.roche.com/about/philanthropy/science-education/b...
Apoptosis (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR80Huxp4y8
We are all made of nanobots.
I guess that’s why we still call the process of bacteria taking up DNA “bacterial transformation”. It was the terminology they used early on.
Anyone manage to at least start? If so, where? I mostly forgot my university level science courses.
Reading Asimov's essays and a Brief history by Bryson etc have left me a desire to learn more.
Then I got to college and was effectively told, if I studied astronomy, I'd end up in academia perpetually and I wasn't ready to make that commitment. So I fell back to CS. And sometimes I wonder....
That isn't necessarily true though.
I'm currently tutoring a pupil who isn't so lucky. Trying to get her interested in the dry material that she has to do is by far one of the greatest challenges and has required me to generate an interest in it that I can pass on to her.
But biology, like computing, has a bottom, and the bottom is not abstract. It’s physical. It’s shapes bumping into each other ....
Hemoglobin ... was shown to be an efficient store of energy because of how oxygen atoms snap into its body like Legos, each snap widening the remaining slots, so that it loads itself up practically at a gulp
Most proteins are like this. The ones that drive locomotion twist like little motors; the ones that contract muscles climb and compress each other. Cells, too, are constantly in conversation, and the language they speak is shape.
It’s keys entering locks: a protein might straddle the cell membrane, and when a cytokine (that’s a kind of signaling molecule) docks with it, it changes its shape, so that its grip loosens on some other molecule on the interior side of the membrane...
Interesting, but in the head-mangling way of debugging complex TeX macros, or the original sendmail.cf. Avoid, if you value your sanity.
I didn't need to be shown what math was useful for.
The most fascinating question is "Why" and that cannot be answered or debated in the school setting.
That's exactly what I did, for a year, after reading The Selfish Gene.
(He says it was from his blog, but it's not actually in the blog.)
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-corona...
If you’re lookin for a book that has absolutely kept this sense of wonder, “Immune” by Philipp Dettmer has this in spades. Highly recommended.
You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring.
We are solutions along a physical, biogeochemical optimization gradient. We're fit to the world around us like a glove.
We're also distributed systems. Every sub-component of every single one of our cells is a computational system in flux, dynamically adjusting to trillions of inputs every single second.
Even the packing of "junk DNA" is a calculated encoding of spatiotemporal expression dynamics and far downstream behavior.
We are the universe encoding behavior unto itself. Exchanging gasses, assembling polymers, replicating, carefully kept in balance. Battling against other systems attempting to utilize the same energy gradients.
> I think we also need inspiration. There is a romance in biology, as in any other science, that a movie like Good Will Hunting could bring out. We need heroes. Whoever delivers us from this pandemic in the form of a slam dunk vaccine, or a cheap quick reliable test, should become a household name, not for their own glory but for our kids—a Feynman for them to dream about someday becoming.
Biology doesn't have the rockets or the fancy computers, but it stands to one day unlock some of the best things for humanity: a world free of diseases, long lives, and perhaps one day, even immortality.
The only reason it's not sexier is that it's still in the punch card phases. We're just starting to scratch the surface of the computers that make up ourselves.
This. I'd say it applies to a lot, If not all subjects.
In my experience teachers rarely explained, why we need the subject, and what's it's use. Now I see myself digging thing on my own, and realising how cool a lot of subjects are.
Turns out, its chlorophyll.
For a hypothesis to have explanatory power, it must be falsifiable. Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
What observation in your mind would falsify the existence of God?
> and hence can explain nothing.
Could you explain your reasoning here?
Let's hope we don't have this problem here on planet Earth, and especially at a core, fundamental level(s)!
Meanwhile can you expand on your take on Naive Realism here? What's the specific issue with Naive Realism you're pointing out? (am aware there's issues)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
(More seriously, Indirect Realism is actually several centuries old already, isn't it?)
And yes, it is indeed very old...old and forgotten, even by those who have knowledge of it.
But it may even be worse: what is it in the first place?
The whole video is pretty good, and the specific point starting with "You cannot prove a vague theory wrong" is explained around 5:10.
In re:
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
Feynman restates it from a different angle: he calls these kinds of things vague theories and states that they are not very useful to scientists because they can be hard to prove wrong.
Throughout he gives a bunch of examples of such vague theories that cannot be proven wrong. (eg that moogles did it, or the positions of the planets influenced when to go to the dentist, or maybe it was caused by flying saucers. )
He also points out Newtons laws which are not vague, and thus can and have been proven somewhat wrong since (see also: Einstein) .
I think further down our thread, this is in re whether saying "God did it" (or "A wizard did it" etc ) has Explanatory power:
* Why do the planets move in ellipses: "God did it"
* Why do the tides go in and out: "A wizard did it"
* How fast will an apple hit my head if dropped from precisely 10.25 meters, and will I need to wear a helmet? "Zeus knows the answer"
etc.
I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
(ps. The answer to the latter should be about ~14.17 m/s ~= 50.4 km/h . Something you could go out and measure for yourself outdoors if you like! )
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything
> and hence can explain nothing.
If I'm not mistaken, what you're referring to is the fundamental unknowability of certain things, and this state often causes the mind to hallucinate "facts" like the two above. "It is unknown, therefore it is a fact that anything is possible" is plain bad thinking, but paradoxically it is very popular thinking (thus: proper thinking), even among relatively smart people.
There must be something going on here that can "explain" (in a non-incorrect fashion) all of this, it seems unlikely that we've stumbled upon never before encountered phenomena.
> I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
I too enjoy building simple strawmen and knocking them down:
"Science exists, and "is correct", and I believe in it, therefore my personal opinion of fact is factual in fact".
I wonder which of these two strawmen most closely matches actual conversations that can be found on the internet. I constantly hear stories about religious people saying incredibly silly things (over and above standard silly Normative Cognition), but I rarely ever encounter it in real life. What I describe in my strawman though (essentially: scientism, the ~religion of science, etc), it is extremely common on all social media platforms, ion TV, in the newspaper, etc.
I'm just trying to talk about Falsifiability. That's the only thing I'm talking about.
If you posit an unfalsifiable ( == untestable) hypothesis, then -unsurprisingly- that hypothesis can't be tested.
Fun for teasing people if you're subtle about it, absolutely! Leaves people really confused until they catch on!
But when troubleshooting or dealing with issues in the real world, it's probably best to stick to testable hypotheses.
I'm not really sure how to explain this any better, it's really basic stuff, so I figure you already know this? (I mean it's basically how you can debug a program or fix a car too. I think Feynman learned it by fixing radios as a teenager, and when he grew up he ended up applying it to quantum mechanics.)
[*] Or - worse yet ;-) - are you a philosophy major?
For fun: two things to try to fit into your model:
Not sure why you bring up that and CWA here at this time though. Does it have something to do with falsifiability from your perspective? I think falsifiability is more of an OWA kind of thing though, isn't it? (The idea being that you never have sufficient information to know if something is true, only if it is positively false. That sounds pretty OWA to me, right?)
I'm interested to hear what you mean by "and the consequences" , because I truly have no idea what you might be seeing, and I'm really curious now. I get the impression you see people making certain kinds of mistakes?
It's like this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/they...
Could you refer to an existing proof of these claims, or at least put it in some sort of a more logical form that can demonstrate that these things are necessarily true? Narrative format can make not actually true things appear true pretty easily.
The clouds of Jupiter, when viewed from a planetary scale, have a similar amount of [apparent] complexity.
We simply bias familiar complexity due to our evolutionary pathway.
A planet-sized fungal-like Gaia creature that "eats" clouds by atmospheric manipulation and is able to seed it's lower planetary orbit with proto-replicative molecules would scuff at such a self-centered bias.
yes!
Just as Carl Sagan likened consciousnesses as an emergent phenomenon that happens somewhere between the neuron count of a worm and a dog an a certain ape; " Life " is a word we use for a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF COMPLEXITY.
we are not a single species in a vacuum - we are clearly, nearly obviously, the product of our environment, literally.
We are a biosphere, stuck in a gravity well, fed by the sun: without Sol (gravity really under the hood), we cannot afford the fight on the second law of thermodynamics. We use it to locally displace some entropy and get us a lil complexity, even if temporarily.
life is just some magnitude of complexity. its an illusion.
we are not special.
we came from tidally-stirred, protein-packed, slurry pools of eventually-replicative molecules. probably packed tightly into some mineral for a backbone at first; eventually crossing the line from a repeating geologic/acid formation and more of a proto-algaeic-slime of a chain of molecules that depend on each other.
shit is moot. once you have replication - even if that seems like a massive gap to you (not to me), you have a resource-competing-selfish entity. It will then innately, by its own merit of existence, compete against itself for its own resources and be subject to random mutations due to ionizing radiation. ionization radiating is pretty universal, so no leap there.
the molecules would be subject to increasing selective pressure.
Darwin's theory.
either we here, or we aint.
the universe, time, and pretty much everything is dominated by bacteria like molecules, i am sure.
"intelligence (as we know it)" - (the ability to arrive at the same state from different inputs) is a mini-max point in many evolutionary pathways that we can easily see felines arriving at in our absence.
we are nothing special.
But to each simulant, their own programming. Unicuique suum.
I’m more partial to God being Humans that survived the flood (being real and caused by an asteroid exploding over ice caps) and have been chilling underwater, occasionally popping their UAPs up and poking around. But I don’t hold that view too firmly.
That's exactly the opposite of being "beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring".
Most high schools and every biology course uses the cycle as a milestone of learning, but usually teaches it by pure rote learning, words that have no meaning. Oxaloacetate turns into citrate via the citrate synthase and Acetyl CoA (I had to look this up; of course I learned it three times by heart and forgot immediately after the exam). Most of my teachers taught it like this, a meaningless collection of words and steps that you have to rote learn.
Except for my microbiology professor! We spent a semester learning about the basics of biochemistry, why reactions have to happen the way they happen, until we all had a relatively clear logic. We learned the Krebs cycle at the end, as a special kind of application and use case of the inherent logic. We want to 'reactivate' NAD+ into NADH, so we need an H+. But look at our Malate! There's a nice H dangling there in the OH group. Hs are taken off by dehydrogenases because they de- the hydrogen, so surely our helper is called the malate dehydrogenase. And it is! What happens to an O that has it's H taken away? the most usual outcome is a double-binded O. Which is why our oxaloacetate looks the way it does. If you know what malate looks like you know what oxaloacetate looks like. (And so on).
Of course you can't explain the entire cycle and its terms this way, as names like malate are there for historic reasons, but it gets you far closer to the inherent beauty of the thing. It's just a pity it's usually taught by rote.
But after a couple of years in the role I realised I was at a major disadvantage. The good people in biology actually do like and know the rest of it too. I was working on projects to do with plant biology. I did my bit. But the others came in to the greenhouses to tend their plants during the night on a weekend. They'd talk about high-level concepts that I just had no idea about. I was never going to be as passionate about it as they were, so I was never going to succeed.
So yeah, do learn this stuff because it's amazing and unbelievably fascinating. This is a great article to whet your appetite. But there might be a reason you didn't love biology in school!
“One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. [...] it would be nice if just one of these gushing eggheads would step back and, as a concession to objectivity, speak the truth: THERE IS NOTHING INNATELY IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OR ANYTHING IN IT.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/497970-one-cringes-to-hear-...
Entire book is great read btw, no equivocating. The author will use CAPS to hammer home a point. Very refreshing, to read people who have a point to make.
Romance is for those who care, and most don’t. But it is so, so beautiful once you do.