> 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.
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.
Children. Best before they enter a school (or anything resembling something similar).
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".