Thanks for the sys bio robustness papers.
Regards such cross-cutting insights, I'm tempted to see what an LLM, given a order-100 author tome, where the expertise is applied mostly silo-wise, might make of something vaguely like "Edit this to emphasize modularity (see doc). And weave that story across chapters. And...". But I suspect a good breath-wise pass would require similar order massed expertise.
Hmm... just now doing a quick and sloppy spot check, suggests current AIs might be coaxed to draft a "simplified tree of life" using the regulatory miRNA family ratchet (and Hox clusters, TF families) as a lineage regulatory/complexity budget. That's potentially much easier to do than it's been in years past. So maybe the blocker of "massive expertise resources required, but there's little incentive", might be destabilized by AI?
> Later, [...] connecting, and biology becomes lots more interesting and actually easier to study
So my question is, can this be done much much earlier? A kindergarten sci ed person suggested their kids have a human right to understand their world now, not a lifetime (for them) later. Seems an intriguingly audacious goal. Riffing on above, might one create a K-accessible/empowering fun little tree of life?
Our collective focus seems elsewhere. From MCAT to early primary, I've heard "Yes, <that> would be a nice way to explain <concept>, providing better understanding. But my students are soon taking <next high-stakes exam>, and that's not on the exam. Our time together is limited, so I'd be doing them a disservice if I <didn't teach to the test>."
Perhaps the texts are fine and something extra is needed. A formative AI tutor? Or perhaps texts and tests could use a massive refresh. Or perhaps something non-textual is needed. Tens of hours living in novel AR cell sims? Or some combo. But I find the status quo rather piteous.
Viewing science education as disaster triage chain of care, there's a distinction between stabilization and patient packaging, just surviving handoff vs not having to redo. If intro genetics is burning time on something which could have been taught in primary but wasn't, and was taught unsuccessfully in middle school, again in HS, and again in intro bio... maybe change is needed and available? Order-of-magnitude size is a part of most every physical sciences intro class, and there was a NSF "nanotech" push to primary, so how many times and years might a first-tier med student have been "taught" it, 10-ish?, before having little clue how big a red blood cell is?
One teaches with the students, outcomes, and material at hand. So material which pervasively leverages scaling doesn't exist; and outcomes don't require/permit it; and students have no sense of scale; so such material would be undeployable; and sci ed research doesn't deal with the undepoyable; so we've no idea what it might look like or gain; so there's little research funding; and thus little progress over time. I think of us as being wedged, or in a local optimum with search temperature dialed unhelpfully low.
Sorry for my latency. Thank you again for the comments.