[HN Gopher] I should have loved biology (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
I should have loved biology (2020)
Author : paulgb
Score : 203 points
Date : 2024-04-21 06:28 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jsomers.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jsomers.net)
| pfdietz wrote:
| There is no date on that?
|
| (He says it was from his blog, but it's not actually in the
| blog.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The page was first archived in November 2020, so probably
| thereabouts.
| arduanika wrote:
| Discussion at the time:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422
| jeffhwang wrote:
| From the article, "A few months ago, I started a magazine
| assignment to answer some questions about SARS-CoV-2 and the
| immune system. I encountered paragraphs like this"... and the
| author links to this this [1] New Yorker article about COVID
| that was published November 2020. So from context clues, was
| probably published in late 2020.
|
| [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-
| corona...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| One might just as easily wonder why they needed to be told to
| have a sense of wonder.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| A genuinely engaging read. Thank you for posting it here.
| echelon wrote:
| > I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless
| recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle;
| mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.
|
| 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.
| ArtsiomH wrote:
| > You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once
| beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious,
| majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring.
|
| 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.
| jononomo wrote:
| No. Biology is unique in the sense that life is the creation
| of God and is far more complex and awe-inspiring than any
| other subject.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Newton remarked that what colors leaves green would always
| be a mystery to all but our great Creator, Jesus Christ,
| the father.
|
| Turns out, its chlorophyll.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
| jononomo wrote:
| Yes, I bite the bullet on the God of the Gaps. What I
| object to is materialism of the gaps. At least God has
| explanatory power. Materialism does not.
| echelon wrote:
| I think it's far more likely that we're the simulation of
| some super intelligence than the creation of a mythological
| deity worshiped by ancient goat herders.
|
| But to each simulant, their own programming. Unicuique
| suum.
| jononomo wrote:
| You realize that those two ideas are identical, right?
| RIGHT??
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > In my experience teachers rarely explained, why we need the
| subject, and what's it's use.
|
| That's exactly the opposite of being "beautiful, bizarre,
| fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine,
| and awe-inspiring".
| grzeshru wrote:
| I sympathize with the author even if my gripe is different. I'm
| surrounded by people who read pop science and regurgitate things
| they have no clue nor conception of. It's very difficult to have
| an honest discussion and to ask "what if?" and say "interesting,
| I don't know" with people who read books and think they have it
| figured out because so--and-so said so.
|
| I should have loved curiosity, but what I've found are people
| looking to justify existing thinking.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > 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?
| AdeptusAquinas wrote:
| Hmm, I'm studying first year biology at uni and they convey a lot
| of wonder with it. Especially when at the same time you study
| human bioscience (organ systems, tissues etc) and chemistry for
| biology the sheer wonder of all the little machines working
| together effectively by random collisions comes off as magical.
|
| 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.
| nicd wrote:
| Fluorescence microscopy is a great tool for this!
| fabian2k wrote:
| My experience with high school biology was similar, though that
| might have been that particular teacher. He was close to
| retirement and while he could have identified most plants in the
| region, he could not answer most of my questions about
| biochemistry.
|
| 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.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > My experience with high school biology was similar, though
| that might have been that particular teacher. He was close to
| retirement and while he could have identified most plants in
| the region, he could not answer most of my questions about
| biochemistry.
|
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| when were you in highschool? I took honors bio back in 93 in
| highschool and it was all memorization of aniimal and plants
| parts. I'm taking bio 180 at UW now (20 years after graduating
| college) and it's all about genetics and statistics. They're
| almost different subjects. One is closer to farming and
| exploring and the latter is more science and the unseen. I
| could totally see an end of career hs teacher staying with the
| older style.
|
| Also I bet that dude knew where all of the morels grew.
| fabian2k wrote:
| A bit later than you, and not in the US. But as my teacher
| was born around World War 2 (estimated from their retirement
| date) I don't think it is unexpected that they had a very
| different view. Biology has fundamentally changed in that
| timeframe.
| grogenaut wrote:
| My teacher back then was in ww2. He actually was one of the
| army kids in the closer bunkers who were somewhat unwitting
| test subjects. He had a recording of him being interviewed
| after one of the first tests. He said he was 18 at the
| time. He said "I think this might just change the world" or
| something like it. I couldn't find the interview with a
| quick google. His last name was stocker. He was actually a
| great teacher in basic science the year before which is why
| I took honors bio but I zoned out memorizing all of the
| names of parts of sponges. The kids in regular bio were
| dissecting pig fetuses.
|
| 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.
| thorum wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with this:
|
| > 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.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > what are some good books or other learning resources that
| encourage questing, curiosity and wonder
|
| Children. Best before they enter a school (or anything
| resembling something similar).
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Most of the pop sci books are useless for practical use cases,
| and similarly the Feynman lectures self select for the
| physics/mathematically inclined.
|
| 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.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| Absolutely right. These basic concepts like the central dogma
| aren't especially hard to learn, but it's important to really
| understand them deeply if you want anything to make sense.
|
| 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.
| kaiwen1 wrote:
| Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of my all-time
| favorite books. Read it 15 years ago, rereading it now in
| the 7th (newest) edition. If someone has read the books
| you've listed, done the exercise and has a comprehensive
| understanding of the material, but no biology degree, only
| a passion for learning about cell biology, are there job
| options to keep feeding that passion?
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Work/volunteer as a minimum wage software developer lab
| rat (or whatever your day job speciality is). There are
| plenty of labs that are in need of free labor when it
| comes to software/engineering support in general, just
| ask around.
| sampo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The early books by Richard Dawkins. Also later books when he
| writes about biology and not about religion.
| willturman wrote:
| Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
|
| A Brief History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
|
| Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
|
| The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben
| robocat wrote:
| For biology I loved most of Stephen Jay Gould's books. Ignore
| the detractors: the books are interesting!
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| This resonated a lot:
|
| _> 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._
| willturman wrote:
| It's a wonderful experience when hazy abstractions of
| complexity click into clarity. I'm not sure I've ever found
| that without tangible motivation and immersion in a problem
| space, although excellent writings can bring one to the
| doorstep.
| streptomycin wrote:
| When I took biochemistry as an undergrad, it was taught by a
| somewhat eccentric professor who instead taught it more like
| "History of Molecular Biology". And it was super interesting.
|
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| This is why I didn't take it when I got my undergrad. I was
| good at formulas and bad at memorization. I'm taking it now 20
| years later after getting an EMT certification and realizing
| that yes I can do memorization. That said I'm taking intro bio
| right now and it's not that much memorization. End goal os ti
| take org to see how bad it is.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I loved biology in high school. I had one of the most boring
| teachers ever, and literally slept through class half the time,
| but then I would go home and read the text book for homework
| assignments and I found it totally fascinating. It was kind of
| running gag that the teacher could wake me up and ask me a
| question at any time and I always knew the answer, to the
| amusement of the other students. But my secret was just that I
| found it interesting and easy to absorb.
|
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Even if you pin the "blame" directly on teachers, they have a
| difficult situation. They need to get 3-5 classes of 20-40
| mostly obnoxious kids to learn a broad array of material
| prescribed by other people. They have to do this while also
| correcting behavioral issues and dealing with parents or
| admins.
|
| 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.
| derivative7 wrote:
| Teachers have cushy jobs with well-above-average remuneration
| and they learned that complaining will get them more sympathy
| than it gets the accountants and the secretaries. It's not
| that hard to put more than bare minimum effort.
| xcv123 wrote:
| > cushy jobs
|
| Compared to what? Coal mining? Sewer maintenance?
|
| > well-above-average remuneration
|
| No. Below average remuneration.
|
| Median Public School Teacher Salary in the United States:
| $57,947 [0]
|
| Average salary in the U.S. in 2024: $59,384 [1]
|
| [0]
| https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-
| scho...
|
| [1] https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-
| payroll...
| lannisterstark wrote:
| >Even if you pin the "blame" directly on teachers, they have
| a difficult situation
|
| 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.
| dangets wrote:
| I would say the reverse is true though - great teachers are
| able to spark interest on a subject that students may otherwise
| not care about. But I agree that that expectation shouldn't be
| the baseline.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Except making a subject interesting, at least for K-12,
| should be a baseline, no? (With success in early years making
| it easier to maintain high interest in later years.)
|
| 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.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I agree, and I may have downplayed the importance a pedagogy
| a bit too much. I've experienced first hand, and also see
| with my kids, the profound difference that a great teacher or
| coach can have on the pupils.
|
| But a great teacher is not necessary to find a topic
| interesting, nor sufficient to spark interest in everyone who
| lacks interest.
| mandibeet wrote:
| Agree, they are not the sole determinant but still
| jll29 wrote:
| There isn't another book like "Godel, Escher, Bach"; when I
| ordered it at 16, because I was curious after having seen it
| mentioned in very different contexts, reading it was a life-
| changing event.
|
| 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.
| sampo wrote:
| According to archive.org, this was maybe written in 2020.
| BroomOfSYS wrote:
| This is probably true for almost every subject, I found myself
| hating chemistry in high school mainly due to a bad teacher, but
| then I watch thiings like red nile on YT and am amazed hor funny
| this subject is.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Biology is unique; no other classical study, in modern practice,
| (can) contain both the sheer magnitude of complexity and the
| propensity to sweep away that same complexity with just a mere
| (if only temporary) classification.
|
| 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.
| wrs wrote:
| It's much, much harder than that! The watch was at least
| designed by a human, with parts that have at most a few
| simultaneous functions. All the parts are big enough to see,
| and made of metal so constant shape-shifting isn't part of
| their functionality. It was mostly designed to be
| understandable. Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works.
| Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the
| eye of the beholder.
|
| 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.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| >Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any
| organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye
| of the beholder.
|
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| paulgb wrote:
| Thank, Dan. Some further context: this was posted in another
| thread yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40102956. I liked it so
| much I yoinked it and submitted to main.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| My high school biology teacher (Ms Dinnetz, Kungsholmen's
| Gymnasium) was absolutely amazing. She had a way of really
| briging the material to life, or rather, to death. That is, every
| time she taught us a new concept she would describe the way we'd
| die without that concept. An extremely memorable class.
| keyshapegeo99 wrote:
| Beautifully written piece whose premise I disagree with.
|
| 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.
| icambron wrote:
| I took high school bio in the US, and mostly agree with both of
| these:
|
| > 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.)
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| It does seem to be the norm for interesting things to be
| presented in a boring way, rather than the exception. I'd guess
| this is partly because it's difficult to explain concepts clearly
| in the first place, let alone make the explanation engaging...
|
| 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)
|
| I think time pressure would come into play with this. If you have
| the time, you can hone in on the "clear [?] engaging" zone; but
| if you are pressed for time you just aim for "clear" which you'll
| hit more quickly.
|
| 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)
| openrisk wrote:
| Biology is interesting and intellectually attractive without
| having to try too hard but the way it is typically taught is off-
| putting for the more mathematical types.
|
| 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.
| mandibeet wrote:
| I think the love for school subjects largely depends on the
| teacher
| npunt wrote:
| Nobody's talking about the author's point at the end of the
| article, that we need better tools to reason about biology, and
| that the biology as a subject has a particular gap between
| reality and content that perhaps other subjects do not.
|
| 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?
| piecerough wrote:
| Isn't this what we're all betting massive Transformer
| architectures are going to give us? Tools to explore and handle
| complex concepts. Reasoning may still be left to us, though.
| npunt wrote:
| Absolutely! Super exciting! But how precisely will it work?
|
| 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' :)
| fmy105 wrote:
| This article resonates with me deeply. Like the author, I found
| my high school and college biology classes to be a dry litany of
| jargon and diagrams, sucking the wonder out of the incredible
| machinery of life.
|
| It wasn't until years later that I began to grasp the profound
| beauty of biology through books like "The Eighth Day of Creation"
| mentioned in the article. The great revelation for me was that at
| its core, biology is a physical, engineering discipline - it's
| all about how 3D shapes and surfaces interact and fit together to
| produce structure and function, from protein complexes up to
| tissues and organs.
|
| I wish more biology education focused on cultivating that sense
| of awe at the nanoscale world of the cell. Imagine if
| introductory classes posed biology as the greatest reverse-
| engineering project in the universe - here is this self-
| replicating machine of staggering complexity, your task is to
| figure out how it works! Let students discover for themselves the
| logic and elegance of core concepts like the Central Dogma.
|
| The other key point is that evolution needs to be the central
| organizing framework, not an afterthought. You simply cannot make
| sense of biology without viewing it through the lens of
| evolutionary processes shaping structure and function over deep
| time. When taught this way, even rote memorization takes on new
| meaning.
|
| We are living through a golden age of biological discovery, from
| the frontiers of neuroscience to the dizzying possibilities of
| synthetic biology. I hope we can inspire future generations to
| share in that excitement by presenting biology as it truly is -
| the grandest puzzle and most awesome technology on Earth. Let's
| bring the wonder back into how we teach the science of life.
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