[HN Gopher] I should have loved biology too
___________________________________________________________________
I should have loved biology too
Author : nehal96
Score : 139 points
Date : 2025-04-22 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nehalslearnings.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nehalslearnings.substack.com)
| kleiba wrote:
| A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can
| very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were
| presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the
| freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very
| tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state
| government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and
| uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old kids don't care about
| the history of computers), that I couldn't blame any of my
| students not to show much interest in my classes.
|
| As a matter of fact, I gave up after just one year. It wasn't any
| fun for anyone, not for the students, not for me.
| hfgjbcgjbvg wrote:
| Imagine if they taught the history of English to kids before
| they could read
| moffkalast wrote:
| Since most people throughout history couldn't read, I guess
| it would be relatable?
| internet_rand0 wrote:
| they might just remember it all once they're adults!
|
| imagine that!? an historically informed populace???
|
| you'd need more expensive lies and higher quality fakes...
| the government would be costlier to run.
|
| ideally, in the long term this would make the national
| currency's value in the international money market rise up.
| but why wait for that when one can directly manipulate money
| through trade fraud and covert military ploys?
| RogerL wrote:
| That's not the point, the point is the ordering is
| inverted, not that history shouldn't be learned.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Those curiculums developed by sould-dead gremiums in consensus
| on the minimum knowledge you goto have are a blight on western
| civilization. Instead of giving students the ability to
| discover a topic, or built something they are interested in
| themselves and then give them a understanding and fascination
| with the discoverers who have gone before them. Instead they
| kill the subject..
|
| I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the
| anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the
| fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that
| only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation
| could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists
| academia.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Yes, definitely, destroying education as we know it without
| any plans for what the next thing is will definitely work.
|
| Developed countries really need a come to Jesus moment,
| because the disdain for everything that made them great
| places is unbelievable. People will understand, after great
| suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building
| it.
| immibis wrote:
| We're in the destroying phase right now. Unless you live in
| China - I hear they're mostly doing well. Or middle of
| nowhere Africa, where there's nothing to destroy because
| there's nothing there.
|
| But systems can rot from within too, or just decay
| naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core
| ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the
| past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what
| to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal
| machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell
| apart.
| fads_go wrote:
| Forgetting that it was the anti-education forces that created
| the curriculums. The war on public education goes back a long
| time; teachers lost the freedom to teach decades ago. and it
| has been the same forces behind it all along.
| tqi wrote:
| Ok... what would you do differently? Keep in mind you have to
| educate millions of students across an enormous spectrum of
| abilities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and interests.
| slicktux wrote:
| I think the whole teaching the history of computers is a big
| failure at an attempt to Segway into computer organization and
| architecture. Nonetheless, I get what is happening. If it's a
| pure Computer programming class then the goal maybe to have
| them understand the "basics"...like what is the hard drive vs
| RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic)
| and what is a punch card (mnemonics and abstractions of those
| mnemonics to what is now just a computer programming language).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > have them understand the "basics"...like what is the hard
| drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor
| (Boolean logic)
|
| You must understand these things at least conceptually if you
| want to really understand how to write efficient programs.
| Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically
| "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can
| magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g.
| register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.
| 0_gravitas wrote:
| Personally, I struggled a lot in my earlier CS/Informatics
| education, partly because I never felt like I understood what
| was actually happening/how we got here, everything was just
| factoids in a void. When I took a gap semester between my
| A.S. and B.S., I finally studied/explored a bit of the
| history and it put a lot finally in perspective.
| nightpool wrote:
| (Unless you're riding a motorized vehicle, the word is segue,
| not Segway)
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I've loved the history of computers since I was young, although
| if I was forced to learn about it in school I know it would
| suck.
| liquidpele wrote:
| This is why most good teachers don't use the books but find
| creative ways to still meet the standards. More work though, so
| fewer do it now with pay being so shit.
| Fomite wrote:
| I should write a blog post entitled "I should have loved computer
| science"
| westurner wrote:
| Do you do bioinformatics?
|
| Bioinformatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics
|
| Health informatics:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_informatics
| intrasight wrote:
| My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology
| was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become
| doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers
| took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since
| I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But
| all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized
| that there was this tremendously rich domain of real neurons
| which I knew nothing about. I worked as a software engineer for a
| couple years after graduating but then went back to school to
| study Neurophysiology. I did not pursue it as my area of work or
| research, but I am grateful for having had the opportunity to
| look at the world from the perspective of a biologist.
|
| If you're an engineer and early in your career and feel there's
| something missing from your intellectual space, I encourage you
| to go back and get a graduate degree in something totally
| different. Humans live a very long time so don't feel like you're
| wasting time.
| TinyRick wrote:
| I would love to do something like this but simply cannot afford
| it. I think it is good advice but going back to school for a
| degree one does not plan on utilizing is not as feasible today
| as it was in the 80's, largely due to the sizeable increase in
| tuition without reciprocal increases in wages.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I would love to do something like this but simply cannot
| afford it.
|
| Work for a company that will pay for it.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I can't imagine why a company would pay an engineer to get
| a masters degree in biology
| MattGrommes wrote:
| A lot of companies will pay for at least part of whatever
| college classes you take, without auditing whether or not
| it would be good for your specific job.
|
| I encourage people to look into it, it's a benefit a lot
| of people have but don't use and it's leaving money on
| the table.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Every company I ever worked for constrained it in many
| ways
|
| 1. Masters degree only, they won't pay for anyone to get
| a bachelor's or associates
|
| 2. Must maintain a B average or better
|
| 3. Cannot take any time off, it has to be entirely on
| nights and weekends
|
| 4. Reimbursement _after_ the fact, so you 're taking on
| the initial financial risk up front.
| dominicq wrote:
| Can you say more? What kind of company would so such a
| thing? Maybe I live in a bubble but that's so far outside
| of what I've seen that it just sounds fantastical.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| Ok, both of these comments made me doubt my memory so I
| just checked and my current employer, a very large
| consumer company, and the limits of the program are that
| you get a C or above, and the class is "related" to your
| job or any job you can get at the company. But I've
| gotten classes paid for that only tangentially related to
| my job with no problem. So I concede that you might not
| get a biology degree as an engineer but my particular
| company does a lot of different things so my guess is in
| practice you'd have no problems. I also worked at a now-
| defunct mid-size startup and a hospital system with
| similarly loose requirements but I don't have access to
| their docs anymore.
| toast0 wrote:
| Depending on where you live, and what you want to study, you
| might be able to take a couple courses at the community
| college in areas of interest without spending a lot of money.
| biomcgary wrote:
| I was paid to get a PhD in Biology, albeit just enough to
| live on. Most people in PhD programs are, either through
| being a TA (teacher's assistant) or RA (research assistant).
| The real financial cost is the opportunity cost of 5-6 years
| of your life.
|
| Whether or not broad support for training scientists holds up
| during and after the current administration remains to be
| seen.
| nosianu wrote:
| In this day and age, you can do this for FREE and on the
| side, whenever you have time!
|
| There are tons of very well-done professional level video
| courses on Youtube.
|
| There are more organized courses that only ask you for money
| for the "extras", like some tests and a certificate, but the
| main parts, texts and videos, are free.
|
| You could start with a really good teaching professor (Eric
| Lander, MIT) and his course:
| https://www.edx.org/learn/biology/massachusetts-institute-
| of... (the "Audit" track is free, ignore the prices; also
| ignore the "expires" - this course restarts every few months
| and has been available in new versions for many years now)
|
| It's very engaging!
|
| There's similar courses for _everything_ in the life
| sciences, there on edX, on Youtube, many other places.
|
| I feel the true Internet is soooo underutilized by most
| people! Forget news sites, opinion blogs, or social media.
| Knowledge is there for the taking, free. Only the organized
| stuff, where you end up with a certificate costs money, but
| they usually still provide the actual content for free.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Same. Biology was an elective in high school and I never took
| it. I took Earth Science (basically introductory geology) and
| then went into the Chemistry/Physics track (two years of each).
| Never felt I missed it, last time I had any real biology
| education was a unit in 8th grade science and I didn't care for
| it then.
| AnnikaL wrote:
| I am not sure biology is not a "hard science"?
| keithwhor wrote:
| I've been programming since I was eight, but truly fell in love
| with biology in 12th grade chemistry: the first introduction to
| organic chemistry and biochemistry. It was the first time I
| truly started grokking the application of systems-level
| thinking to the biological world; how do trees "know" to turn
| red in the autumn? How do fetuses assemble themselves from two
| cells?
|
| I decided to purse a double major in biochemistry and
| evolutionary biology and it was one of the best decisions I've
| made in my life. The perspective you gain from understanding
| all life in terms of both networks and population dynamics of
| atoms, molecules, cells, tissue, organisms and populations --
| and how every layer reflects the layer both underneath and
| above it in a fractal pattern -- is mind-expanding in a way I
| think you just don't and can't get designing software systems
| alone.
|
| I work as a software engineer / founder now, but always reflect
| wistfully on my time as a biologist. I hope to get back to it
| some day in some way, and think what the Arc Institute team is
| doing is inspirational [0].
|
| [0] https://arcinstitute.org/
| bsder wrote:
| The breakpoint was molecular biology around 1986 with the
| introduction of PCR. Once that happened, biology went from
| being alchemy to being science.
|
| I _loathed_ biology as taught prior to that. Once I got a
| molecular biology course, I thought biology was _amazing_ and
| wondered "Why the hell did we teach all that other crap?"
|
| Well, that was because the tools we had for biology _sucked_
| prior to PCR. My problem was that I _recognized_ that even as a
| child.
| duxup wrote:
| I took some programming courses in college. I loved computers and
| was very interested. However, the classes were a guy reading from
| a book about C. That was pretty much it. You did what the book
| said and hoped something stuck in your head.
|
| This was early days of the internet, the book(s) were largely the
| only resource. The instructors were folks who just understood
| coding in C naturally and had no idea how to communicate with
| those who did not. No joy in anything, just raw code.
|
| I dropped out.
|
| Decades later after age 40 I was at a career crossroads and took
| a web development class. I loved it, I could make things quickly,
| the instructor actually understood how to teach / introduce
| concepts. I've been happily coding professionally and personally
| since then.
|
| How things are presented sometimes makes all the difference.
| manfromchina1 wrote:
| I remember my first interaction with computers was on one of
| those ancient ones way back when. Our teacher showed us how to
| make a circle appear on the screen. I was preoccupied with how
| the computer was actually able to render that circle, what
| exactly was happening under the hood and what kind of physics
| was happening for all this to come together as a circle on the
| screen and not that particular function of whatever program
| they were using at the time. That turned me off to wanting to
| mess around with computers for awhile.
| westurner wrote:
| Genetic algorithm:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm :
|
| > _Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality
| solutions to optimization and search problems via biologically
| inspired operators such as selection, crossover, and mutation._
|
| AP(r)/College Biology: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-
| biology
| westurner wrote:
| Justifying that genetic algorithms are CS and Biology applied,
| which satisfies OT's implicit yearning
| westurner wrote:
| AP(r)/College Biology > Unit 6: Gene Expression and Regulation
| > Lesson 6: Mutations: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-
| biology/gene-expressi...
|
| AP(r)/College Biology > Unit 7: Natural selection:
| https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/natural-selec...
|
| Rosalind.info has free CS algorithms applied bioinformatics
| exercises in Python; in a tree or a list; including genetic
| combinatorics. https://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/
|
| FWICS there is not a "GA with code exercise" in the AP Bio or
| Rosalind curricula.
|
| YouTube has videos of simulated humanoids learning to walk with
| mujoco and genetic algorithms that demonstrate goal-based
| genetic programming with Cost / Error / Fitness / Survival
| functions.
|
| Mutating source code AST is a bit different from mutating to
| optimize a defined optimization problem with specific
| parameters; though the task is basically the same: minimize
| error between input and output, and then XAI.
| frereubu wrote:
| The post by James Somers that this article references at the top
| inspired me to buy the David Goodsell book _The Machinery of
| Life_. I would seriously recommend that to anyone who doesn 't
| have a background in biology (like me). The phrase is a bit of a
| cliche, but it genuinely blew my mind, to the extent that I had
| to read it slowly because there's so much fascinating stuff
| packed into such a small book. It's obvious to me now, but the
| fact that so much of this stuff is about physical shapes locking
| into each other, and doing it at an almost unimaginable speed,
| was absolutely enthralling.
| smath wrote:
| Ha, same here! Bought that book about a year ago after reading
| that post
| flobosg wrote:
| Check out his[1] Molecule of the Month series
| (https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/) if you haven't already!
|
| [1]: Although he just retired from it. Janet Iwasa will
| continue the project.
| searine wrote:
| I think one of the things I love most about biology is its
| uncertainty. Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and
| rules based. Life is wibbily wobbly, lifey-wifey. An enormous
| soup of changing alleles cast as probabilities over eons all
| creating endless interactions you can't ever comprehend.
|
| You have to become comfortable with the fact that there is
| uncertainy and there are parts of it you can't control. So
| instead you have to be obsessed with introducing order where you
| can. It is so refreshing to see a beautiful experiment that can
| wrestle a clear signal from the endless noise.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules
| based
|
| Depends where in math, in things like particle physics things
| get all wibbly wobbly is my cat dead or alive. In things like
| engineering quite often what you're dealing with _is_
| probability based, but you just stack the deck so far in your
| favor the probability is 1.
|
| As they say, building a bridge that doesn't fall down is easy.
| Building a bridge that barely doesn't fall down is much harder.
| searine wrote:
| Not saying those fields don't have uncertainty, but I've
| never seen an physicist pray to Newton that gravity works
| this time when the ball drops.
|
| I have seen molecular biologists (jokingly) shake the voodoo
| "molecular biology maracas" over the PCR machine to try and
| replicate their result.
| asnyder wrote:
| Every scientist does that at some point. I've easily
| crossed my fingers and hoped numerous times that code I'd
| written would work, especially on the first time. Even more
| rewarding in the superstition when the project is hard, and
| you're a bit daffy at the end.
|
| It's a human thing.
|
| Surely Feynman made jested comments before running
| experiments. I'm sure some digging in his wonderful books
| and letters will find many examples.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| A lot of experimental and applied physics operates this
| way. If you are synthesizing material, for example, it
| takes a lot of time and effort to get high yields of what
| you want. Before that your processes can be very
| probabilistic.
|
| In fact, just finished listening to a talk where a
| experimentalist was talking about how to get the
| fabrication yields of superconducting qubits from currently
| low double digit to 99.99+.
| searine wrote:
| Man, just let me have this.
|
| Biology is messy at a macro level is all I'm saying. I
| don't need a hundred people butting in saying "butt
| aschully phsyix and code is also messy and harder at a
| quantum level." I know. We know.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I am sure the author is a fine person, but this is an incredibly
| self-entitled piece. A number of biologists managed to make it
| through these classes just fine, and are paid much less for
| pursuing their passion (and making the breakthroughs the author
| enjoys reading about while on vacation).
|
| A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the
| boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology
| interesting" may have had less impact, though.
|
| Computer scientists and programmers are very intelligent people
| who often have grossly unrealistic projections of their
| competency in other fields, and this is a fine example of the
| phenomenon.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The author did fine in another field, but might have picked
| biology instead if they had gotten the switch flipped earlier
| in life. That some people get through bad classes isn't a proof
| that those classes are good; you get those few who would
| survive no matter what, and those whose brain-wiring is
| conducive to the way the bad classes are structured. This has a
| tendency to reduce diversity of thought over time, and
| contributes to academic ossification.
|
| Secondly, fields really do need cross-discipline collaboration.
| Finding passionate CS people is fantastic because they bring a
| different skill set. I have often found that when we get
| diverse experts together, we can have everyone do the "easy
| part" and get results which would be otherwise unobtainable.
|
| Yes, some people have 'engineers disease' and fail to
| appreciate the depth of knowledge and skills of folks who have
| spent their life in another domain... But the author doesn't
| seem to be one of these. Many of their favorite stories
| appreciate the combination of insight and hard work in the
| history of the field.
|
| It does, indeed, suck that people working in biology get paid
| less than computer engineers. Blame capitalism...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| As a biologist with a tech background (but actual
| biotechnology majors) - please we have enough tech bros who
| think they're biology's saviors. They'll just come in
| fascinated by some technological problem, call it the only
| blocker to solving aids and cancer and take away a billion
| dollars in funding over decades and show nothing of actual
| consequence. Like the entire protein folding field. It's a
| tool. Not the solution. Even today there was this hyperbolic
| piece on NBC about how this Harvard scientist working on
| microscopy image processing is being deported and now we are
| not going to cure cancer.
|
| I feel bad for them, but I can assure you, as someone who did
| the research in the exact same field, they're curing nothing
| and are more likely to make cures slower by sucking away
| funding from more pertinent projects.
|
| Also relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1831/
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I've been working my way towards a biololgy degree very
| slowly (can only really fit one-class-at-a-time alongside
| working full time). I'm maybe 70% to a bachelor's degree in
| it. Been writing code for ages, but I've saved enough to
| accept a lower salary if it means I get to work on a real
| problem for once in my life. So I guess I'm one of those
| people you're frustrated with.
|
| Do you have any advice for how to not be that kind of
| problem? For now I'm just focusing on my coursework, but at
| some point I'll be biologist-enough to help out with
| research. How do I approach it without being that guy?
| niam wrote:
| What does the author claim entitlement to? Or what real-world
| malign effect are you expecting from this piece that warrants
| the charge? I went in expecting the type of piece you describe,
| since I know the type, but I've failed to read it as you do
| except with a disqualifying squint.
| svat wrote:
| The post is not about becoming a professional
| academic/researcher in biology, so it's not clear why your
| comments (this and the earlier deleted one) focus on
| competency, calling the author "not cut out for biology", etc.
|
| The post is simply about what you call _enough attention to get
| through the boring parts of high school biology_ -- should
| biology in school be only for those who have that ability? Even
| if being a professional biologist requires those attributes,
| shouldn 't the teaching of the science of life--which is full
| of wonder--have a bit of something for everyone else too? Even
| people who don't become biologists ought to love biology,
| surely?
|
| That's what the post (like the earlier one by Somers) is about;
| it's not about "I could have become a biologist" (as you seem
| to be implying). You can call it pop biology, but it's missing
| from school where "astonishing facts were presented without
| astonishment". I see nothing self-entitled about this.
|
| It's the same in mathematics, say: even if being a professional
| mathematician requires (say) thinking long and hard and being
| willing to struggle with difficult problems, manipulating
| things in one's head, etc -- surely there is value in exposing
| more students to pop mathematics / beautiful results (enjoying
| which is very different from actually doing mathematics, sure),
| so that more people could love mathematics recreationally,
| whether or not they become professional ones?
|
| The other top-level thread that talks about how this happens in
| CS education too
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43764315) seems to get
| the point of the post: it's the equivalent of Lockhart's _A
| Mathematician's Lament_ (https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2
| 002_-_A_Mathematician'... ).
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Well, this is incredible: "The gene sequence had a strange
| repeating structure, CAGCAGCAG... continuing for 17 repeats on
| average (ranging between 10 to 35 normally), encoding a huge
| protein that's found in neurons and testicular tissue (its exact
| function is still not well understood). The mutation that causes
| HD increases the number of repeats to more than forty - a
| "molecular stutter" - creating a longer huntingtin protein, which
| is believed to form abnormally sized clumps when enzymes in
| neural cells cut it. The more repeats there are, the sooner the
| symptoms occur and the higher the severity"
|
| Not the only sequence model that exhibits stutters on repetitive
| inputs...
| ansk wrote:
| And on the seventh day, God ended His work which He had done
| and began vibe coding the remainder of the human genome.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| this should do the trick... while creatures:
| c = get_random_creature() if c.is_dead():
| creatures.pop(c) else:
| creatures.add(c.mutate())
| RogerL wrote:
| You also need selection, not just mutation (I know you are
| being silly, so am I)
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Selection is handled by asynchronous events which
| populate the is_dead() boolean.
|
| Critiquing my own code, though, it should really be a
| check against 'can_reproduce()' rather than 'is_dead()'.
| seydor wrote:
| If you want to be fascinated with biology just go to nature, or a
| park and stay there for a while. After a while you ll start to
| wonder about the birds, the plants the snails, the cats. Biology
| is descriptive science , nothing wrong with it
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I don't know if just going to nature is sufficient to get
| fascinated with biology. In my opinion it takes a fundamental
| reset in how you think about anything you see. Humans while
| smart have obviously had to learn to "ignore" thinking about
| how things work. You don't think too hard about how anything
| works really. I mean at a cursory level sure, but by vastly
| different interpretations of the word "cursory", you can change
| your thirst to know how things you see work at more and more
| fundamental levels.
|
| You don't need to go into nature to get this curiosity except
| for the possibility that it makes you more meditative. You can
| look at your arm and think what the hell happens in there at a
| molecular level to make you move the muscles. Or when someone
| says nerves conduct electricity what the hell does that mean?
|
| I revisit this feynman video of him explaining (or not) magnets
| every few months and I think it's relevant to this question.
| https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?si=CkWYfiGoGCgAANwP
|
| When I think like that I'm just curious why OP and others blame
| teachers or whoever else for not inducting the curiosity in
| them. Like it's someone else's job to make you curious? In my
| opinion you're either born that way or you're not. Some airport
| store book isn't gonna make you the next whatever scientist you
| adulate.
| heurist wrote:
| I was lucky to have a great AP Biology teacher in high school. I
| ended up minoring in the field and it has shaped my career. Now
| my child is a little biologist. It is a fascinating subject and
| so core to everything we are and everything we do.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| In high school I was all math>physics>chemistry>biology. So I
| didn't take biology. Much to my peril. I didn't learn that I
| wasn't just a brain on a stick until I was 25! At some point "The
| Inner Life of the Cell" blew my mind.
| dekhn wrote:
| I invested a great deal of effort over 30+ years to learn
| biology, which I started to love in high school when a teacher
| introduced us to molecular biology. Over time I've come to
| appreciate that biology is a huge field and people who master one
| area often know little to nothing about many others.
|
| To be proficient in biology you need to have "Extra" skills:
| extra ability to work with ambiguity,ability to memorize enormous
| amounts of descriptive information, and highly abstract
| representations. Digital biology often loses many aspects of
| biological reality, and then fails to make useful predictions.
|
| Over the years, I've come to realize I know less and less about
| biology- that I greatly underestimated the complexity and
| subtlety of biological processes, and have come to admit that my
| own intelligence is too limited to work on some problems that I
| originally thought would be "easy engineering problems".
|
| A great example of the rabbit hole that is modern biology is
| summed up here: what is the nature of junk DNA? To what extents
| are digital readouts like ENCODE representative of true biology,
| rather than just measuring noise? What is the nature of gene and
| protein evolution?
|
| https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)...
| (note that while I disagree strongly with Eddy in many ways, I've
| come to recognize that I simply don't understand the modern view
| of evolution outside the perspective of molecular biology (IE,
| what geneticists like Eddy think).
|
| Also, recently, Demis Hassabis postulated that if he is
| successful, we will come up with silver bullet cures in 10 years
| time simply using machine learning. It's amazing how many
| computer scientists (I call him that rather than a biologist,
| although he has worked into neuro) make this conclusion.
| baq wrote:
| Why would biology be so hard? It's only a billion years of
| evolution, after all. We're dealing with billions of things all
| the time. /s
| dekhn wrote:
| Appreciate the sarcasm, but... it's really 3 billion years of
| evolution, with astronomical levels of actual entities living
| and dying in a dynamic world environment. Chemical reactions
| happening in nanoseconds. Polymers have extraordinarily
| complex behavior!
| Wojtkie wrote:
| I've got a background in neuroscience and transitioned to data
| science a few years ago. Your comment about the rabbit hole of
| modern biology is spot on. I've been hearing for 10+ years
| about how ML like computer vision will revolutionize medical
| diagnosis and treatment. It hasn't happened yet and I think
| that enthusiasm comes from the fact that we built computer
| systems from the ground up and therefore know them deeply,
| whereas biological systems aren't fully understood.
| praptak wrote:
| A complex three dimensional organism self-assembling from a
| single cell is 100% magic, especially given how resilient it is
| to disruption. You can kill one of the two cells produced by the
| first division and still get a fully formed organism (that's one
| of the actual early experiments in morphogenesis theory).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Concentration gradients layered on concentration gradients
| layered on concentration gradients.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmentation_gene
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| And Brownian motion all but guaranteeing everything bumps
| into everything else constantly!
| polotics wrote:
| This article really strikes a chord: going through high-school
| biology I was shocked by the dessication of life in the way
| everything was presented, as if death itself had written the
| curriculum. I focussed on maths and suspected this was the hidden
| agenda: only present man-made constructs, treat the rest as if it
| were just wrong maths.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| My father, who was a teacher considered teaching classes to be a
| kind of performance art. For getting information, you are better
| off with a book (or other media). His goal was to put up a
| performance good enough to get students interested, and ideally,
| read the books later.
| metadaemon wrote:
| Makes sense, my perceived best professors were those that were
| enthusiastic about teaching and/or the subject
| 1auralynn wrote:
| The field of biology was created by people who love to
| classify/name things. This has resulted in what we have now: A
| subject where the prerequisite to understanding is the ability to
| read long passages of text littered with jargon and visualize
| what that might represent. Even if everyone's reading skills were
| where they should be, the second part is not a super common
| skillset.
|
| It's one of the reasons why I work in visualization for life
| sciences education: I think we're missing out on people who might
| otherwise make massive contributions to the field because they
| failed to memorize what the "endoplasmic reticulum" does. Much of
| biology you don't have to actually remember what things are
| called in order to understand the processes (at least at a basic
| level like what a middle schooler might be taught). Once you're
| exposed to the fascinating complexity of life at that level, for
| many people it can be interesting enough to build the motivation
| for the memorization/etc.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| > _Much of biology you don 't have to actually remember what
| things are called in order to understand the processes_
|
| But even that's besides the point of the fact that all these
| things are nothing more than abstractions created by humans,
| and ultimately it's all one giant soup of interacting
| molecules.
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| I do quantitative biology now, although my background is in
| theoretical physics. Biology is fascinating, but ultimately there
| is a cultural divide between the scientific "language" used in
| biology and the scientific language of e.g., engineers,
| physicists (very famously described in "Can a biologist fix a
| radio?"
| https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1535-6108%2802%2900...)
|
| I do find the author's point weird. "I thought high school
| biology was just memorizing facts, but I began to appreciate it
| when I read some pop science books and went scuba diving." So the
| only problem for the author was the _topic_ of the classes, not
| the _style_. Why shouldn 't one have the same problem with high
| school physics ("it's just about boring ramps and pulleys"),
| etc.? Personally I find the _style_ to be a more important
| distinguishing factor, in that biology is much less quantitative
| than other science disciplines. Instead the author 's problem is
| that biology should be even _less_ quantitative and more literary
| or poetic...?
|
| Ultimately science journalism/popularization is not the same
| thing as science. High school science classes (try to) teach the
| latter not the former.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| High school physics and chemistry equips students to make (a
| very limited set of) predictions. High school biology super
| doesn't. When you're learning chemistry and physics, it feels
| like you're learning a systematic set of rules that let you
| approximate and model the world around you. Biology...doesn't,
| not really. Life is just more complex and higher order, and
| it's that much harder to actually use the study of it to
| understand the world immediately around you in any meaningful
| way.
|
| It's still super cool, but it makes learning about it as a
| science less satisfying, since it's less friendly to the
| standard scientific method.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Love biology. I appreciate purist mathematician/logicians prefer
| chemistry and physics and it seems to be an inside joke in the
| professions that biology isn't on the same level when it comes to
| axiomatic things.
|
| I'm a classic INTJ but left school and built biology-online.org
| 25ish years ago. I think it's had a couple of thousand years of
| reading hours. I sold it on thinking I lack the expertise the
| topic deserves (it ranked well on Google for lots of biological
| terms)
|
| I love the lack of agency about biology/evolution, it found a way
| to create ourselves as well as the huge tree of life around us
| purely through biological/ecological pressures. And here we are.
| We owe a lot to how biology has expressed things over the past 4
| billion years and will likely find out a whole lot more.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I'm a classic INTJ
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
|
| > Despite its popularity, the MBTI has been widely regarded as
| pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][3][2] The
| validity (statistical validity and test validity) of the MBTI
| as a psychometric instrument has been the subject of much
| criticism.
|
| > Many of the studies that endorse MBTI are methodologically
| weak or unscientific.[13] A 1996 review by Gardner and Martinko
| concluded: "It is clear that efforts to detect simplistic
| linkages between type preferences and managerial effectiveness
| have been disappointing. Indeed, given the mixed quality of
| research and the inconsistent findings, no definitive
| conclusion regarding these relationships can be drawn."[13][72]
|
| >The test has been likened to horoscopes, as both rely on the
| Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading
| participants to personally identify with descriptions that are
| somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.[10][73] MBTI
| is not recommended in counseling.[74]
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I don't mind the pigeon hole classification as it seems to
| describe me quite well vs the other definitions.
| mandolingual wrote:
| Any survey (as opposed to horoscopes which aren't up to user
| choice) can be used to convey information about a person,
| even if that information is what they think about themselves.
| "I took a survey and I'm a Slytherin" conveys plenty, and no
| one feels the need to point out that that's unscientific.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I get that, but I wanted to elucidate since many people
| think Myers Briggs is based on data and is not a fiction.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| So is it a coincidence that a majority of programmers
| tend to fall into the INTJ bracket?
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| I'm just going to recommend the biology books written by Lewis
| Thomas. The books are collections of essays rather than science
| or text books. They blew my mind and opened up a deep respect for
| the field of biology and gave me a deep appreciation of life in
| all its forms, so many of which I didn't know existed.
|
| Look for:
|
| The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
|
| The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
|
| The Youngest Science
|
| ...and a couple of thers.
| shayway wrote:
| I've recently been delving into paleobiology, but what inspired
| it was very different from what's described in the post. I ingest
| a lot of pop educational stuff, mostly just for entertainment;
| but after a few years of just hearing the highlights and fun
| facts it became frustrating not being able to put all of it into
| context.
|
| So I pushed myself a little out of my comfort zone and ordered a
| textbook and enrolled in a course. It made me realize how I've
| forgotten how to learn without it being entertainment. But, after
| some acclimation, I also realized that I don't really need an
| engaging presentation, because I really do just enjoy learning.
| So in a way my journey has been kinda the opposite of the
| author's - the 'fluff' around the information made it less
| appealing, not more. Though I suppose I might not have taken the
| leap to delve deeper into these topics in the first place if it
| weren't for the accessible versions.
|
| Either way though, I think the real takeaway isn't that there's a
| right way to be interested in a topic - whether through stories
| and history or otherwise - but rather that school isn't the best
| environment for figuring out if something interests you, and it's
| worth re-visiting topics you might have written off with a fresh
| approach.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| >I think the real takeaway isn't that there's a right way to be
| interested in a topic
|
| I think a different perspective can sometimes illuminate
| though, it's not just about the person - it's them having an
| epiphany that motivates them to do something, like learn more.
|
| >pop educational stuff,
|
| I watch a lot of that as lazy entertainment, so much of it is
| factually incorrect (on YouTube etc). But I know better I
| guess.
| philsnow wrote:
| My interest in biology isn't driven at all by stories, history,
| or "adventure", but rather by the awe-inspiring complexity and
| majesty of all the microbiological processes and their interplay.
|
| Yes, it's pop science, but last be year I read through Philipp
| Dettmer's "Immune", and the description of how the immune system
| continuously generates random/arbitrary sequences of nucleotides,
| builds the proteins that those sequences encode, and then
| subjects the resulting proteins to a "is this a 'me' protein or
| an 'other' protein?" gauntlet, the latter path of which allows
| the body to create antibodies for completely novel proteins... is
| just incredible.
|
| I have an idle fantasy that, in the afterlife, I'll be able to
| ask God questions like "so what are quarks made of?", "why is the
| speed of light what it is and not any faster/slower? What would
| the universe have been like if the speed of light were several
| orders of magnitude faster/slower?", "is there a single force
| that unifies all the ones that humans know about? What would the
| universe have been like if the weak nuclear force were just a
| tiny bit weaker?", etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| same inspiration but I wouldn't devolve it to 'pop science',
| it's simply less axiomatic than physicists and mathematicians
| would like. The fact there's 4 billion years of ecological
| change beyond the biological change just makes stuff hard to
| prove empirically.
|
| esp. when physicists use things like the anthropic principle to
| describe our own universe.
| mleroy wrote:
| I can really relate to this -- in school, biology felt like dry
| memorization. It never clicked with me, and I wrote it off for
| years. If I could recommend one subtopic of biology to math and
| physic people, it would definitely be _mycology_!
|
| It's like real-life Pokemon GO and field mycology has a "collect
| 'em all" vibe. You get out into nature, identify and catalog
| fungi -- it scratches the same itch as exploring an open-world
| game.
|
| Fungi are discrete, classifiable entities with tons of metadata:
| GPS location, substrate, time of year, morphology, spore prints,
| photos, microscopic features. Perfect for structured data nerds.
|
| Unlike many branches of biology, you don't need to go to the
| Amazon. You can walk into your backyard or a nearby forest and
| find species newly known for your country and sometimes even new
| for science.
|
| Microscopes, macro lenses, chemicals, even DNA sequencing.
| There's a hacker spirit in mycology.
|
| Projects like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and FungiMap are
| full of real scientific contributions from everyday people. The
| barrier to entry is low, the impact can be surprisingly high, and
| the community is genuinely welcoming. Many leading contributors
| -- even those publishing in cutting-edge scientific journals --
| are passionate autodidacts rather than formally trained
| biologists.
|
| High intra-species variance, subtle features -- perfect
| playground for machine learning wich is not nearly "solved" here.
|
| Cordyceps that zombify insects. Giant underground networks that
| share nutrients between trees. Bioluminescent mushrooms. Many
| weird stories.
| eilccn wrote:
| ha i studied bio in undergrad > med illustration mfa then dropped
| out after a semester > ms in cs
| Balgair wrote:
| Aside:
|
| Hey, a lot of fellow biologists here! A few questions:
|
| Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?
|
| Where do you get your biology news from?
|
| Where do you think the field/s are going?
|
| Is bio harder than other STEMs?
|
| I'm a neuroscientist/bioengineer by training and profession. I
| followed the path that a lot of commenters here did too, in that
| I came back to bio after a harder STEM career (physics). Glad to
| know I'm not alone in this!
| ray__ wrote:
| Fun questions! My takes:
|
| 1) Sadly there isn't really. There are a few good blogs like
| Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline" that centralize news, but no
| anonymous online forum like this.
|
| 2) Google scholar alerts, Twitter, Bluesky, and word of mouth.
|
| 3) I think our understanding of biological processes at the
| mesoscale is about to hit an inflection point, largely through
| advances in electron microscopy (cryo-ET) and the ability to
| perform simulations at this scale.
|
| 4) Not harder but definitely more messy and progress is less
| linear.
| Feynuus wrote:
| I had always thought of biology as 'less rigorous' than the other
| sciences, and consequently less deserving of merit than, say,
| physics (my major). Less mathematical, not as rigorous, purely
| memorization devoid of deep understanding,.
|
| It took me a while to shed that view.
|
| 1. There's an inherent charm and beauty to biology, and the
| ability to memorise is a skill.
|
| 2. The many different sub-disciplines of biology demonstrate the
| level of complexity that the field demands. And, even if it isn't
| as 'rigorous' as physics, do we denounce experimentalists because
| theoretical physicists exist? They simply serve as distinct, but
| crucial, parts of a chain.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _I should have loved biology (2020)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 - April 2024 (253
| comments)
|
| _I should have loved biology_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271
| comments)
|
| _I should have loved biology_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298
| comments)
| mandevil wrote:
| I think this is true for most any subject taught in school.
|
| I have loved history since I was six and my parents got me my
| first adult history book. I love how all stories fit together,
| understanding why things happened the way they did, how and why
| people in the past thought differently than we do today, all of
| it. If you read a textbook, though, history is just memorizing
| one thing happening after another.
|
| Part of that might be my (American) education system's fear of
| controversy: explaining what motivated abolitionists and slave-
| holders in the 1850, the actual stakes over which they were
| fighting, would not be popular in many states, and some parents
| would no doubt object. But also, it's complicated because the
| past is a different country- all of a sudden you are having to
| explain the way that the economics of the Industrial Revolution
| changed the demand for complimentary goods (1), the Curse of Ham
| (2), the way that printing presses functioned in antebellum
| American democracy (3), and the pre-Civil Service patronage
| system (4). Basically, you have to teach a college level course
| to understand how things were different then and why they
| happened. And really good teachers can simplify the details down
| to an age-appropriate level, but most teachers are, well,
| average, and so memorization is a lot easier path to follow.
|
| 1: The beginning of the industrial revolution mechanized looms
| and spinning wheels, and mechanized cleaning raw cotton. As basic
| microeconomics suggests, those improvements suddenly massively
| increased the demand for cotton. Those demand spikes transformed
| large slave owners from people who understood that slavery was
| bad and wanted to see it ended but not quite yet to people who
| thought that slavery was a positive boon for the enslaved people
| they owned. You can actually see this in their writing, in 1800
| most slave-owners think that slavery is on its way out and will
| not spread much, and in 1830 slavery is the best thing that God
| gave people anywhere.
|
| 2: The Southern Baptist Convention created itself in 1845 because
| so many didn't think that National Baptists in the General
| Missionary Convention were committed to defending slavery and the
| Curse of Ham, and they wanted to be part of a religion dedicated
| to the idea that White people should rule over Black people.
|
| 3: Before the secret ballot each party would provide its own
| ballots, pre-marked, and you just turned in the ballot of the
| party you supported. This naturally meant that each party had its
| own printing press in each town, which meant that they also had
| newspapers, pamphlets, and the like, and the press-owner was
| almost always one of the most committed political partisans in an
| area. Then when their party won they would get the contract for
| printing all documents the government needed in that area. This
| is a major driver for political polarization in the 1840's and
| 1850s.
|
| 4: Before the existence of Civil Service protections, basically
| all of the staff of the government would change over with a new
| Administration, every postmaster in every town would be appointed
| by the President and would change with every election. The fear
| that a Northern President committed to abolition would use this
| patronage- and printing contracts to printing press owners- to
| build a large segment of white southerners committed to
| abolition- who would in turn spark a slave revolt- that was why
| so many Southern states tried to leave the Union at the election
| of the first Republican President, before he was even inaugurated
| or had a chance to do anything. Because if they waited, he would
| appoint abolitionists to every town in the country, so they had
| to get ahead of him.
| alexpotato wrote:
| This entire article reminded me of reading the introduction to
| Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (it's in the 25th anniversary
| edition).
|
| He mentions reading Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and finding
| archaeology, as described by Thor, to be incredibly fascinating
| and exciting (which I agree with having read Kon-Tiki as well).
|
| Card goes on to say that when he tried ACTUAL archaeology he
| found it incredibly boring. e.g. it was mostly sitting out in the
| hot sun dusting off rocks hoping to find some bones.
|
| It's a reminder of two facts:
|
| 1. EVERY activity has exciting and boring pars
|
| 2. A good writer can make even dull and boring activities comes
| alive
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