If you want to study biology, study evolution. Darwin. Dawkins. Gould. King. Biology only makes sense in light of evolution, and boy howdy is it beautiful.
Biology doesn't have to make sense, it just is what it is.
I should have loved biology
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Re: I should have loved biology
#12If you want to study biology, study evolution. Darwin. Dawkins. Gould. King. Biology only makes sense in light of evolution, and boy howdy is it beautiful.
Biology doesn't have to make sense, it just is what it is.
Life is a self-sustaining, self-replicating chemical reaction. It obeys the laws of physics. It must somehow preserve the information necessary for its own genesis and regenesis at every generation. It must accumulate the energy needed for its functions from its environment. Makes sense?
Re: I should have loved biology
#13This article rings so true to me. My father is a microbiologist - and now, so is my fiancée. I'm very lucky that I get to learn about genetics through osmosis now, and boy, is it ever fascinating!
I had a dining-table discussion with my dad the other day where the subject of DNA mismatch repair came up. It turns out that, in E. coli, a very simple & widely studied prokaryote, there's a mechanism called DNA mismatch repair which fixes errors which might occur during DNA copying. If an error is detected - a mismatch (e.g. a G paired with a T) - a trio of proteins (MutL, MutS, MutH) spring into action. The original template strand is already methylated - marked with an extra methyl group - at certain points in the genome (usually where there's a C followed by a G). The daughter strand, on the other hand, is usually not methylated yet. So, one of these proteins starts running down the DNA from the mismatch site, looking for a methyl group - up to 1000 base pairs away. When it finds a site with a methyl group on one side but not the other, it nicks (marks) the daughter strand, and another protein complex comes along and chops up everything from the nick to the mismatch site. The DNA polymerase then comes by and resynthesizes the whole strand.
Just three proteins are needed to drive this complex algorithm - a linear search procedure which distinguishes the mother from the daughter strand, a marking procedure which identifies the incision point, and a third to chop up the DNA and prepare it for resynthesis. What's even more bonkers is that E. coli - under stressful situations - will disable certain DNA repair mechanisms to deliberately induce more mutations. And I know that there are thousands more such pathways and complex interactions going on in cells all the time - many of which we simply haven't discovered or probed yet.
I wish that everything in biology could be explained so neatly. Unfortunately, real biology is so incredibly messy. There's just so much we don't know - and so much that we can't neatly slot into an explanation like this. But, I know now that in another life I probably would have been a biologist!
Re: I should have loved biology
#14I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
I think there are a few problems that result in this sad state of affairs, and unfortunately they are not constrained to biology (eg 'why isn't mathematics taught with wonder?'). 1. Teachers are required to do evaluations, and the way we have settled on doing evaluations is giving students giant, shitty tests. In order to pass these tests, lots of rote memorization is required. 2. Five years of being forced to teach-…
I'm somewhat skeptical of this explanation since I went to a private secondary school in Australia where these pressures did not apply, and had the exact same experience with Biology where what we were taught was to memorize taxonomies that made me abandon the subject as early as possible.
Re: I should have loved biology
#15I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
I would say it's also similar with other subjects, like history, which focus SO MUCH in memorizing dates and names, instead of actually understanding why things were happening.
Re: I should have loved biology
#16If you want to study biology, study evolution. Darwin. Dawkins. Gould. King. Biology only makes sense in light of evolution, and boy howdy is it beautiful.
Probably an annoying question... do you have an opinion on the mathetical unlikelyhood of evolution happening?
Re: I should have loved biology
#17Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
Re: I should have loved biology
#18If you want to study biology, study evolution. Darwin. Dawkins. Gould. King. Biology only makes sense in light of evolution, and boy howdy is it beautiful.
> Biology only makes sense in light of evolution
That quote is from Dobzhansky, by the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense...
Re: I should have loved biology
#19Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
Aren’t salaries determined by the market? Just to be clear, this isn’t snark. I’m curious how salaried are determined.
Re: I should have loved biology
#20Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
it will change, soon.