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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#171

Post by ricardo81 »

When I first got into web building I created biology-online.org, about 21 years ago (it originated on some free hosting space). Managed to get it ranking #1 for "biology" and a number of relevant terms, mainly because an eminent Harvard page was linking to it.

At that time I could put ads on the page to effectively make it a full time job developing the site, which I did. It was massively rewarding knowing that 5000 people a day were reading something I wrote. I'd like to think someone managed to get their degree/job based on stuff they learned on there.

My personal belief is that biodiversity and preserving it should be one of our top priorities this century, nature has inspired a lot of our ideas and there's going to be many more. For all our advancements, we're just part of a larger tapestry. Great subject.

Re: I should have loved biology

#172

Post by svara »

madrox wrote: post #142

Of course Feynman had something to say about this: "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." I knew this intuitively at a very young age, wh…

He's making an interesting point that's largely true, but not the whole truth. It's the typical physicist arrogance towards biology. ;)

For example, evolution through natural selection would not have been understood if Darwin and Wallace hadn't put great effort into cataloguing and classifying species. You might say they obviously were thinking about mechanisms at the same time, but the cataloguing was the precondition to their later insights. They built on the foundations set by, amongst others, Linnaeus, who's main contribution to the field was a classification of living things.

Re: I should have loved biology

#173

Post by MauranKilom »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #98

This isn't just biology, it's school . The only time you're taught processes and methods, it's when they're busywork, and you're wasting a year memorising how to do something nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators. What you're being taught is to squash your individuality, demand and follow orders, and to seek your worth only in the approval of your betters. But most of all, you're being kept o…

Probably not the same education system, but there are many things I no longer do explicitly that are nevertheless important for understanding the concept.

Off the top of my head, for just mathematics:

- Long division

- Calculate limits

- Curve sketching

These aren't things I do by hand any more. But if I hadn't learned how to do them, I wouldn't be able to apply them to more advanced problems.

From my extremely limited exposure to US education methods, I would concur that some algorithms are practiced in an excessive manner. But that does not mean that they are useless, even if computers can help you often enough.

Maybe you can name a thing or two that you consider "busywork [that] nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators"?

(I will note though that biology courses always stood out to me in exactly the way that is lamented in this thread - almost entirely memorizing arbitrary things.)

Re: I should have loved biology

#174

Post by TeMPOraL »

friendlybus wrote: post #113
adrianN wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah so you mean the mathematical unlikeliness that evolution brought forth the complexity we see today, not that evolution happens at all. That makes more sense. I think it's hard to come up with solid arguments either way, because we only have a poor understanding of genetics and hence we can only give very rough estimates on the amount of complexity needed, and how much can be introduced in a given unit of time. I'm…

No, I do mean a doubt in evolution over all. The complexity argument has problems because in the small error bars of dna replication, it's so easy to introduce a sequence that actively hurts the animal, or is useless. Producing a whole new limb or whatever is way more complicated that we'd like it to be. The discussion overall is part of a larger move by the intellectual/theological groups to bring back language (and…

> Producing a whole new limb or whatever is way more complicated that we'd like it to be.

It isn't that much more complicated, though. Because as it turns out, you don't always have to code for that limb from scratch. You just have to flip a switch.

The key phrase here is "evolutionary developmental biology". We've learned that complex life has a lot of Lego-life quality - a lot of DNA codes for signals that enable or disable creation of whole organs at various locations, stages and cadences.

A TL;DR in four minutes by A Capella Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk.

A nice example that video gives is that snakes have DNA coding for legs, it's just turned off. It can be turned on, and a snake will grow legs.

Re: I should have loved biology

#175

Post by [deleted] »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #98

This isn't just biology, it's school . The only time you're taught processes and methods, it's when they're busywork, and you're wasting a year memorising how to do something nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators. What you're being taught is to squash your individuality, demand and follow orders, and to seek your worth only in the approval of your betters. But most of all, you're being kept o…

[deleted]

Re: I should have loved biology

#176

Post by faichai »

One of the simple things that my secondary school biology failed to explain was enzymes. They were presented as these mythical entities that magically reduce the energy requirements of certain reactions, using a clumsy key/lock metaphor that didn’t really explain anything.

It was much later in my 30s after buying a book on cellular biology that I learnt that enzymes work by using electro-static forces to bend target molecules to increase their probability of breaking at lower energies. It’s this pattern of +ve and -ve charges on the enzyme that matches the target molecule and provides the basis of the key/lock metaphor.

This realisation was so beautiful, astonishing and illuminating that I can’t for the life of me understand why it was left out, particularly as we were learning about the physics and chemistry of the related concepts anyway.

Re: I should have loved biology

#178

Post by kls »

The author pretty much summed up the epiphany I had, which was pretty much "Holy crap, that is a self contained biological programming language" It got a lot more interesting for me when I had that aha moment.

Re: I should have loved biology

#179

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

nneonneo wrote: post #13

This 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 r…

Next step, start thinking about these systems as tools to be used in making technology. You've stumbled upon a very important thing here. Look up IDT gBlocks. Solid-phase nucleotide synthesis is only 99.9% efficient. This means when you make a 500 nucleotide long synthetic DNA strand, every other one will have an error. How do you clean-out the wrong ones? Well, you make the complementary strand, anneal them together, and pass them through a column with immobilized MutS. Guess what happens? The dsDNA with errors get bound by the enzyme and the perfect duplexes just flow right through. So out the other end is cleaner DNA.

This is how biotechnology works.

Re: I should have loved biology

#180

Post by xwdv »

Many of the experiments I would love to do in biology are probably unethical, perhaps it is better that I went into tech, where a lack of ethics doesn’t necessarily equate to direct harm to a living thing.
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