I should have loved biology • Hacker News Board

Re: I should have loved biology

#211

Post by VoodooJuJu » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #41

After 15 years in tech and a life-changing psychedelic trip, I decided to self-learn genetic engineering and share it with the world[1][2] while I look for a meaningful biotech venture to found. What you can do today from your kitchen or home lab is remarkable. For instance, I taught myself PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and recently published my first genetic sequence at GenBank from fungi that I cultured, extracte…

I just want to point out that there is no such thing as genetic engineering. This isn't a nitpick, but an important point that investors and laymen alike can benefit from understanding, particularly in regard to avoid being deceived by exuberant claims of progress by so-called "genetic engineering" startups. The top comment [1] from another HN thread sums it up pretty well. Here's an important excerpt:

...engineering is a tradition built on minimizing variation, while biology is a science founded on understanding a built-in mechanism for generating variation. "Life finds a way"....evolution is always driving against the engineered design

An engineer can design a system that creates 1000 screws with minimal variation. He understands all the effects of the different steel chemical makeups, he understands how to change the pitch and length to his specifications; he understands how to achieve each and every property of that screw, and once created, the screw will not act against its makeup.

A "genetic engineer" is presented with a million million variables. In altering a variable, he may observe some change – maybe some bioluminescence in fungus, some hairlessness in a mouse. But how much also changed that he cannot possibly observe? What other variables were dependent on the altered variable? As it is life, ever in flux, how much more will it change, itself, and its environment?

"Genetic engineering" should rather be called "unprecedented biological experimentation". This is important because "engineering" implies certainty, replicability. Altering some gene isn't engineering. It isn't minimizing variation in a system – it is introducing even more variation into that system. "Genetic engineering" certainly sounds cool and promising. But before you buy into a startup that employs "genetic engineering", don't be so certain; biology is much harder, much more complex, than screws.

[1] Or: Biology is really hard... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21396311

Re: I should have loved biology

#212

Post by VonBlue » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

When I was in my AP Calc class in high school, the teacher began by explaining what a derivative was. He drew a picture with a curve, drew a line across two points on that curve, and explained that the derivative is the slope of that line as the two points get closer and closer together. We knew how to calculate a slope, so it was easy to build on that knowledge and take it further. It’s been 20 years and I can still do this, after having seen it that one time. I don’t know if this way of teaching derivatives is unique, but it felt like a far cry from memorization, even back then. It was effective because it was visual, because it explained something intuitively, and because it added a small piece of information to an existing foundation of knowledge.

Incidentally, the only things I remember from biology are pictures, or the demonstration that a teacher made when someone “stretched” her “intestines” across the room.

Re: I should have loved biology

#213

Post by codecaveman » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

"Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices" - this one clicked for me. I mean why this is not the way the education goes? I think its not optimal strategy just to force people memorize random facts without seeing big picture. Why go suboptimal route?

Re: I should have loved biology

#214

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

ufo wrote: post #190

TeMPOraL wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I suspect the obsession of education around the world with biological classification dates to the period where most people lived in the country, not in urban spaces. Us city kids, we didn't get to spend so much time in the woods, to see so many different kinds of plants and animals - and the ones we did, we've already known by their laymen names. Tangential: it would be helpful if schools explained to ki…

There is one important part of taxonomy that is not arbitrary, however. The classification should be hierarchical, reflecting the evolution of the tree of life.

That's absolutely arbitrary too. The tree of life is a lie.

...or at least a very simplified model that breaks down as you move towards simpler and simpler forms of life. That's because horizontal gene transfer is a thing, and when you go all the way back to prokaryotes, there's so much of it going on that any "tree of life" is a statistical picture that's valid only for a select genetic marker that's used to trace dependencies. Pick a different marker, you'll get an entirely different prokaryotic tree of life.

Life ultimately forms a graph

Re: I should have loved biology

#215

Post by Siira » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:29 PM UTC

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…

> you're being kept out of the house so that both your parents can go back to jobs they don't like.

I was left home alone from, like, 4 years old? I definitely preferred that to going to school.

Re: I should have loved biology

#216

Post by k__ » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

In school I was good at physics and chemistry, but bad at biology and history.

I have the feeling it being "a lifeless recitation of names" was the reason, yes.

Re: I should have loved biology

#217

Post by Siira » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

throwaway316943 wrote: post #202

kls wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed 100%, I have a troubled kid in school right now, who is off the charts smart but the only thing he will apply himself to is Advanced Math, Auto Shop and his Culinary program. If it's not hands on or mechanical he just has no interest in rote memorization. School needs to fundamentally change especially for adolescent males, it just stacks the decks against the high functioning learn by doing types. I often won…

It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way. Reading, writing, speaking, logic, geometry, mathematics, and programming along with a whirlwind tour of all the good and bad ideas throughout history then pack it up. Instead we have a public babysitting service that pretends to add…

I suspect teachers are the bottleneck. They hardly have any useful skills (except keeping children in line), so they can only teach memorization which is easy to teach/grade.

Re: I should have loved biology

#218

Post by draw_down » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #156

an_opabinia wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY. Biology is pretty notorious for most stuff being arbitrary. There is no model. People who say there's a model, they're talking about something else - sometimes, a literal Platonic ideal of biology, that makes for an appealing pop science course, but not knowledge that like, helps you design experiments or better use drugs or whatever. From the article: > It was…

> Programming computers and being good at math does not prepare you at all for understanding this stuff! This is something that lots of people, and especially people in the tech industry, keep forgetting. They go ''well i can calculate partial differential equations, did a course on topology ánd created an api based on open data, how hard can this 'biology' actually be???'' and then it turns out that yes, it is hard.

This isn’t at all like my computer science classes. Biology education must be off the rails.

Re: I should have loved biology

#219

Post by throwaway316943 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #189

brundolf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how nearly every STEM class I've ever taken has been (and really, things like history too). I retained a passing interest in math despite my classes. I was lucky to develop a foundational interest in programming before classes had the chance to ruin it. It's simply par for the course of our education system, at least in the United States. I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they we…

> I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they were turned off by their first exposure to a subject. On the positive side, we dont need more scientists. There are too many people trying to be scientists leading to pretty shitty working conditions for PhDs and post docs.

That is being caused by exactly the same nonsense that has been happening in high schools. You have to get a high school degree. Why? No one knows. Everyone has a high school degree so you have to get a college degree. Everyone has a college degree so you need to have a masters degree. On and on until the whole thing is a diploma mill and society collapses under the sheer weight of puffed up do nothings grubbing at the controls.

Re: I should have loved biology

#220

Post by ashtonbaker » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

jplatzek wrote: post #131

hnmm23 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean i want to learn about everything before that too, like history, links, diagnoses - to be sure, as well as testing/tracking metrics and the likes, also reading is the easy part, but what about understanding? when im running into medical terms/and other things im not familiar with or equipped to understand, where do you go? bc i find myself ending down different rabbit holes and my productivty diminishes and my…

Biologist here. I would start with a textbook called Janeways Immunobiology. It is the textbook that all of us have used to learn immunology and should be accessible for anyone with a high-school understanding of biology. The book already has many explanations of autoimmune diseases, so it should be everything you need.

Seconding this. I would also add that Biochemistry was really the class that first gave me the "I should have loved biology" feeling, so whatever the equivalent Biochem textbook is might be interesting as well.