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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#11

Post by popcube »

agumonkey wrote: post #7
asmithmd1 wrote: post #2

the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. I would disagree, we see the object code. If we had the source, with comments, genetic engineering would be much easier

embryology made me realize that there's also an inherited context in how genes control development, IIRC the womb triggers some key structural changes in the very first days.

Biologist performed so many crazy experiment on fruit fly, development biology is very interesting for reading: what happen in each stage and all of mechanism we can understand.

Re: I should have loved biology

#12

Post by formerkrogemp »

The_suffocated wrote: post #5

I think this is not a biology-only phenomenon. I have the impression that chemistry and mathematics are also not taught well in many (if not most) high schools. Physics education in contrast seems to be in better shape.

Let's just agree that US high school education is generally abysmal.

Re: I should have loved biology

#13

Post by abrax3141 »

Seems like the author has a limited sense of wonder. Just because the teacher didn’t say “Isn’t X amazing!” He didn’t realize that it was amazing. Hint: Everything is amazing. Start looking at the world that way and you’ll do way better in everything you do. If teachers had to tell you all the amazing things in the world they wouldn’t have time to tell you how things work - which is also amazing. (I’m locked out of additional comments so have to respond to my critics by edit: I’m a molecular biologist and a computer scientist. I find the names are part of the wonder. It’s hard to describe how this can be true unless you have a wholistic sense of what wonder means. Maybe I have an overactive sense of wonder. )

Re: I should have loved biology

#14

Post by bowsamic »

One of my favourite course I took when studying physics at university was “Biological Nanomachines”. I find it absolutely bizarre that trying to gain a physical intuition for biology is not the norm. Throughout school I hated biology because it really did just feel like rote learning. This is embarrassing but I had such a poor understanding of what a cell was by the end of HS biology that I still had an image in my mind of a little conscious being that makes choices: “the cell wants to x” is language that we can’t use in a HS classroom

Re: I should have loved biology

#15

Post by Verath »

During the first part of the pandemic I watched the lectures for the Introductory Biology course [1] from MIT OpenCourseWare. I cannot recommend those highly enough!

Almost every lecture brought up and highlighted something really cool and fascinating. Like how RNA sequencing over the last couple of years has gone from expensive to almost free, and what its uses are. Or time-lapse of bacteria adapting to antibiotics. Or just the first lecture showing a video of someone sticking a syringe into a cell. There were even some labs that could be done via a normal web browser.

For me this was so much more engaging than the biology I was thought in high school, where we mostly learned things from outdated books.

[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-...

Re: I should have loved biology

#16

Post by telesilla »

"Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed. It’s all a big slop of global mutable state".

Brings me to wonder, could we ever create anything so marvellous as what biology does so effortlessly.

Re: I should have loved biology

#17

Post by go_elmo »

bognition wrote: post #8

There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner. In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stori…

Lovely life lesson shared. It also blew my mind how much complexity handling non formal, discrete systems adds. Just samoling root development takes years and endless hours of tedious, non automatable work. No wonder the field progresses orders of magnitudes slower. Also, add chaos theory, quantum mechanics, differential equations and enzyme molecules to the distributed system to make it a bit more realistic.

Re: I should have loved biology

#18

Post by asmithmd1 »

bognition wrote: post #4
asmithmd1 wrote: post #2

the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. I would disagree, we see the object code. If we had the source, with comments, genetic engineering would be much easier

It doesn't really make sense to talk about DNA as source code vs object code vs whatever. Biology doesn't have the same clean levels of abstraction that we've developed in computer science. DNA functionally operates at many levels. It long term storage, local working storage, and it is used to compute. It's a single molecule that does everything. Then you have to throw in all the secondary processes that modulate and…

Yeah, I was kind of making a joke. But to stretch the analogy... Maybe there is a common source that is cross compiled to different chemistries producing a seed object code cell.

Re: I should have loved biology

#19

Post by tony_cannistra »

It seems like the larger argument here (which I wholeheartedly agree with) is that the role of skilled teacher (whether it be human, book, YouTube, whatever) simply cannot be understated when it comes to creating that “spark” in a learner to develop and pursue their own passions.

What’s interesting to me, and what follows from this, I think, is that we therefore have a lever for creating more passionate people: create more extremely skilled teachers.

It’s obvious to me that this idea isn’t new; I just wonder why it’s so deprioritized at almost every level of education. (Not least the highest.)

Re: I should have loved biology

#20

Post by [deleted] »

abrax3141 wrote: post #13

Seems like the author has a limited sense of wonder. Just because the teacher didn’t say “Isn’t X amazing!” He didn’t realize that it was amazing. Hint: Everything is amazing. Start looking at the world that way and you’ll do way better in everything you do. If teachers had to tell you all the amazing things in the world they wouldn’t have time to tell you how things work - which is also amazing. (I’m locked out of a…

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