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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#71

Post by formerkrogemp »

barry-cotter wrote: post #62
brnaftr361 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the purpose of education to make people take tests and get high scores that bureaucrats can wave around, routing their success? Or is it something a little more profound?

If they can’t do well on tests designed to measure skills the students have been failed. They have not learned skills. The US education system is quite good at teaching skills. A large majority of countries do worse. The skills that PISA tests are a prerequisite for almost any more rarefied learning that is often held up as the real purpose of education. Being able to read for meaning, extract information, combine kn…

> Trying to make people care about academic subject matter is very difficult because most people do not care and do not find it useful. Thus they forget most of what they learn in school. Insofar as education is forcing the tastes of one class on everyone else it can burn. Most people don’t care, just like most academics don’t care about sports. Forcing sports on them would also be an injustice.

Ah, yes, we should teach less science to everyone because that would be like forcing every academic to play sports. Perhaps physical and science education should be provided for every student? Education does not come at the expense of sports. If anything, the opposite is often true.

Re: I should have loved biology

#72

Post by gilleain »

localhost wrote: post #60

I have a PhD in Organic Chemistry and just last week I visited my PhD supervisor's research group. My research was on understanding the mechanism of enzyme-catalyzed decarboxylation reactions. This is very detailed physical-organic reaction kinetics to seek to understand the basis for some of the remarkable acceleration that the enzyme provides (10^6) over model systems in aqueous solution. Reflecting on this, I find…

Er, hate to nitpick but photosynthesis uses magnesium, no? In the chlorophyll, at least, although other parts have haems with iron in :)

(Also as with anything in biology, there is no doubt some weird organism that has like a cadmium or similar in its chlorophyll, I don't know)

Re: I should have loved biology

#73

Post by gilleain »

bsedlm wrote: post #56
gilleain wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great description. I would go further to describe living systems as not just distributed and so on. Also they are self-assembling and self-repairing. They are redundant - which makes them more damage resistant and 'evolvable'. Also, these complex assemblies of machines work at (mostly) room temperature and pressure. Except for extremophiles that can work down to freezing or up to boiling temperatures, or in acid or h…

I like to think that in life the code is also the runtime, unlike in computer technology where the hardware is the runtime.

I must be running on slower code, as I can't quite unpack that. So the code in life is the DNA which is also the 'runtime'?

Re: I should have loved biology

#74

Post by ryan93 »

formerkrogemp wrote: post #12
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.

Smart kids do incredibly well here. Who cares about average pisa scores. Average kids anywhere don’t contribute to science or engineering

Re: I should have loved biology

#75

Post by khaledh »

cercatrova wrote: post #65
al2o3cr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you look at everything that we've been able to figure out, things we didn't know about even a few decades ago, and you conclude "WELL I CAN'T SEE THE REST OF THE PUZZLE RIGHT NOW SO I GUESS MY IMAGINARY FRIEND DID IT" So goddamn stupid that it's just sad.

This is known as the God of the gaps argument [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

Ok let's stay scientific. What are the odds of forming a single enzyme (necessary for life) composed of a chain of roughly 200 amino acids, each is drawn from a pool of 20 possible amino acids? 20^200, right? The estimated number of atoms in the entire universe is 10^80 atoms. Can you explain what process would consistently keep winning the protein lottery with those kind of odds?

Re: I should have loved biology

#77

Post by pixel_tracing »

I guess I’m a prime example of this article. I originally majored in biology (racked up enough credits so that if I wanted to I could have a biology degree within 1 semester), then switched to chemistry and eventually graduated with a chemistry degree and a minor in computer science.

My passion for biology came when I attended Human Anatomy & Physiology. I learned about neurons and action potentials, chemical gradients and how diffusion can cascade these changes. These machinery like interactions made the cells come to “life.”

I then switched my major to chemistry to understand these interactions. My favorite class was Physical Chemistry. Both of these fields are saturated by two types: the pre-med schooler and the academic, these two types are fighting for prestige and status. I believe the schools mostly cater to these types so they can get into their relevant higher ed (masters, PhD, and medicine) schools. This ends up robbing the undergrads who are actually interested of the material (you end up with what’s described in the article).

In contrast computer science was a breath of fresh air :) I wish bio and Chem fields were like that.

Re: I should have loved biology

#78

Post by ramraj07 »

axg11 wrote: post #25

I think what is described here comes down to the fact that we don't have much (any?) _deep_ understanding of biology. The most concrete aspects of biology are observations. For example, anatomy is very well understood because it's essentially observations of structures within living organisms, as field it has been relatively stable for a long time, hence there are well-established methods for teaching anatomy. There'…

Hard disagree. We understand biology for the most part. The issue is in the exact implementations.

An analogy would be like understanding how a computer works. We know how chips are made, the physics behind them. We know how bits are stored and processing steps are executed. We also know generally how operating systems work. We have the full compiled code as assembly instructions. But we don’t have the source code of the OS. We just use crude tools to figure out The details of the OS and how it works on particular subsystems but because of the crude nature of the tools the knowledge we gain is ambiguous at times.

Re: I should have loved biology

#79

Post by ngc248 »

gilleain wrote: post #67
ip26 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through biochem, but didn’t fully understand just how gigantic & complicated proteins are until I started learning about computational protein folding. There’s several levels of abstraction just between rna/ribosomes and functional proteins… that’s one of the most shocking complexities to me, most pieces of life are rather elegant when you come to understand them but it’s hard to imagine how complex proteins e…

I worked for a professor (James Milner-White) who was interested in early protein evolution and I remember a conversation we had about the possibility that proteins could have evolved from large to small. Not sure if it was from a published paper, but the idea was that early proteins might have been large - say several hundred residues - but mostly disordered. The smaller, more ordered 'domains' would then have evolv…

wow ... it makes sense ... more of a top down approach.

Re: I should have loved biology

#80

Post by synergy20 »

Pulcinella wrote: post #27
tony_cannistra wrote: post #19

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: creat…

Money, power, control. Defund schools and create horrible working and learning conditions for those who stay. Create a problem and then say you are the only one who knows how to fix it. Prey on peoples’s fear, especially fear for their children. Sow mistrust and bigotry in their communities. Unfortunately far, far too many in power who actively and intentionally do not have the best interests of students at heart. “T…

On top of that, there is the "education first" mindset. When a culture puts education first(e.g Eastern Asia countries), it not only means they will sacrifice their limited resources for education, it also means teachers are well respected and well paid across the society, relatively speaking.

Further, when a country focuses on CRT and LGBT+-education and Equity-grading at K-12 these days, school is no longer a place to prepare kids for a meaningful career, instead it is a playground to raise future everyone-is-a human rights activist or politician, we will have to rely on skillful immigrants that actually _DO_ things to sustain the economy, this pattern won't last very long obviously.

It's not a teacher's problem, or school's funding problem, it's more of a political problem to me these days(including the recent education-unrelated law changes). I feel lost as an independent.

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