I should have loved biology • Hacker News Board

Re: I should have loved biology

#101

Post by brnaftr361 » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

formerkrogemp wrote: post #71

barry-cotter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

Yeah, actually. This is projection but:

People are naturally curious. Shuffling them into the confines of some narrow and often purposeless maze fucks that up. That's a considerable portion of TFA, the institutional curricula stunted their interest in biology.

My curiosity was drugs, drugs lead me to biology, lead me to chemistry, physics - but it was independent study. Political challenges from my partner got me interested in history and anthropology, but it was all independently structured.

I think if the institution gave all these little knobheads enough autonomy to actually derive, from themselves, some real interest, they would ultimately end up intersecting with all the sciences, it's actually inevitable. Instead they're just forcefed a bunch of information they don't have a relationship with.

Sports is biology and mechanics is molecular biology and kinesiology and so on. It doesn't matter where you start, you track into that shit. Passion the latitude it lends to the people possessed by it is what allows us to push deeper and deeper. Not stunting intellectual growth by conditioning people into a state of repulsion at the premise of learning.

Re: I should have loved biology

#102

Post by oldsecondhand » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

Pulcinella wrote: post #36

ta988 wrote: post #9

There are additional factors that make molecules in cells not subject to pure diffusion rules. Charge depending on the pH of the area ( even if in such a crowded space it is likely not really a pH anymore), and molecular interactions. Proteins (and virtually any other molecules but proteins and to a lesser extent nucleic acids are particularly good at that) can stick or be repulsed by their overall composition (exter…

Yeah see the art of David Goodsell. I believe he said the concentrations of the various biomolecules are roughly accurate based on calculations he does before starting painting. Cells are incredibly crowded. The human body being 60-70% water is usually presented in pop-sci as “wow we are mostly water!” but that’s actually very concentrated for chemical reactions. You usually don’t perform reactions that concentrated…

> It’s a wonder all this stuff doesn’t just gunk up

It does gunk up but it takes a few decades.

Re: I should have loved biology

#103

Post by fastaguy88 » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

I think this essay applies to most of the sciences (perhaps excluding physics), in part because it is really hard to test whether a student was amazed by a particular insight, and much easier to test facts. Biology is amazing. Every cell has the same DNA, and in humans, that DNA is several meters long. In a cell that is 25-ish microns in diameter! But chemistry is amazing too - how do all those air molecules become uniformly distributed in a volume? How did Avagadro figure out that number?

The problem with teaching science is that the amazing stuff that is accessible to a high-school student was figured out 100 - 400 years ago, and we’ve learned a lot since. And for biology and chemistry, there are all those details. (I guess math might be worse, since we teach things that have been understood for thousands of years, but at least the old stuff is obviously useful.)

I think it’s really hard to teach and test on the exciting stuff. What’s exciting to me may be “who cares” to the next person. But it’s great when it works.

Re: I should have loved biology

#104

Post by dataflow » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

thanatos519 wrote: post #91

bonniemuffin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall the same "everything coming together" feeling, but for me it didn't happen until Applied Biochemistry in grad school. I recall the final exam being only a single question, with a bunch of blank lined pages to write your answer, and the question was something like "You just ate a ham sandwich. What happens to it?" A good answer needed to include everything down to the molecular/chemical level and tie it toget…

I love it! Much like the "I type a URL into my browser and press enter. What happens?" tech interview question.

Except it seems like a way harder question!

Re: I should have loved biology

#105

Post by popcube » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:15 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #24

Low effort comment, but, wow. This article is a super thorough version of the shower thought that, biology is a lot cooler once you reframe it as the study of naturally occurring self-replicators.

this is all the selfish gene want to talk about

Re: I should have loved biology

#106

Post by ampdepolymerase » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #82

Dynamic systems theory is very powerful organizing principle / concept that makes biology make a lot more sense. It also helps to constantly remind yourself that academic science divisions - in particular physics, chemistry, and biology - are fairly arbitrary and nature doesn't care much about them, and this becomes very clear from a system-based view. Without a grasp of basic physical concepts like conservation of m…

Voit looks gimmicky. Uri Alon's treatment (An Introduction to Systems Biology) is much better.

Re: I should have loved biology

#107

Post by pgrepds » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

imaltont wrote: post #99

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…

I feel the same way about just math in general, and all the sciences that derive a lot of their knowledge and systems from it. You start learning math as just high level/abstracted away things where you just have to memorize that this thing does that and in this case do this instead, especially derivation I remember they showed us the formula with dy/dx, but they never showed us any proofs of why or how that lead to…

I had the opposite experience. My teacher took extra care to explain to us why and how certain things worked in math. The reason I loved math so much, and still do, is because I never had to memorize anything. I just had to understand how it worked. In biology, however, it was very different. I had to memorize facts instead of understanding them.

Re: I should have loved biology

#108

Post by lr4444lr » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

This is the natural result of state standardized education. It has its pros though, like getting a functionally literate and numerate workforce of average people when done decently. It will rarely serve people of the author's level of intelligence. That's one of the cons.

Re: I should have loved biology

#109

Post by Balgair » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

bonniemuffin wrote: post #88

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…

I recall the same "everything coming together" feeling, but for me it didn't happen until Applied Biochemistry in grad school. I recall the final exam being only a single question, with a bunch of blank lined pages to write your answer, and the question was something like "You just ate a ham sandwich. What happens to it?" A good answer needed to include everything down to the molecular/chemical level and tie it toget…

The two questions I really remember from my neuroscience grad program are:

"You discover a mouse that can sense radiation. How does it do it?"

"You are riding a bicycle. Explain."

We had to do it in 2 pages, NSF grant rules on spacing and margins.

Re: I should have loved biology

#110

Post by Balgair » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #78

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…

Having done a lot of biology, I'd disagree that we understand biology.

My background is neuro, so take that into account. But in neuro, we've nearly no idea about the larger parts of how it all works. Sure, yeah, electrically active neurons, we have that down. But the non electrically active parts? I mean, we're still debating about how much of the brain is glia. Like, we can't even agree on how to count. Don't get me started on synapses.