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I should have loved biology too

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Re: I should have loved biology too

#51

Post by SoftTalker »

intrasight wrote: post #5

My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously ri…

Same. Biology was an elective in high school and I never took it. I took Earth Science (basically introductory geology) and then went into the Chemistry/Physics track (two years of each). Never felt I missed it, last time I had any real biology education was a unit in 8th grade science and I didn't care for it then.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#52

Post by JoeDaDude »

I'm just going to recommend the biology books written by Lewis Thomas. The books are collections of essays rather than science or text books. They blew my mind and opened up a deep respect for the field of biology and gave me a deep appreciation of life in all its forms, so many of which I didn't know existed.

Look for:

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

The Youngest Science

...and a couple of thers.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#53

Post by ricardo81 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #49
ricardo81 wrote: post #47

Love biology. I appreciate purist mathematician/logicians prefer chemistry and physics and it seems to be an inside joke in the professions that biology isn't on the same level when it comes to axiomatic things. I'm a classic INTJ but left school and built biology-online.org 25ish years ago. I think it's had a couple of thousand years of reading hours. I sold it on thinking I lack the expertise the topic deserves (it…

> I'm a classic INTJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... > Despite its popularity, the MBTI has been widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][3][2] The validity (statistical validity and test validity) of the MBTI as a psychometric instrument has been the subject of much criticism. > Many of the studies that endorse MBTI are methodologically weak or unscientific.[13…

I don't mind the pigeon hole classification as it seems to describe me quite well vs the other definitions.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#54

Post by RogerL »

internet_rand0 wrote: post #44
hfgjbcgjbvg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if they taught the history of English to kids before they could read

they might just remember it all once they're adults! imagine that!? an historically informed populace??? you'd need more expensive lies and higher quality fakes... the government would be costlier to run. ideally, in the long term this would make the national currency's value in the international money market rise up. but why wait for that when one can directly manipulate money through trade fraud and covert military…

That's not the point, the point is the ordering is inverted, not that history shouldn't be learned.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#55

Post by shayway »

I've recently been delving into paleobiology, but what inspired it was very different from what's described in the post. I ingest a lot of pop educational stuff, mostly just for entertainment; but after a few years of just hearing the highlights and fun facts it became frustrating not being able to put all of it into context.

So I pushed myself a little out of my comfort zone and ordered a textbook and enrolled in a course. It made me realize how I've forgotten how to learn without it being entertainment. But, after some acclimation, I also realized that I don't really need an engaging presentation, because I really do just enjoy learning. So in a way my journey has been kinda the opposite of the author's - the 'fluff' around the information made it less appealing, not more. Though I suppose I might not have taken the leap to delve deeper into these topics in the first place if it weren't for the accessible versions.

Either way though, I think the real takeaway isn't that there's a right way to be interested in a topic - whether through stories and history or otherwise - but rather that school isn't the best environment for figuring out if something interests you, and it's worth re-visiting topics you might have written off with a fresh approach.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#56

Post by RogerL »

sdenton4 wrote: post #50
ansk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on the seventh day, God ended His work which He had done and began vibe coding the remainder of the human genome.

this should do the trick... while creatures: c = get_random_creature() if c.is_dead(): creatures.pop(c) else: creatures.add(c.mutate())

You also need selection, not just mutation (I know you are being silly, so am I)

Re: I should have loved biology too

#57

Post by philsnow »

My interest in biology isn’t driven at all by stories, history, or “adventure”, but rather by the awe-inspiring complexity and majesty of all the microbiological processes and their interplay.

Yes, it’s pop science, but last be year I read through Philipp Dettmer’s “Immune”, and the description of how the immune system continuously generates random/arbitrary sequences of nucleotides, builds the proteins that those sequences encode, and then subjects the resulting proteins to a “is this a ‘me’ protein or an ‘other’ protein?” gauntlet, the latter path of which allows the body to create antibodies for completely novel proteins... is just incredible.

I have an idle fantasy that, in the afterlife, I’ll be able to ask God questions like “so what are quarks made of?”, “why is the speed of light what it is and not any faster/slower? What would the universe have been like if the speed of light were several orders of magnitude faster/slower?”, “is there a single force that unifies all the ones that humans know about? What would the universe have been like if the weak nuclear force were just a tiny bit weaker?”, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#58

Post by [deleted] »

RogerL wrote: post #54
internet_rand0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they might just remember it all once they're adults! imagine that!? an historically informed populace??? you'd need more expensive lies and higher quality fakes... the government would be costlier to run. ideally, in the long term this would make the national currency's value in the international money market rise up. but why wait for that when one can directly manipulate money through trade fraud and covert military…

That's not the point, the point is the ordering is inverted, not that history shouldn't be learned.

[deleted]

Re: I should have loved biology too

#59

Post by ricardo81 »

shayway wrote: post #55

I've recently been delving into paleobiology, but what inspired it was very different from what's described in the post. I ingest a lot of pop educational stuff, mostly just for entertainment; but after a few years of just hearing the highlights and fun facts it became frustrating not being able to put all of it into context. So I pushed myself a little out of my comfort zone and ordered a textbook and enrolled in a…

>I think the real takeaway isn't that there's a right way to be interested in a topic

I think a different perspective can sometimes illuminate though, it's not just about the person - it's them having an epiphany that motivates them to do something, like learn more.

>pop educational stuff,

I watch a lot of that as lazy entertainment, so much of it is factually incorrect (on YouTube etc). But I know better I guess.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#60

Post by mandolingual »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #49
ricardo81 wrote: post #47

Love biology. I appreciate purist mathematician/logicians prefer chemistry and physics and it seems to be an inside joke in the professions that biology isn't on the same level when it comes to axiomatic things. I'm a classic INTJ but left school and built biology-online.org 25ish years ago. I think it's had a couple of thousand years of reading hours. I sold it on thinking I lack the expertise the topic deserves (it…

> I'm a classic INTJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... > Despite its popularity, the MBTI has been widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][3][2] The validity (statistical validity and test validity) of the MBTI as a psychometric instrument has been the subject of much criticism. > Many of the studies that endorse MBTI are methodologically weak or unscientific.[13…

Any survey (as opposed to horoscopes which aren't up to user choice) can be used to convey information about a person, even if that information is what they think about themselves. "I took a survey and I'm a Slytherin" conveys plenty, and no one feels the need to point out that that's unscientific.
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