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I should have loved biology too

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Re: I should have loved biology too

#61

Post by mleroy »

I can really relate to this — in school, biology felt like dry memorization. It never clicked with me, and I wrote it off for years. If I could recommend one subtopic of biology to math and physic people, it would definitely be mycology!

It's like real-life Pokémon GO and field mycology has a "collect 'em all" vibe. You get out into nature, identify and catalog fungi — it scratches the same itch as exploring an open-world game.

Fungi are discrete, classifiable entities with tons of metadata: GPS location, substrate, time of year, morphology, spore prints, photos, microscopic features. Perfect for structured data nerds.

Unlike many branches of biology, you don’t need to go to the Amazon. You can walk into your backyard or a nearby forest and find species newly known for your country and sometimes even new for science.

Microscopes, macro lenses, chemicals, even DNA sequencing. There’s a hacker spirit in mycology.

Projects like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and FungiMap are full of real scientific contributions from everyday people. The barrier to entry is low, the impact can be surprisingly high, and the community is genuinely welcoming. Many leading contributors — even those publishing in cutting-edge scientific journals — are passionate autodidacts rather than formally trained biologists.

High intra-species variance, subtle features — perfect playground for machine learning wich is not nearly "solved" here.

Cordyceps that zombify insects. Giant underground networks that share nutrients between trees. Bioluminescent mushrooms. Many weird stories.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#62

Post by niam »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #12

I am sure the author is a fine person, but this is an incredibly self-entitled piece. A number of biologists managed to make it through these classes just fine, and are paid much less for pursuing their passion (and making the breakthroughs the author enjoys reading about while on vacation). A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology inte…

What does the author claim entitlement to? Or what real-world malign effect are you expecting from this piece that warrants the charge? I went in expecting the type of piece you describe, since I know the type, but I've failed to read it as you do except with a disqualifying squint.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#63

Post by fads_go »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #24
kleiba wrote: post #2

A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old…

Those curiculums developed by sould-dead gremiums in consensus on the minimum knowledge you goto have are a blight on western civilization. Instead of giving students the ability to discover a topic, or built something they are interested in themselves and then give them a understanding and fascination with the discoverers who have gone before them. Instead they kill the subject.. I must confess, it gives my dry old…

Forgetting that it was the anti-education forces that created the curriculums. The war on public education goes back a long time; teachers lost the freedom to teach decades ago. and it has been the same forces behind it all along.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#64

Post by AnnikaL »

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…

I am not sure biology is not a "hard science"?

Re: I should have loved biology too

#66

Post by Balgair »

Aside:

Hey, a lot of fellow biologists here! A few questions:

Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?

Where do you get your biology news from?

Where do you think the field/s are going?

Is bio harder than other STEMs?

I'm a neuroscientist/bioengineer by training and profession. I followed the path that a lot of commenters here did too, in that I came back to bio after a harder STEM career (physics). Glad to know I'm not alone in this!

Re: I should have loved biology too

#67

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #37
praptak wrote: post #25

A complex three dimensional organism self-assembling from a single cell is 100% magic, especially given how resilient it is to disruption. You can kill one of the two cells produced by the first division and still get a fully formed organism (that's one of the actual early experiments in morphogenesis theory).

Concentration gradients layered on concentration gradients layered on concentration gradients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmentation_gene

And Brownian motion all but guaranteeing everything bumps into everything else constantly!

Re: I should have loved biology too

#68

Post by [deleted] »

dawnofdusk wrote: post #40

I do quantitative biology now, although my background is in theoretical physics. Biology is fascinating, but ultimately there is a cultural divide between the scientific "language" used in biology and the scientific language of e.g., engineers, physicists (very famously described in "Can a biologist fix a radio?" https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1535-6108%2802%2900... ) I do find the author's point weird. "I…

[deleted]

Re: I should have loved biology too

#69

Post by keithwhor »

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…

I've been programming since I was eight, but truly fell in love with biology in 12th grade chemistry: the first introduction to organic chemistry and biochemistry. It was the first time I truly started grokking the application of systems-level thinking to the biological world; how do trees "know" to turn red in the autumn? How do fetuses assemble themselves from two cells?

I decided to purse a double major in biochemistry and evolutionary biology and it was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. The perspective you gain from understanding all life in terms of both networks and population dynamics of atoms, molecules, cells, tissue, organisms and populations -- and how every layer reflects the layer both underneath and above it in a fractal pattern -- is mind-expanding in a way I think you just don't and can't get designing software systems alone.

I work as a software engineer / founder now, but always reflect wistfully on my time as a biologist. I hope to get back to it some day in some way, and think what the Arc Institute team is doing is inspirational [0].

[0] https://arcinstitute.org/

Re: I should have loved biology too

#70

Post by westurner »

westurner wrote: post #7

Genetic algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm : > Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems via biologically inspired operators such as selection, crossover, and mutation. AP®/College Biology: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology

AP®/College Biology > Unit 6: Gene Expression and Regulation > Lesson 6: Mutations: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/gene-expressi...

AP®/College Biology > Unit 7: Natural selection: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/natural-selec...

Rosalind.info has free CS algorithms applied bioinformatics exercises in Python; in a tree or a list; including genetic combinatorics. https://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/

FWICS there is not a "GA with code exercise" in the AP Bio or Rosalind curricula.

YouTube has videos of simulated humanoids learning to walk with mujoco and genetic algorithms that demonstrate goal-based genetic programming with Cost / Error / Fitness / Survival functions.

Mutating source code AST is a bit different from mutating to optimize a defined optimization problem with specific parameters; though the task is basically the same: minimize error between input and output, and then XAI.

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