I don't know what I find more repellent about this article: the author's condescending insistence that his schoolteachers should have been better salesmen, the exhortation that biology is complex in one breath while denigrating scientists for constructing a descriptive vocabulary in the next, or (possibly worst of all) the continued erasure of Rosalind Franklin, topped off by a strong recommendation for a book on the matter whose author circled back to tack on an infamously dismissive "exoneration" of Watson and Crick.
I should have loved biology
121–130 of 306 posts
Re: I should have loved biology
#122Beside the links provided in the article, does anyone have any other articles, books, courses, lectures, youtubers, key people, papers, journals, interesting links/talks/podcasts/quotes they'd like to share to help others on their journy to understand biology better? Thank you!
I would recommend the edX Introduction to Biology course [0].
It is a simplified version of the introductory biology course at MIT, that doesn't _focus_ on naming/defining things in biology. Instead, it uses the lenses of genetics and biochemistry to explore how the core machinery of life works, and how we got to our current understanding. That said, there is some amount of memorization that is unavoidable.
[0] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
Re: I should have loved biology
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah so you mean the mathematical unlikeliness that evolution brought forth the complexity we see today, not that evolution happens at all. That makes more sense. I think it's hard to come up with solid arguments either way, because we only have a poor understanding of genetics and hence we can only give very rough estimates on the amount of complexity needed, and how much can be introduced in a given unit of time. I'm…
No, I do mean a doubt in evolution over all. The complexity argument has problems because in the small error bars of dna replication, it's so easy to introduce a sequence that actively hurts the animal, or is useless. Producing a whole new limb or whatever is way more complicated that we'd like it to be. The discussion overall is part of a larger move by the intellectual/theological groups to bring back language (and…
That most mutations are useless is a feature, not a bug. Changes that neither hurt nor benefit are a major stepping stone to adaptions. You can have hair that looks more and more like feathers without hurting its performance as an insulator. You can have a spine with a few more or a couple fewer vertebrae without having a use for a tail or super flexibility. Phenotypic diversity is how populations adapt.
Re: I should have loved biology
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go to scholar.google.com, search "autoimmune disease treatment", filter by last five years, use sci-hub to read the paper. Repeat until you learn enough to find your next step forward.
i mean i want to learn about everything before that too, like history, links, diagnoses - to be sure, as well as testing/tracking metrics and the likes, also reading is the easy part, but what about understanding? when im running into medical terms/and other things im not familiar with or equipped to understand, where do you go? bc i find myself ending down different rabbit holes and my productivty diminishes and my…
It can take me weeks if not months to fully comprehend a new paper. One paper will require that I look up a lot of new terms, watch a lot of videos explaining the terms and repeating the process for the cited references. It sounds like you need more structure so I would suggest you take notes, set goals, organize your materials and schedule time for focusing on particular topics, tasks or techniques.
Re: I should have loved biology
#125> Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was.
Why is that crazy? I had years when I liked biology and years when I did not liked it, but imo, the wish for mystification does not lead to knowledge. Well done any topic can be interesting, badly done it will be boring.
But, that wish to have everything framed in mystique is something I cant comprehend or really stand by. Like, I did not wanted to be manipulated that way as a kid and teachers who overdone it came across as untrustworthy or pathetic.
Re: I should have loved biology
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't mean to criticize. I've tripped on mushrooms, I get it. It's just ... 7g, holy crap :)
It’s hard to quantify how strong based purely on dose size, but yeah 7g is double what I would consider a strong dose. I did that amount once in high school and I didn’t touch them again for several years haha.
People have wildly different reactions, some of my friends can take 14g+ and be fine, others are barely able to talk after 2g. Plus potency varies wildly between crops and strains.
Re: I should have loved biology
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts. They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance. It is the natural gift of being able to identify the key features of the forest despite the preponderance of obfuscating trunks and branches. It is the gift of seeing some sort of order behind ci…
my observations which I think broadly agrees. -Math/CS: inherently better at abstracting & are "proof" centric. -Life Sciences: inherently better at observing then reasoning and are "argument" centric. Coming from the CS side this is not a marriage made in heaven as opinions don't matter by design.
As a Math/CS graduate (I focused on mathy aspects of CS): math cs people struggle at working with real world abstractions. They abstract and simplify, but then tend to convince themselves that simplified model and its conclusions are totally all there is to reality.
And if they accept that model is not super perfect, they completely reject model - to find another simplified model that they convince themselves if flawless.
They struggle with the "this is model with such and flaws we need to keep in mind while interpreting".
Re: I should have loved biology
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go to scholar.google.com, search "autoimmune disease treatment", filter by last five years, use sci-hub to read the paper. Repeat until you learn enough to find your next step forward.
i mean i want to learn about everything before that too, like history, links, diagnoses - to be sure, as well as testing/tracking metrics and the likes, also reading is the easy part, but what about understanding? when im running into medical terms/and other things im not familiar with or equipped to understand, where do you go? bc i find myself ending down different rabbit holes and my productivty diminishes and my…
University textbooks. They are written with the goal of building that foundational knowledge.
Scientific papers are great, but they assume a lot of pre-existing knowledge, whereas a textbook is designed to expose you to the concepts without any prior assumptions.
Re: I should have loved biology
#129Biology was my first love; But I ended as Computer hacker :)
Re: I should have loved biology
#130I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
In school it seemed the same way to me, it was very superficial and my high school teacher was unable to anwer my "why" questions.
At university it was very different, I finally got my questions answered. Part of that was certainly that it was much more in-depth, but the quality of the teaching and also the textbooks was just much higher. For me there were also maybe a few core things I didn't understand in school that are really crucial to put everything into context. The biggest one maybe being a tiny bit of thermodynamics and understanding what enzymes actually do and what they can't do.
I do suspect that a major problem is trying to cover too much material, which makes the courses too superficial and makes it impossible to actually explain how stuff works, what problems are solved by specific biological systems and why they probably work the way they do.