I should have loved biology too
As a matter of fact, I gave up after just one year. It wasn't any fun for anyone, not for the students, not for me.
The "mistake" happens so often, partially because "segway" is a much more straightforward spelling if one has only heard the word said aloud, that I think it will eventually become the actual way it is spelled!
That's precisely how language changes over time. Language is not a strict set of rules. It's based on understanding and consensus, so sometimes things that are "wrong" do end up being accepted.
I suggest this as a great introduction into what languages are and how they evolve over time https://www.amazon.com/Language-Families-of-World-audiobook/...
How does this mistake happen so often? Can you explain people's thought process a bit? Is it just: "Something something 'seg...' ... ah I know, I will simply use another random word that starts with the same 3 letters and doesn't make sense in this phrase!"?
Also this is the first time I see it.
I am sure people will make the mistake, as they sometimes do today. But it is a mistake, and will likely be recognised as one.
It is likely that the language gets more cemented by automatic spelling and grammatical correction, including using AI. For example, there are a number of grammatical and spelling changes that have been cemented by American spelling/grammar checking programmes ie. by MS Word.
The idea that mistakes generally get accepted as correct is simply untrue, which is what you are implying.
I did not imply that at all. I said sometimes, so it's not that absurd that it could happen. It does happen though, and a quick google search will give you pages of examples.
With machines looking over our shoulders now and so much of language being typed instead of handwritten, odds are such drift might actually decrease in English... On the other hand, the introduction of AI leaves an interesting avenue for people to begin acting as if something is common usage and have the AI begin confirming that as common if it consumes that action. And then, of course, there's the effect of the machine itself... Most of us have a way to type "résumé", but we don't bother because the machine makes it too much work to do so, So the alternate spelling without accent, which was called out in my high school days as wrong, has fallen into common usage in a generation of people having to submit their resumes online (example: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a510363).
I suggest you yourself take a second and explore why you think being smarmy on the internet is a way of getting people to agree with you.
have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic)
You must understand these things at least conceptually if you want to really understand how to write efficient programs. Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g. register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.
I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.
Developed countries really need a come to Jesus moment, because the disdain for everything that made them great places is unbelievable. People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.
But systems can rot from within too, or just decay naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell apart.
People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.
"It is easier to destroy than to create" doesn't tell you when something should be torn down.
You can have a house that provided shelter for your family for generations, but if it's water damaged, the floors are rotting and it's full of toxic mold, the person who shows up with a bulldozer isn't necessarily wrong.
I also think this is where things like intergenerational math-phobia come from: parents who don't grasp core concepts and are scared off, and can't help their own children, creating an ongoing cycle.
I also think this is where things like intergenerational math phobia come from: (elementary) teachers who don't grasp core concepts, are scared off, and can't help their own students, creating an ongoing cycle.
I hope you appreciate my addition of the other common path of math phobia.
It’s probably why, when I got to university and tackled subjects like probability theory, discrete math, and theoretical CS, I did extremely well — they weren’t reliant on the shaky algebra and trig foundation I had from school. Once the focus shifted to logic and conceptual thinking, without the baggage of poorly taught fundamentals, everything clicked
The answer is it's magic and no one cares, now let's go build some games
At school I thought "computer science" meant "programming" - which it doesn't. So well done for recognizing this before wasting your much time. (Seriously, not sarcastic.) programming can easily be learned outside college.
To other general readers here though I'll say that understanding the science can be really helpful over a career. It's not terribly applicable in getting that first job, but as you progress more and more of those theoretical fundamentals come into play.
Ultimately there are a small fraction of people who need to understand how it all works, all the way down, because those people build the things that programmers use to build everything else.
There are theoretical parts of computer science, but it is fundamentally a practical subject. All of it is in service to programming. Type systems are about typing programs. Algorithms are implemented using programs. Data structures are for use in programs.
The very worst computer science lecturers are those that forget it is a practical subject and try to teach it like abstract mathematics, because they believe (whether they realise they believe it or not) that it is more prestigious to teach abstract concepts than practical concrete things.
It is the same in mathematics, where unfortunately there has developed a tradition since Bourbaki of trying to teach abstract notions as fundamental while concrete problem solving is left to the engineers. The result is that many engineers are much stronger mathematicians than many mathematically-trained students, and those students have to relearn the practical foundations of the subject before they can make progress at the graduate level. If they don't, they get stuck doing what looks like maths, but is actually just abstract roleplaying.
This was a point repeatedly driven home in my undergraduate curriculum, and in fact, they made a point of having multiple classes where a computer was completely uninvolved.
My favourite classes were those where we didn't just get taught facts and theorems but we also got taught a bit about who proved the theorem for the first time, who discovered this fact, what this algorithm was first used for, etc. So much easier to remember too.
This is one of the best things about studying law: the very nature of it makes it impossible to teach it without the historical context.
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 ploys?
I've received great intellectual satisfaction from various well-taught subjects. I would rather chop off a finger than lose them. So curriculum committees that make subjects boring are doing something worse than chopping off millions of children's fingers.
I really wish that teaching of history will get better for current and future kids.
If you're an engineer and early in your career and feel there's something missing from your intellectual space, I encourage you to go back and get a graduate degree in something totally different. Humans live a very long time so don't feel like you're wasting time.
I would love to do something like this but simply cannot afford it.
Work for a company that will pay for it.
I encourage people to look into it, it's a benefit a lot of people have but don't use and it's leaving money on the table.
1. Masters degree only, they won't pay for anyone to get a bachelor's or associates
2. Must maintain a B average or better
3. Cannot take any time off, it has to be entirely on nights and weekends
4. Reimbursement after the fact, so you're taking on the initial financial risk up front.
However, to use it there are constraints: 1. The topic should be related to technologies used by company. Cannot get a Google cloud certification as they are using aws. 2. To get it you need approval by line manager, hr, and director of the office. 3. If it is more than €250 you need to sign up loyalty agreement for a year. Meaning if you will return some amount of you quit.
With all that strings attached it is just a marketing bullshit to attract new hires.
There are tons of very well-done professional level video courses on Youtube.
There are more organized courses that only ask you for money for the "extras", like some tests and a certificate, but the main parts, texts and videos, are free.
You could start with a really good teaching professor (Eric Lander, MIT) and his course: https://www.edx.org/learn/biology/massachusetts-institute-of... (the "Audit" track is free, ignore the prices; also ignore the "expires" - this course restarts every few months and has been available in new versions for many years now)
It's very engaging!
There's similar courses for everything in the life sciences, there on edX, on Youtube, many other places.
I feel the true Internet is soooo underutilized by most people! Forget news sites, opinion blogs, or social media. Knowledge is there for the taking, free. Only the organized stuff, where you end up with a certificate costs money, but they usually still provide the actual content for free.
Whether or not broad support for training scientists holds up during and after the current administration remains to be seen.
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].
For small example, there was a Princeton(?) coffee-table book which used "everyday" examples to illustrate cell/embryonic organizational techniques - like birds equally spacing themselves along a wire. Or compartmentalization, as a cross-cutting theme from molecules to ecosystems.
I've an odd hobby interest in exploring what science education content might look like, if incentives were vastly different, and massive collaborative domain expertise was allocated to crafting insightful powerful rough-quantitative richly-interwoven tapestry.
I loathed biology as taught prior to that. Once I got a molecular biology course, I thought biology was amazing and wondered "Why the hell did we teach all that other crap?"
Well, that was because the tools we had for biology sucked prior to PCR. My problem was that I recognized that even as a child.
A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology interesting" may have had less impact, though.
Computer scientists and programmers are very intelligent people who often have grossly unrealistic projections of their competency in other fields, and this is a fine example of the phenomenon.
Secondly, fields really do need cross-discipline collaboration. Finding passionate CS people is fantastic because they bring a different skill set. I have often found that when we get diverse experts together, we can have everyone do the "easy part" and get results which would be otherwise unobtainable.
Yes, some people have 'engineers disease' and fail to appreciate the depth of knowledge and skills of folks who have spent their life in another domain... But the author doesn't seem to be one of these. Many of their favorite stories appreciate the combination of insight and hard work in the history of the field.
It does, indeed, suck that people working in biology get paid less than computer engineers. Blame capitalism...
I feel bad for them, but I can assure you, as someone who did the research in the exact same field, they're curing nothing and are more likely to make cures slower by sucking away funding from more pertinent projects.
Also relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1831/
Do you have any advice for how to not be that kind of problem? For now I'm just focusing on my coursework, but at some point I'll be biologist-enough to help out with research. How do I approach it without being that guy?
Practically what this means is that you should decide what you truly want to change (not necessarily what you can change with your current expertise) and pursue it across whatever fields necessary. If it's curing a disease, you have to decide what is the most important thing that's stopping us from curing that disease and pursue that exact topic. More often than not it's not anything software related. You have to grab a pipette at some point and guillotine a few mice at another lol.
I offered to put it on github for him, so that at least he didn't have to be the sole caretaker for this endangered bit of software, but he was afraid of running afoul of the original author's rights, so endangered it will stay.
This was maybe an unlikely occurrence, falling neatly in the not part of your:
More often than not it's not anything software related
But it makes me think that there is still some juice left to squeeze out there. I mean, I'm having a good time with my one-class-per-semester, I'd just prefer to not have to do it for another decade before I'm enough of a biologist to get my hands dirty.
The post is simply about what you call enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology — should biology in school be only for those who have that ability? Even if being a professional biologist requires those attributes, shouldn't the teaching of the science of life—which is full of wonder—have a bit of something for everyone else too? Even people who don't become biologists ought to love biology, surely?
That's what the post (like the earlier one by Somers) is about; it's not about “I could have become a biologist” (as you seem to be implying). You can call it pop biology, but it's missing from school where “astonishing facts were presented without astonishment”. I see nothing self-entitled about this.
It's the same in mathematics, say: even if being a professional mathematician requires (say) thinking long and hard and being willing to struggle with difficult problems, manipulating things in one's head, etc — surely there is value in exposing more students to pop mathematics / beautiful results (enjoying which is very different from actually doing mathematics, sure), so that more people could love mathematics recreationally, whether or not they become professional ones?
The other top-level thread that talks about how this happens in CS education too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43764315) seems to get the point of the post: it's the equivalent of Lockhart's A Mathematician’s Lament (https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician'... ).
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 ranked well on Google for lots of biological terms)
I love the lack of agency about biology/evolution, it found a way to create ourselves as well as the huge tree of life around us purely through biological/ecological pressures. And here we are. We owe a lot to how biology has expressed things over the past 4 billion years and will likely find out a whole lot more.
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] A 1996 review by Gardner and Martinko concluded: "It is clear that efforts to detect simplistic linkages between type preferences and managerial effectiveness have been disappointing. Indeed, given the mixed quality of research and the inconsistent findings, no definitive conclusion regarding these relationships can be drawn."[13][72]
The test has been likened to horoscopes, as both rely on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.[10][73] MBTI is not recommended in counseling.[74]
There’s a funny irony that you’re using a rhetorical device, as opposed to a rigorous scientific methodology, to try and navigate that criticism.
To be proficient in biology you need to have "Extra" skills: extra ability to work with ambiguity,ability to memorize enormous amounts of descriptive information, and highly abstract representations. Digital biology often loses many aspects of biological reality, and then fails to make useful predictions.
Over the years, I've come to realize I know less and less about biology- that I greatly underestimated the complexity and subtlety of biological processes, and have come to admit that my own intelligence is too limited to work on some problems that I originally thought would be "easy engineering problems".
A great example of the rabbit hole that is modern biology is summed up here: what is the nature of junk DNA? To what extents are digital readouts like ENCODE representative of true biology, rather than just measuring noise? What is the nature of gene and protein evolution?
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)... (note that while I disagree strongly with Eddy in many ways, I've come to recognize that I simply don't understand the modern view of evolution outside the perspective of molecular biology (IE, what geneticists like Eddy think).
Also, recently, Demis Hassabis postulated that if he is successful, we will come up with silver bullet cures in 10 years time simply using machine learning. It's amazing how many computer scientists (I call him that rather than a biologist, although he has worked into neuro) make this conclusion.
You have to become comfortable with the fact that there is uncertainy and there are parts of it you can't control. So instead you have to be obsessed with introducing order where you can. It is so refreshing to see a beautiful experiment that can wrestle a clear signal from the endless noise.
Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based
Depends where in math, in things like particle physics things get all wibbly wobbly is my cat dead or alive. In things like engineering quite often what you're dealing with is probability based, but you just stack the deck so far in your favor the probability is 1.
As they say, building a bridge that doesn't fall down is easy. Building a bridge that barely doesn't fall down is much harder.
I have seen molecular biologists (jokingly) shake the voodoo "molecular biology maracas" over the PCR machine to try and replicate their result.
In fact, just finished listening to a talk where a experimentalist was talking about how to get the fabrication yields of superconducting qubits from currently low double digit to 99.99+.
It's a human thing.
Surely Feynman made jested comments before running experiments. I'm sure some digging in his wonderful books and letters will find many examples.
Not the only sequence model that exhibits stutters on repetitive inputs...
while creatures:
c = get_random_creature()
if c.is_dead():
creatures.pop(c)
else:
creatures.add(c.mutate())I have loved history since I was six and my parents got me my first adult history book. I love how all stories fit together, understanding why things happened the way they did, how and why people in the past thought differently than we do today, all of it. If you read a textbook, though, history is just memorizing one thing happening after another.
Part of that might be my (American) education system's fear of controversy: explaining what motivated abolitionists and slave-holders in the 1850, the actual stakes over which they were fighting, would not be popular in many states, and some parents would no doubt object. But also, it's complicated because the past is a different country- all of a sudden you are having to explain the way that the economics of the Industrial Revolution changed the demand for complimentary goods (1), the Curse of Ham (2), the way that printing presses functioned in antebellum American democracy (3), and the pre-Civil Service patronage system (4). Basically, you have to teach a college level course to understand how things were different then and why they happened. And really good teachers can simplify the details down to an age-appropriate level, but most teachers are, well, average, and so memorization is a lot easier path to follow.
1: The beginning of the industrial revolution mechanized looms and spinning wheels, and mechanized cleaning raw cotton. As basic microeconomics suggests, those improvements suddenly massively increased the demand for cotton. Those demand spikes transformed large slave owners from people who understood that slavery was bad and wanted to see it ended but not quite yet to people who thought that slavery was a positive boon for the enslaved people they owned. You can actually see this in their writing, in 1800 most slave-owners think that slavery is on its way out and will not spread much, and in 1830 slavery is the best thing that God gave people anywhere.
2: The Southern Baptist Convention created itself in 1845 because so many didn't think that National Baptists in the General Missionary Convention were committed to defending slavery and the Curse of Ham, and they wanted to be part of a religion dedicated to the idea that White people should rule over Black people.
3: Before the secret ballot each party would provide its own ballots, pre-marked, and you just turned in the ballot of the party you supported. This naturally meant that each party had its own printing press in each town, which meant that they also had newspapers, pamphlets, and the like, and the press-owner was almost always one of the most committed political partisans in an area. Then when their party won they would get the contract for printing all documents the government needed in that area. This is a major driver for political polarization in the 1840's and 1850s.
4: Before the existence of Civil Service protections, basically all of the staff of the government would change over with a new Administration, every postmaster in every town would be appointed by the President and would change with every election. The fear that a Northern President committed to abolition would use this patronage- and printing contracts to printing press owners- to build a large segment of white southerners committed to abolition- who would in turn spark a slave revolt- that was why so many Southern states tried to leave the Union at the election of the first Republican President, before he was even inaugurated or had a chance to do anything. Because if they waited, he would appoint abolitionists to every town in the country, so they had to get ahead of him.
just read foner if you want something easy or read black reconstruction in america by dubois if you want the key text.
I do find the author's point weird. "I thought high school biology was just memorizing facts, but I began to appreciate it when I read some pop science books and went scuba diving." So the only problem for the author was the topic of the classes, not the style. Why shouldn't one have the same problem with high school physics ("it's just about boring ramps and pulleys"), etc.? Personally I find the style to be a more important distinguishing factor, in that biology is much less quantitative than other science disciplines. Instead the author's problem is that biology should be even less quantitative and more literary or poetic...?
Ultimately science journalism/popularization is not the same thing as science. High school science classes (try to) teach the latter not the former.
It's still super cool, but it makes learning about it as a science less satisfying, since it's less friendly to the standard scientific method.
[1] Although he just retired from it. Janet Iwasa will continue the project.
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.
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.
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.
Thing is, in my native Dutch, most things from nature have normal, natural sounding names. Words like "scheenbeen" (shin bone), "longontsteking" (lung inflammation), "boterbloem" (butter flower). In English, every single term in biology seems to be a 7-syllable latin word, directly anglicised (respectively "tibia", "pneumonia" and "ranunculus" in my examples - admittedly not 7 syllables but no less ridiculous) (how do you people even pronounce "ranunculus"??).
I simply don't understand why the language famous for having the largest vocabulary in the world couldn't give any bone other than "rib" a regular English sounding name (This also makes House MD needlessly hard to watch).
This made biology seem like mostly learning Latin word lists by heart. I simply didn't see the point! There'd be pages with pictures of the human body and just forty lines with Latin words pointed to them, and that was this week's teaching. If this stuff wouldn't be so cryptic, maybe there had been more space for wonderment. I once saw a Dutch language biology book from a parallel class and it was so much better.
When I was in school, biology as a subject was a high school level course. If you were in one of the classes meant for "advanced" students, the textbook was more of a college prep book as opposed to simply learning the concepts. Sure, the concepts were there, but the book was written from the perspective of teaching students that were interested in university level biology and ultimately medicine.
If your school imported books in English without performing due diligence to compare the philosophy of both books (Dutch vs English), then yea, it makes sense that the English one seems like overkill. Pair that with the lack of awareness that goes hand-in-hand with learning a new language and it's also not surprising that it all seems very confusing. When you grow up with one very specific language, a lot of concepts get into your brain without trying. I didn't grow up needing a biology textbook to teach me what a clavicle was, even if I knew there was also a simpler word (collarbone). You can't take that sort of implicit language knowledge for granted.
I've learned a lot over the past few years really diving in and trying to speak a new language with fluency. It takes a ton of work (thousands and thousands of hours of active learning) and then you're still behind by the decades of life that you can never live through again. Childhood years especially play a huge role in the amount of information that you absorb about society and culture that are later incorporated into your education and life as an adult.
This made biology seem like mostly learning Latin word lists by heart.
I took a "pre-med" biology course in high school for extra credit that was essentially this. Each week, we had to memorize 25 more bones and there was a quiz (on top of other normal homework and lectures). This is me putting the conspiracy hat on, but it felt like a way to weed out disinterested students from pursuing a career in medicine if they didn't have the innate attention to detail that _the field thinks_ (note: I'm making an assumption as to their opinion of what makes a good doctor) is useful. This goes back to my first point about not using the correct textbook for the stated goals outlined by the writers of educational curriculum for a school district or state body.
Sites like Brilliant or Khan Academy show that material is available to break down these complicated subjects into something easier to understand, but that doesn't mean anything if the decisions are made to buy thousands of textbooks in bulk based on some nebulous rating system of "this one is better" or "they use it at Harvard/Stanford/MIT so it must be good" instead of evaluating it for the audience that will actually be consuming the material.
So yea, it's confusing for everyone I believe, there are easier ways to learn these concepts and it's up to educators and policy writers to take that into consideration when choosing curriculum.
The Dutch language biology book was likely written for a more focused approach to what is practical for people to use in their day to day lives, and looking at the structure of the Dutch education system, I can easily see that being the case. It was normal for me growing up to not read an entire textbook over the course of an academic year. We only read certain chapters that the teacher decided were important to pass the state mandated exams and our focus was placed there. To get out of those "simpler" classes, you had to self select for more difficult courses. What was your experience with textbooks growing up? Did you read all of them cover to cover as a part of the curriculum?
Last point - just for fun; the entire point of House MD is that it's supposed to be full of medical speak that normies don't understand. It creates tension and mystery that makes for exciting TV. What makes House standout further though, is that they didn't shortcut the biology just for the sake of TV, but found a way to make it the focus of the drama!
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.
esp. when physicists use things like the anthropic principle to describe our own universe.
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!
Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?
Not that I know of. Could be cool. I produced a prototype platform that was a searchable DB of all papers published on PubMed, with a comment and karma system. The idea was to incentivise continued debate on published papers. Currently discredited papers continue to get cited for many years, because almost no-one publishes their critiques once the paper is published.
Where do you get your biology news from?
Back in the lab, we would mostly just closely follow our small field with automated searches of PubMed. We'd find out about wider stuff by attending talks and speaking to other scientists. Often new and exciting things will take years to publish, so you would often find out before publication via talks.
Is bio harder than other STEMs?
Only because the traditional high-school and university education in biology does not prepare people for the realities of cutting-edge bio research. I did a load of coding, image analysis, complex microscopy, chemistry etc etc, during my PhD and post-doc, none of which was taught during my degree or high school.
To thrive in biology research, you have to be comfortable not knowing about a thing, but figuring out how to do the thing, which likely no-one has done before.
1) Sadly there isn't really. There are a few good blogs like Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline" that centralize news, but no anonymous online forum like this.
2) Google scholar alerts, Twitter, Bluesky, and word of mouth.
3) I think our understanding of biological processes at the mesoscale is about to hit an inflection point, largely through advances in electron microscopy (cryo-ET) and the ability to perform simulations at this scale.
4) Not harder but definitely more messy and progress is less linear.
This was early days of the internet, the book(s) were largely the only resource. The instructors were folks who just understood coding in C naturally and had no idea how to communicate with those who did not. No joy in anything, just raw code.
I dropped out.
Decades later after age 40 I was at a career crossroads and took a web development class. I loved it, I could make things quickly, the instructor actually understood how to teach / introduce concepts. I've been happily coding professionally and personally since then.
How things are presented sometimes makes all the difference.
It took me a while to shed that view.
1. There's an inherent charm and beauty to biology, and the ability to memorise is a skill.
2. The many different sub-disciplines of biology demonstrate the level of complexity that the field demands. And, even if it isn't as 'rigorous' as physics, do we denounce experimentalists because theoretical physicists exist? They simply serve as distinct, but crucial, parts of a chain.
You don't need to go into nature to get this curiosity except for the possibility that it makes you more meditative. You can look at your arm and think what the hell happens in there at a molecular level to make you move the muscles. Or when someone says nerves conduct electricity what the hell does that mean?
I revisit this feynman video of him explaining (or not) magnets every few months and I think it's relevant to this question. https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?si=CkWYfiGoGCgAANwP
When I think like that I'm just curious why OP and others blame teachers or whoever else for not inducting the curiosity in them. Like it's someone else's job to make you curious? In my opinion you're either born that way or you're not. Some airport store book isn't gonna make you the next whatever scientist you adulate.
Gaining an appreciation for nature is good, getting fascinated with biology is also good, but one is not necessarily related to the other in practice.
But indeed there was a lot of boring and story-less recitation during my courses. One my most vivid memory was that of a cell signaling course. This activate this and promotes this thingy. Half of the class was asleep. At some point the professor describe some of the function of the SSH gene. You've got a gradient of this stuff combined with two others gradients of other gene and you got a nice differentiation in embryonic development. Whatever, I was waiting for something else. But then we got unto the next pathway I don't remember nor care about. And that made me furious. It was indeed a "lifeless recitation of name",
Because SHH is an acronym. An acronym for Sonic Hedgehog ! As in Sonic the videogame mascot from Sega ! In serious developmental biology ! It's something unusual, something that sticks, something that's worth telling a story. But no, it's SHH, represented as a boring abstracted circle in an abstracted pathway. I knew the story (not from the olympiad people, maybe it was in a random listicle in the IFLS Facebook back when I used facebook), and I wish, I wish that the guy in the front who's supposed to be a professor and supposed to teach would go on a little tangent that drosophilia biologist generally name their gene in a funnier way than human biologists. The professor could just said that, just as a way for bored student barely out of their teenage years to have some interest, to make the material easier to stick somehow ! But no, "lifeless recitation of name" indeed.
The only molecule name I do remember from this course is cyclopamine. Because when I look for it in Wikipedia there's a frigging real cyclops photo in there. I think it was one of the rare instance of something cool appearing in the actual course slide, but I'm honestly not sure about it (incidentally cyclopanine disrupts the Sonic Hedgehog pathway)
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 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.
Bioinformatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics
Health informatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_informatics
I liked math and physics and economics and even chemistry,
I think the reason is that these subjects give students a sense of instant gratification and instant empowering. Every concept and every theorem could be a breakthrough to my problem-solving skills, and I can immediately see how I can solve more problems through the learning.
But of course, nothing gives more instant gratification than CS. I can try and build things via my keyboard at any time. The learning and the associated work does not get better than that.
He mentions reading Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and finding archaeology, as described by Thor, to be incredibly fascinating and exciting (which I agree with having read Kon-Tiki as well).
Card goes on to say that when he tried ACTUAL archaeology he found it incredibly boring. e.g. it was mostly sitting out in the hot sun dusting off rocks hoping to find some bones.
It's a reminder of two facts:
1. EVERY activity has exciting and boring pars
2. A good writer can make even dull and boring activities comes alive
Later I got a job in bioinformatics. I worked on virus genomics. Definitely recommend viruses (specifically RNA viruses) because it's all the cool stuff without memorising bits of a flower etc.
Biology is a huge field, though. I can't criticise the way it was taught because I have no idea how to do it better. Not everyone is into genomics.
The good thing though in biology as opposed to physics and chemistry is knowledge is advancing quickly - since I went to college in the 1980s physics and chem are much the same but all sorts of new stuff has been figured out in biology and it's rapidly moving forward on things like how does the dna sequence turn into a given body design, how did life start, how do you make covid in a lab, is there likely to be bacterial life on Mars and so on. An interesting thing I learnt recently is bacteria may have partly shaped/made the continents. The idea, roughly, is they live deep in the crust and kind of rot it so part collapses into the magma.
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.
It's one of the reasons why I work in visualization for life sciences education: I think we're missing out on people who might otherwise make massive contributions to the field because they failed to memorize what the "endoplasmic reticulum" does. Much of biology you don't have to actually remember what things are called in order to understand the processes (at least at a basic level like what a middle schooler might be taught). Once you're exposed to the fascinating complexity of life at that level, for many people it can be interesting enough to build the motivation for the memorization/etc.
Not a lot of point in spending time researching something, only for no one to know what you're even referring to.
Much of biology you don't have to actually remember what things are called in order to understand the processes
But even that's besides the point of the fact that all these things are nothing more than abstractions created by humans, and ultimately it's all one giant soup of interacting molecules.
The field of biology was created by people who love to classify/name things.
More to the point, the field of biology is so complex that for the longest time we could only name and classify things. Understanding came later, when we'd accummulated enough data and had hints from chemistry and other fields.
The problem is that once we gain that understanding, we add that as one more chapter to our textbooks, one more lesson tacked on, instead of rethinking the curriculum around our understanding.
I should have loved biology (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 - April 2024 (253 comments)
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments)
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
These machines are also unbelievably complex - one of the challenges in biology is the sheer volume of stuff to know.