There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out", something like what the book A Brief History of Everything traces out. Things like "we used isotopes with different masses to figure out this thing about phosphorous in DNA".
In general, the "what" makes no sense without the history. Why were we searching for DNA in the mid 20th century? What did we already know? Retracing science as an investigation would be much more beneficial to kids than making them remember the conclusions. It's much more portable as a skill to understand the path of investigation than some facts about organelles that they aren't likely to use.
But the real reason I dropped biology when the choice came (and why did it come, dear IB organisation?) is that biology is not seen as the smart kid subject, when compared to physics and chemistry. Part if this is that you can grind your way through memorizing the biochemical cycles, probably easier for most than learning calculus that you need for physics. But part of it is simply reputation, and it's not reasonable.
I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.
As a safety inspector, I find to be more successful in teaching safety when I explain why some rules are in place. If not explained explicitly, people will figure an explanation on their own, and then sometimes they will be wrong - e.g. I'm safe to enter the hazardous zone, as it's a break time so no one works above = no risk of things falling down - except some things could be poorly secured and still fall down, or there could be a radiographic testing pending, or there could be holes in the floor… Knowing the reasons for a rule also make it easier to remember the rule.
I wish more people understood your thinking. Two instructions you get at a doctor’s office before having a surgical procedure:
- Wear comfortable clothes.
- Don’t eat anything before surgery.
The first is so you don’t have tight clothes rubbing your achy body on the ride home. The second is so that you don’t vomit up your eggs Benedict, inhale it, and die an awful death. They’re both in the same size print in the same bullet list.
That stuff should be explained beforehand but I rarely hear it said that concretely. I’ve wondered if rephrasing that like:
- Don’t eat anything before surgery, because it might make you die.
I work in train and aviation operational systems. We do safety training by taking teams to depots or sites of accidents where there are ruined systems.
Seeing the remains of an aircraft fuselage, or what a burned out diesel locomotive looks like -- and in the case of the train, smells like; it was being repaired -- really drives the point home.
A couple more slides on case studies and how they happened -- shout out of Admiral Cloudberg for doing a great job with that stuff; use their articles a lot -- and it's easy to convince people. Make it visceral, and they sure as hell will remember.
Presumably it's the same with a lot of science education as well. Physics and math for the sake of math is just rote memorization, but make them calculate rocket trajectories, then build a few model rockets and shoot them off, and those kids will be way more engaged. Like, I got really into biology when I started making basement hooch in college...
I had this same experience being taught physics and maths. Just a bunch of what feel like pretty dull experiments which ends with a gold leaf moving...
But the STORY of physics is fascinating. Why each experiment was done, by who, to prove what etc etc. All the sciences are like a soap opera of personalities and disagreements that make them much more interesting - and memorable - if you know the back story.
That 'thin deep slice' comment really sums it up. No context, just a thing to memorise.
I think physics students should be give The Fabric of the Cosmos my Brian Greene to read before they start doing any actual learning. I bet there's a biology equivalent of a book that is a 'what we know so far and what we don't understand' - if you know of one please let me know.
> I had this same experience being taught physics and maths. Just a bunch of what feel like pretty dull experiments which ends with a gold leaf moving...
> But the STORY of physics is fascinating.
There’s a college some of my kids have been considering that takes a similar approach to their math (and sciences) curricula, starting math out with Euclid and progressing through Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler (maybe Leibniz / Newton? Not sure), at each point motivating the development of astronomy and mathematics by showing how each person developed our understanding of the natural universe.
In comparison, in my college math courses, which were oriented towards engineering majors, I felt at the time like concepts were coming out of nowhere without justification, with no sense of how they fit in with anything else, other than the certainty that I had to keep up or I would be lost a week later.
When I crammed virology before taking a computational biology role, the "how we know" was the most fascinating part for me. I suddenly understood science and realised I'd spent 20 years of my life learning facts, called "science", but not actually understanding science at all.
A great example is the Hershey-Chase experiment[0]. What I realised is science isn't about learning and memorising facts, it's a creative process of prodding the universe in just the right way to learn something about it. I realised scientists have more in common with artists than engineers and that I am definitely more of an engineer.
This is why history resonated so well with me back in school. Instead of just blindly learning historical facts our teachers requested us to explain what were the grounds and cause of historical events.
I still use this when learning new concepts. I try to Llearn what existed before and why the change made sense.
While the motivation is correct, I would have to take this with a huge boulder of salt due to the inability to accurately obtain and analyze all the information around the historic event.
>There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out"
I read Asimov's Guide To Science about 10 years ago, and came to the same realization that, for most people, understanding why we know what we know is probably more important than what we know. It's better than thinking that science is a series of facts about the world, rather than a process. It treats the current state of understanding (as of the book's writing) in several subjects as a series of developments, each raising new questions and problems, which are studied further.
There's a limit to what a prof. can pack in, if the development of understanding needs to be covered too. And for a student focused on efficiently learning the subject matter it's a digression.
As a separate class though, it'd be good, and enlightening.
> There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out", something like what the book A Brief History of Everything traces out.
The problem is that in school there is far too little time to teach this all. There is already too little time to teach the curriculum material. Thus, if you are interested in such topics, simply go to a decent (university) library.
I think we could reduce the scope of today's curricula to accommodate this kind of teaching. If students spent a few more months understanding the how of scientific discovery instead of the what, I think it would be a worthwhile trade-off.
> I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.
I was always amazed about a past acquaintance whose PhD thesis included game theory applications, as she was studying the breeding and feeding behaviors of some random bird.
> For a computer scientist, a biologist’s methods can seem insane; the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.
I think this is probably the part about biology that people outside of biology appreciate the least. We know a lot about how cells and proteins work now. But despite this fact, it is still extremely difficult to understand exactly what is happening within a given cell in situ. Many measurement methods are likely to destroy or alter the thing you’re trying to measure… think Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - the act of measuring the thing changes its state. Everything is sensitive to temperature, shear, ionic strength, pH, etc… and of course most methods rely on these levers to gain resolution and signal. So you have to have a clear idea of what you think is happening to even select a measurement technique that won’t ruin it. This is part of why, while we know a lot of the fundamentals, it is still hard to engineer functionality in specific environments .. engineering requires a lot of measurement and feedback.
I think that also offers insight into why software can be engineered so quickly. It’s a discipline where you can (relatively) easily place a probe wherever you want and understand exactly what’s happening in a (sometimes) deterministic manner. Everyone else is taking fuzzy shots in the dark compared to software. Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity. In every other engineering discipline, you sometimes have entire meetings to decide how many times to retry something that just failed.
The fundamental challenge of most engineering disciplines is attempting to create a model that represents a useful subset of reality but can be easily reasoned about and is, in some sense, reliable or reproducible. Perhaps what makes computer science unique is how unusually successful it has been in wrangling physics into a machine that appears to execute the laws of mathematics. Physics does rear its head from time to time (e.g. rowhammer and "single-event upsets"), but it is truly impressive how little we have to consider the physical nature of the machine nowadays.
However, other engineering disciplines do also try to build similar abstractions with varying levels of success. We've managed to build simple books of electrical standards that can be used by electricians around the world to build and reason about power systems without having to understand the weird quantum mind of an electron. I suspect we'll get there with biology too, we're just a century too early.
Computer engineering is literally designed to allow the most simple reliable substrate for the most complex possible abstractions to be built upon. It's bizarre (but common?) for computer science practitioners to be strangely unaware of how artificial the tools they use are. Then expecting the rest of the world to be as "simple" as their environment.
Semiconductor processing on the other hand is physics. Success is discovered rather than primarily designed. There are development tools, but things like the "pixie dust" used to avoid the superparamagnetic limit in spinning media were not understood for years after they were commercially shipped in hard drives. Biology/Pharma is much more complex/hit-miss and the biotech industry treats most employees quite badly.
This is exactly why I switched to computer science after finishing my biology BSc.
I don't get nightmares about analytic chemistry anymore, but the level of self-loathing you get from doing labs that never work out for reasons that defy understanding make the annoyance of debugging code seem quaint almost.
(I should really say "it used to", but now that I can run an LLM call locally and get a completely different response than the deployed version of a piece of software, with all other factors seemingly being equal...)
I too switched from biochem to CS: it was such a relief to work in a field where I felt that, as in math, you can get by remembering axioms and rules and derive the rest, without all the arcana of biology. (My mentor in biology bought me a copy of Barrow & Tipler as a parting gift, as if to say, CS and biology are not so different.) Today I’m not sure I still feel that way. Programming is more an empirical than logical discipline that ever before, as programs are too complex to be objects of pure reason; and the layers of stuff one needs to know keep growing in both directions, from SIMD to OAuth.
I’m so glad to come across this writer though. I was going to send them a note to tell them they have a real talent, until I noticed the long list of New Yorker and Atlantic publications, and thought: they already know. :)
Minor nit: the observer effect is distinct from the uncertainty principle, which says that two quantities like position and momentum (“conjugate variables”) cannot simultaneously be known to arbitrary certainty, which is to say, their wavefunctions cannot be simultaneously localized to arbitrarily small regions (of their respective spaces). This applies to any two functions that are Fourier transforms of each other, which position and momentum are (my terminology is sloppy here, but close enough to be useful), and has nothing to do with the change to a wavefunction that occurs by measuring it.
>the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.
It's like analyzing a Swiss watch if the back was welded on. You could send it though a shredder and analyze the fragments and work backwards to determine the size of the gears. But it's impossible to shred just one watch-- you have to shred a hundred thousand at a time, which are inevitably a complex mix of different watch models each with different minute lengths and hour durations.
Something I have felt is undertaught in introductory biology is how unknown human cells still are! No textbooks wants to list off a thousand proteins with "function unknown" next to them, after all. But to surprisingly large extent it's an undiscovered country. Just in the last few years we're discovering entire new species of RNA! https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/enter-glycornas
Good point. It reminds me of an observation made by Paul Sutter in his podcast [0]. Paraphrasing, there so many layers of emergent phenomena, most of whom we will probably never figure out:
- From quantum fields to atoms
- From atoms to chemistry
- From chemistry to biochemistry
- From biochemistry to cellular life
- From cellular life to multicellular life
- From multicellular life to consciousness
- From individual consciousness to social phenomena
> For a computer scientist, a biologist’s methods can seem insane;
I actually use biological methods all the time, now that I'm a dev. For instance in Biology, gene knock-out experiments are common, where you damage or delete a gene, and see what breaks. You then know that this gene is important for a given thing.
This is the equivalent to the debugging approach of "if I comment out this code, what happens?"
> Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity.
This is a common requirement in software QA. "Can we reproduce the issue? Does it happen every time? Is it sensitive to timing of user actions, or anything else? What part of the initial state of the system could affect this outcome? What other external or environmental changes will alter the result?"
Sometimes, the initial failure seems to have an obvious answer, and sometimes an immediate code change is the best first move. But replicating a behaviour does is insanity.
> Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.
This also applies to less-cerebral tasks. For example, I didn't learn to touch-type due to a school class with edutainment software, but because after one summer of arguing with people over dial-up, I had learned it just to get the words out faster.
It’s a wonderful experience when hazy abstractions of complexity click into clarity. I’m not sure I’ve ever found that without tangible motivation and immersion in a problem space, although excellent writings can bring one to the doorstep.
It's just focussing on the useful practical applications rather than the abstract theory.
Anchor your explanation in something with actual practical use.
It's why so many mathematicians are so shit at explaining maths to laypeople. They don't understand that regular people don't give a shit about numbers. They're just a means to an end.
Explaining how to turn numbers into more numbers doesn't land with people who dgaf about numbers.
I don't work for them or have any monetary interest in them. They just do very cool work and I'd like to see them get more awareness. I wish we had videos like theirs when I was in school.
I loved biology in high school. I had one of the most boring teachers ever, and literally slept through class half the time, but then I would go home and read the text book for homework assignments and I found it totally fascinating. It was kind of running gag that the teacher could wake me up and ask me a question at any time and I always knew the answer, to the amusement of the other students. But my secret was just that I found it interesting and easy to absorb.
I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject. There are a lot of factors that determine how receptive we are to learning something - current interests, life experience, how developed our brains are, etc - beyond just the way it is taught. I have a much deeper appreciation for geology now than I did in school, for example, and I’m fairly certain that I’m the one who changed, not the way plate tectonics are taught.
> I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject. There are a lot of factors that determine how receptive we are to learning something - current interests, life experience, how developed our brains are, etc
I've met former classmates who got interested in a subject later in life and literally would not believe that the subject had been taught to us in an interesting way in high school. They insisted "I would have loved the subject if they had taught us topic X" or "I would have loved the subject if they had taught us from angle Y" when that is exactly the way our high school teacher taught us. I think when we think back to age 15 we have a hard time remembering how different we were, and we remember things in a way that makes our emotions at the time make sense through our current way of experiencing things.
> They insisted "I would have loved the subject if they had taught us topic X"
Just yesterday was a front page top comment along these lines, that teaching endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts would have made all the difference in grade school biology. But really it would be worth about 30-90 seconds of content in the lesson that day and gone barely noticed and probably not remembered.
Even if you pin the "blame" directly on teachers, they have a difficult situation. They need to get 3-5 classes of 20-40 mostly obnoxious kids to learn a broad array of material prescribed by other people. They have to do this while also correcting behavioral issues and dealing with parents or admins.
They're mostly not domain experts knowledgeable enough to give individualized deep dives to each of their students, but even if they were it would make their already-difficult task impossible. It's a wonder that any sort of individualized instruction manages to exist at all.
>Even if you pin the "blame" directly on teachers, they have a difficult situation
In many countries, teaching is a government position that is pretty impossible to get fired from. Unfortunately, just like in any profession, there are those in teaching who find it that they dislike it but still trudge along because nice benefits (not talking about US), much to the detriment of their students.
We talk about 'passion' a lot in a number of fields, but imho teaching is the only profession where you _NEED_ it.
When I was studying educational research, it seemed that most sources agreed that - apart from individualized tutoring - decreasing class size was one key to better learning. IIRC, the magic 'threshold) was 12. (Mob vs. seminar?)
Of course, teacher's real engagement with their subject and students, and teaching experiences (if they're in tune with what works, and also trying new methods) are important. As is whether their districts encourage (and can afford) innovation (in learning materials and media for example).
Regardless, teachers have to begin at the level of their average student (TBD); if the spread is too wide, some will be bored, some challenged. All of this is a lot to ask, moreso for teachers with outside lives to live and grow themselves also.
A guide who loves the subject matter can make an incredible difference - I had a physics teacher who had a contagious love for it, and those who were naturally curious about the subject learned a lot while even the reluctant students couldn't help but be sucked in to his demonstrations and experiments.
I was fascinated by biology right up until I took 2 high school classes on it, and then it took years for me to recover. It had nothing to do with a lack of curiosity. In my classes, at least, the focus was on memorization of names of things. No time for wonder and amazement, what's important is that you can write labels on that diagram of endoplasmic reticulum! :)
I didn't take the article so much as the blame game but more saying that the subject of biology generally could be taught in a much, much better way. That certainly rings true for me and, from your comments, seems to ring true for you as well: you loved the subject despite how poorly it was presented to you.
> I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject… I’m the one who changed, not the way plate tectonics are taught.
100% agree.
The author seems to be arguing that it’s someone else’s duty to point out what’s interesting. I suppose a essayist or columnist needs to believe something along those lines.
I would say the reverse is true though - great teachers are able to spark interest on a subject that students may otherwise not care about. But I agree that that expectation shouldn't be the baseline.
Except making a subject interesting, at least for K-12, should be a baseline, no? (With success in early years making it easier to maintain high interest in later years.)
The most important thing you can teach about anything is an interest in it - otherwise what is retention going to be?
Or to turn it around, introducing subject after subject that students find boring, confusing, stressful or frustrating is a fantastic way to ensure they avoid anything to do with the fields, knowledge and skills we deem most important for a well prepared life.
I do agree that this isn’t a baseline to apply to each teacher in isolation, without the rest of the ecosystem supporting them. Textbooks, other materials and class aids, all supporting the emotional highs of learning, not just prioritizing a material to be covered on a test, etc.
At the university level, professors should be able to expect an opt-in self-selected and self-motivated level of interest for subjects.
Especially if grade school has prepared highly curious excited to learn students. As apposed to subject avoidance or apathy.
I agree, and I may have downplayed the importance a pedagogy a bit too much. I’ve experienced first hand, and also see with my kids, the profound difference that a great teacher or coach can have on the pupils.
But a great teacher is not necessary to find a topic interesting, nor sufficient to spark interest in everyone who lacks interest.
The thing that got me interested in biology and geology later in life was finding out / realising that there is a continuum between them and also with chemistry and physics (both of which I loved at school).
I don't fully understand why they are separated and taught as separate things, I wonder what the rationale is, apart from expediency.
Textbooks are generally way more carefully made in terms of their presentation, the order of information, their examples. At least in uni, classes that follow a textbook where much nicer to get into for me personally. Why listen to an unmotivated professor reading his notes that he made in 3h for a one time audience of 300 when I could read a textbook that was made in the span of multiple years for an audience of hundreds of thousands?
>I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject
I agree, you can't blame an instructor for your lack of interest. Sometimes a subject is portrayed so abusively, you must declare war against it's convolution to protect any potential for curiosity and wonder.
There's more ways of learning now. Things I found interesting but taught fairly dryly, with even drier textbooks for self learning, I can now engage properly by watchign lectures/ listening at 2x speed. Find communities that meme about plate tectonics that makes me want to explore further etc.
> Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.
> This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
I like to refer to it as nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, discovered on a planet that experienced a "grey goo" apocalypse. Every possible pore of its surface is now infested rogue units, in a constant arms-race of development. Some have even been yoked into titanic moving megastructures and inscrutable hive-minds.
Tangentially related: We like to imagine cyborg metal bodies, but we don't always appreciate all the features of our standard nanotech. From an old post:
________
When it comes to the bio-engineering of the human limbs, just remember that you're sacrificing raw force/speed for a system with a great deal of other trade-offs which would be difficult for modern science to replicate.
1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations
2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)
3. Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation
4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials
5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors
6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts
7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected
8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion
9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids
10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)
There's only so far your high tech nano-particle swarm can spread before resources become a serious limiting factor. If you're limiting yourself just to earth, certain resources that a swarm might need to reproduce will be scarce/energy intensive to extract and utilize (mining rare earths, fabricating highly advanced semiconductors, etc.). It's extraordinarily easy, however, to produce billions of cells nearly anywhere on earth because the cells that we have are especially adapted for ease of reproduction in these exact conditions.
This is how I now see biology, and more so with each reframing. Cells being squishy, floppy bags no longer counts as a point against them being "tech" or "robotic." That's deliberate engineering—a complex scaffold of nanotech ladders that continuously reform to emulate "squish" as a feature.
Nobody's talking about the author's point at the end of the article, that we need better tools to reason about biology, and that the biology as a subject has a particular gap between reality and content that perhaps other subjects do not.
I couldn't agree more. Right now we're sipping the natural world's most complex ideas through the straws of simple language and static diagrams, and the constraints of all of these mediums (including school itself) in aggregate naturally lean toward making biology a rote memorization subject. Reasoning about biology in the way that it appears in nature is, in these mediums, going against the grain. It happens, but it's not the default. Your story about having a good biology teacher is this exception, not the default.
Complex things requires easy to use systems that reflect that complexity. That's the subject here - how do we build these methods of communication and understanding?
It's going to be a few hundred years before we get to that point, if we ever get there.
Bio is just really complicated, there may never be anything like a 'easy to use system.' We're still on the beach of it's ocean, counting the colors of stones.
For instance, in developmental bio (going from one cell to a functioning infant) we have three theories of how a cell determines what it should develop into: 1) The English model: The daughter cells get told what to be by the mother cells 2) The American model: the daughter cells take a look around themselves and determine what to be by taking a poll of the other nearby cells 3) The Las Vegas model: it's all random with lots of apoptosis and going broke.
They very fact that we think these models are right is very concerning to the field. We know deep down that none of this can be correct, but have not been able to disprove it all that well. To be clear here: dev biologists are nearly certain that their theories are crap, based nearly entirely on gut feelings. That's how gun-shy biologists are with any whiff of a 'grand theory'. That's how complicated things are.
It's not a given that bio can really ever be reduced back down to something understandable and simultaneously reflective of the 'real' state of things. That's not something nature is obliged to provide us.
Even more fundamental question is - why does a cell divide? All literature that I came across tells me "how" a cell division happens, but not "why"? What's the cause? What's the motive? For example, in Physics, the cause or motivation is reaching an equlibrium or minimality of energy transferred, entropy etc. For cell division - what's the nature's goal? Having more cells? Why?
> Complex things requires easy to use systems that reflect that complexity...how do we build these methods of communication and understanding?
We've had the wetware for understanding complex systems for thousands of years. We added symbolics for communicating complex things later.
Nowadays, many people weak in symbolics are excellent in understanding, and many people expert in symbolics are novice in understanding.
I am not sure whether we are missing a symbolic form that is closer aligned to understanding, or whether we've simply overvalued symbolics at the expense of understanding.
Isn't this what we're all betting massive Transformer architectures are going to give us? Tools to explore and handle complex concepts. Reasoning may still be left to us, though.
Absolutely! Super exciting! But how precisely will it work?
Right now I don't know of an AI tool that can make a halfway decent biology diagram, let alone a complex 3d animation of a biological process you can talk to and ask questions of. The article was a call to action for this type of tooling.
I'd love to see this thread move from 'my experience in school was good/bad' to 'what if we made something that did X' or 'have you seen Y' :)
I have a hot take that biology is just too complex and complicated for humans to truly understand.
We have the cognitive ability to reason about the relationships between about 150 humans. So, if thats a plausible upper limit for how many genes we can hold in our head too, then we’re toast. Each cell has thousands of distinct proteins, and many more small molecules. When we knock out one gene, we regularly see hundreds change in response. We just can’t hold that large of a system in our head. Parts of it, maybe, but genes are so interconnected that it’s very hard to draw a sensible boundary between distinct “parts”. Also biology behaves in really unintuitive ways. Feedback loops, randomness, long tailed distributions. These are very important concepts for biological systems. Humans are also notoriously bad at thinking about all of them.
It’s just too big and too weird to try to think about a single cell. Forget tissues or organs.
So, I think computational modeling will be really important to teach to students early. We have to rely on computer models because its too complex for our brains.
Beautifully written piece whose premise I disagree with.
At least in the UK (the States may be different), you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned.
At A-Level standard, you are taught the physical basis of epigenetic modification (what he describes as switching genes on or off - although that in itself is a too-binary simplification, it's more to do with up- and down-regulation of expression). You're also taught other fascinating processes such as alternative splicing - where a single gene can express many different proteins.
During my first year of undergrad at a so-so Russell Group university, the history of biology featured prominently in lectures - especially those on the evolution of genetics as a field. The inherent fuzziness of categories and concepts in biology was also made very clear. I distinctly remember a lecturer telling us (in response to a question about why we say bacteria don't have membrane-bound organelles, when the topic of the lecture - the magnetosome - was clearly an exception to this rule) that when we say something is 'always true' in biology, we mean it happens 80%+ of the time, and when we say something 'never happens' in biology, we really mean that it happens less than 20% of the time.
I do agree that there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?) - but I think this case is overblown by the author.
I took high school bio in the US, and mostly agree with both of these:
> you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned
> there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?)
But note that the author was almost certainly only talking about high school biology.
I think the situation is that in the US, an AP Biology (bio class for seniors in high school) teacher has to trade off teaching the concepts with teaching to the AP test all the seniors will take, and that test prep does involve stuff like memorizing the Krebs cycle so that you can forget right after the test. My teacher did a pretty good job of this balance and I got a lot out of it, but mileage may vary. Next, the kids will do well on the test and that will let them dodge their university's biology requirement. That class would have been much better. (I'm was in exactly this camp.)
Readit News
In general, the "what" makes no sense without the history. Why were we searching for DNA in the mid 20th century? What did we already know? Retracing science as an investigation would be much more beneficial to kids than making them remember the conclusions. It's much more portable as a skill to understand the path of investigation than some facts about organelles that they aren't likely to use.
But the real reason I dropped biology when the choice came (and why did it come, dear IB organisation?) is that biology is not seen as the smart kid subject, when compared to physics and chemistry. Part if this is that you can grind your way through memorizing the biochemical cycles, probably easier for most than learning calculus that you need for physics. But part of it is simply reputation, and it's not reasonable.
I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.
- Wear comfortable clothes.
- Don’t eat anything before surgery.
The first is so you don’t have tight clothes rubbing your achy body on the ride home. The second is so that you don’t vomit up your eggs Benedict, inhale it, and die an awful death. They’re both in the same size print in the same bullet list.
That stuff should be explained beforehand but I rarely hear it said that concretely. I’ve wondered if rephrasing that like:
- Don’t eat anything before surgery, because it might make you die.
would save lives.
Seeing the remains of an aircraft fuselage, or what a burned out diesel locomotive looks like -- and in the case of the train, smells like; it was being repaired -- really drives the point home.
A couple more slides on case studies and how they happened -- shout out of Admiral Cloudberg for doing a great job with that stuff; use their articles a lot -- and it's easy to convince people. Make it visceral, and they sure as hell will remember.
Presumably it's the same with a lot of science education as well. Physics and math for the sake of math is just rote memorization, but make them calculate rocket trajectories, then build a few model rockets and shoot them off, and those kids will be way more engaged. Like, I got really into biology when I started making basement hooch in college...
But the STORY of physics is fascinating. Why each experiment was done, by who, to prove what etc etc. All the sciences are like a soap opera of personalities and disagreements that make them much more interesting - and memorable - if you know the back story.
That 'thin deep slice' comment really sums it up. No context, just a thing to memorise.
I think physics students should be give The Fabric of the Cosmos my Brian Greene to read before they start doing any actual learning. I bet there's a biology equivalent of a book that is a 'what we know so far and what we don't understand' - if you know of one please let me know.
> But the STORY of physics is fascinating.
There’s a college some of my kids have been considering that takes a similar approach to their math (and sciences) curricula, starting math out with Euclid and progressing through Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler (maybe Leibniz / Newton? Not sure), at each point motivating the development of astronomy and mathematics by showing how each person developed our understanding of the natural universe.
In comparison, in my college math courses, which were oriented towards engineering majors, I felt at the time like concepts were coming out of nowhere without justification, with no sense of how they fit in with anything else, other than the certainty that I had to keep up or I would be lost a week later.
Most people don't like soap operas and would zone out due to that, you might get a different set of people interested but you wouldn't get more.
A great example is the Hershey-Chase experiment[0]. What I realised is science isn't about learning and memorising facts, it's a creative process of prodding the universe in just the right way to learn something about it. I realised scientists have more in common with artists than engineers and that I am definitely more of an engineer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experime...
I still use this when learning new concepts. I try to Llearn what existed before and why the change made sense.
I read Asimov's Guide To Science about 10 years ago, and came to the same realization that, for most people, understanding why we know what we know is probably more important than what we know. It's better than thinking that science is a series of facts about the world, rather than a process. It treats the current state of understanding (as of the book's writing) in several subjects as a series of developments, each raising new questions and problems, which are studied further.
As a separate class though, it'd be good, and enlightening.
The problem is that in school there is far too little time to teach this all. There is already too little time to teach the curriculum material. Thus, if you are interested in such topics, simply go to a decent (university) library.
I was always amazed about a past acquaintance whose PhD thesis included game theory applications, as she was studying the breeding and feeding behaviors of some random bird.
I think this is probably the part about biology that people outside of biology appreciate the least. We know a lot about how cells and proteins work now. But despite this fact, it is still extremely difficult to understand exactly what is happening within a given cell in situ. Many measurement methods are likely to destroy or alter the thing you’re trying to measure… think Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - the act of measuring the thing changes its state. Everything is sensitive to temperature, shear, ionic strength, pH, etc… and of course most methods rely on these levers to gain resolution and signal. So you have to have a clear idea of what you think is happening to even select a measurement technique that won’t ruin it. This is part of why, while we know a lot of the fundamentals, it is still hard to engineer functionality in specific environments .. engineering requires a lot of measurement and feedback.
I think that also offers insight into why software can be engineered so quickly. It’s a discipline where you can (relatively) easily place a probe wherever you want and understand exactly what’s happening in a (sometimes) deterministic manner. Everyone else is taking fuzzy shots in the dark compared to software. Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity. In every other engineering discipline, you sometimes have entire meetings to decide how many times to retry something that just failed.
However, other engineering disciplines do also try to build similar abstractions with varying levels of success. We've managed to build simple books of electrical standards that can be used by electricians around the world to build and reason about power systems without having to understand the weird quantum mind of an electron. I suspect we'll get there with biology too, we're just a century too early.
Semiconductor processing on the other hand is physics. Success is discovered rather than primarily designed. There are development tools, but things like the "pixie dust" used to avoid the superparamagnetic limit in spinning media were not understood for years after they were commercially shipped in hard drives. Biology/Pharma is much more complex/hit-miss and the biotech industry treats most employees quite badly.
I don't get nightmares about analytic chemistry anymore, but the level of self-loathing you get from doing labs that never work out for reasons that defy understanding make the annoyance of debugging code seem quaint almost.
(I should really say "it used to", but now that I can run an LLM call locally and get a completely different response than the deployed version of a piece of software, with all other factors seemingly being equal...)
I’m so glad to come across this writer though. I was going to send them a note to tell them they have a real talent, until I noticed the long list of New Yorker and Atlantic publications, and thought: they already know. :)
It's like analyzing a Swiss watch if the back was welded on. You could send it though a shredder and analyze the fragments and work backwards to determine the size of the gears. But it's impossible to shred just one watch-- you have to shred a hundred thousand at a time, which are inevitably a complex mix of different watch models each with different minute lengths and hour durations.
Something I have felt is undertaught in introductory biology is how unknown human cells still are! No textbooks wants to list off a thousand proteins with "function unknown" next to them, after all. But to surprisingly large extent it's an undiscovered country. Just in the last few years we're discovering entire new species of RNA! https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/enter-glycornas
It strikes me as the mother of all spaghetti code. Is it even possible to meaningfully look at parts of the human body in isolation?
- From quantum fields to atoms
- From atoms to chemistry
- From chemistry to biochemistry
- From biochemistry to cellular life
- From cellular life to multicellular life
- From multicellular life to consciousness
- From individual consciousness to social phenomena
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/en/podcast/ask-a-spaceman/id95882...
I actually use biological methods all the time, now that I'm a dev. For instance in Biology, gene knock-out experiments are common, where you damage or delete a gene, and see what breaks. You then know that this gene is important for a given thing.
This is the equivalent to the debugging approach of "if I comment out this code, what happens?"
This is a common requirement in software QA. "Can we reproduce the issue? Does it happen every time? Is it sensitive to timing of user actions, or anything else? What part of the initial state of the system could affect this outcome? What other external or environmental changes will alter the result?"
Sometimes, the initial failure seems to have an obvious answer, and sometimes an immediate code change is the best first move. But replicating a behaviour does is insanity.
> Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.
The danger is that you won't know enough of the landscape in order to know what piece you need to learn to unblock what you're trying to do...
Anchor your explanation in something with actual practical use.
It's why so many mathematicians are so shit at explaining maths to laypeople. They don't understand that regular people don't give a shit about numbers. They're just a means to an end.
Explaining how to turn numbers into more numbers doesn't land with people who dgaf about numbers.
You need to show how something is useful.
Pretty cheap for individuals as well: https://smart-biology-academy.getlearnworlds.com/courses
I don't work for them or have any monetary interest in them. They just do very cool work and I'd like to see them get more awareness. I wish we had videos like theirs when I was in school.
I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject. There are a lot of factors that determine how receptive we are to learning something - current interests, life experience, how developed our brains are, etc - beyond just the way it is taught. I have a much deeper appreciation for geology now than I did in school, for example, and I’m fairly certain that I’m the one who changed, not the way plate tectonics are taught.
I've met former classmates who got interested in a subject later in life and literally would not believe that the subject had been taught to us in an interesting way in high school. They insisted "I would have loved the subject if they had taught us topic X" or "I would have loved the subject if they had taught us from angle Y" when that is exactly the way our high school teacher taught us. I think when we think back to age 15 we have a hard time remembering how different we were, and we remember things in a way that makes our emotions at the time make sense through our current way of experiencing things.
Just yesterday was a front page top comment along these lines, that teaching endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts would have made all the difference in grade school biology. But really it would be worth about 30-90 seconds of content in the lesson that day and gone barely noticed and probably not remembered.
They're mostly not domain experts knowledgeable enough to give individualized deep dives to each of their students, but even if they were it would make their already-difficult task impossible. It's a wonder that any sort of individualized instruction manages to exist at all.
In many countries, teaching is a government position that is pretty impossible to get fired from. Unfortunately, just like in any profession, there are those in teaching who find it that they dislike it but still trudge along because nice benefits (not talking about US), much to the detriment of their students.
We talk about 'passion' a lot in a number of fields, but imho teaching is the only profession where you _NEED_ it.
Of course, teacher's real engagement with their subject and students, and teaching experiences (if they're in tune with what works, and also trying new methods) are important. As is whether their districts encourage (and can afford) innovation (in learning materials and media for example).
Regardless, teachers have to begin at the level of their average student (TBD); if the spread is too wide, some will be bored, some challenged. All of this is a lot to ask, moreso for teachers with outside lives to live and grow themselves also.
Dead Comment
I was fascinated by biology right up until I took 2 high school classes on it, and then it took years for me to recover. It had nothing to do with a lack of curiosity. In my classes, at least, the focus was on memorization of names of things. No time for wonder and amazement, what's important is that you can write labels on that diagram of endoplasmic reticulum! :)
I didn't take the article so much as the blame game but more saying that the subject of biology generally could be taught in a much, much better way. That certainly rings true for me and, from your comments, seems to ring true for you as well: you loved the subject despite how poorly it was presented to you.
100% agree.
The author seems to be arguing that it’s someone else’s duty to point out what’s interesting. I suppose a essayist or columnist needs to believe something along those lines.
The most important thing you can teach about anything is an interest in it - otherwise what is retention going to be?
Or to turn it around, introducing subject after subject that students find boring, confusing, stressful or frustrating is a fantastic way to ensure they avoid anything to do with the fields, knowledge and skills we deem most important for a well prepared life.
I do agree that this isn’t a baseline to apply to each teacher in isolation, without the rest of the ecosystem supporting them. Textbooks, other materials and class aids, all supporting the emotional highs of learning, not just prioritizing a material to be covered on a test, etc.
At the university level, professors should be able to expect an opt-in self-selected and self-motivated level of interest for subjects.
Especially if grade school has prepared highly curious excited to learn students. As apposed to subject avoidance or apathy.
But a great teacher is not necessary to find a topic interesting, nor sufficient to spark interest in everyone who lacks interest.
I don't fully understand why they are separated and taught as separate things, I wonder what the rationale is, apart from expediency.
I agree, you can't blame an instructor for your lack of interest. Sometimes a subject is portrayed so abusively, you must declare war against it's convolution to protect any potential for curiosity and wonder.
There's more ways of learning now. Things I found interesting but taught fairly dryly, with even drier textbooks for self learning, I can now engage properly by watchign lectures/ listening at 2x speed. Find communities that meme about plate tectonics that makes me want to explore further etc.
> This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
I like to refer to it as nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, discovered on a planet that experienced a "grey goo" apocalypse. Every possible pore of its surface is now infested rogue units, in a constant arms-race of development. Some have even been yoked into titanic moving megastructures and inscrutable hive-minds.
________
When it comes to the bio-engineering of the human limbs, just remember that you're sacrificing raw force/speed for a system with a great deal of other trade-offs which would be difficult for modern science to replicate.
1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations
2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)
3. Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation
4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials
5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors
6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts
7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected
8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion
9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids
10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)
There's only so far your high tech nano-particle swarm can spread before resources become a serious limiting factor. If you're limiting yourself just to earth, certain resources that a swarm might need to reproduce will be scarce/energy intensive to extract and utilize (mining rare earths, fabricating highly advanced semiconductors, etc.). It's extraordinarily easy, however, to produce billions of cells nearly anywhere on earth because the cells that we have are especially adapted for ease of reproduction in these exact conditions.
I couldn't agree more. Right now we're sipping the natural world's most complex ideas through the straws of simple language and static diagrams, and the constraints of all of these mediums (including school itself) in aggregate naturally lean toward making biology a rote memorization subject. Reasoning about biology in the way that it appears in nature is, in these mediums, going against the grain. It happens, but it's not the default. Your story about having a good biology teacher is this exception, not the default.
Complex things requires easy to use systems that reflect that complexity. That's the subject here - how do we build these methods of communication and understanding?
It's going to be a few hundred years before we get to that point, if we ever get there.
Bio is just really complicated, there may never be anything like a 'easy to use system.' We're still on the beach of it's ocean, counting the colors of stones.
For instance, in developmental bio (going from one cell to a functioning infant) we have three theories of how a cell determines what it should develop into: 1) The English model: The daughter cells get told what to be by the mother cells 2) The American model: the daughter cells take a look around themselves and determine what to be by taking a poll of the other nearby cells 3) The Las Vegas model: it's all random with lots of apoptosis and going broke.
They very fact that we think these models are right is very concerning to the field. We know deep down that none of this can be correct, but have not been able to disprove it all that well. To be clear here: dev biologists are nearly certain that their theories are crap, based nearly entirely on gut feelings. That's how gun-shy biologists are with any whiff of a 'grand theory'. That's how complicated things are.
It's not a given that bio can really ever be reduced back down to something understandable and simultaneously reflective of the 'real' state of things. That's not something nature is obliged to provide us.
We've had the wetware for understanding complex systems for thousands of years. We added symbolics for communicating complex things later.
Nowadays, many people weak in symbolics are excellent in understanding, and many people expert in symbolics are novice in understanding.
I am not sure whether we are missing a symbolic form that is closer aligned to understanding, or whether we've simply overvalued symbolics at the expense of understanding.
Right now I don't know of an AI tool that can make a halfway decent biology diagram, let alone a complex 3d animation of a biological process you can talk to and ask questions of. The article was a call to action for this type of tooling.
I'd love to see this thread move from 'my experience in school was good/bad' to 'what if we made something that did X' or 'have you seen Y' :)
We have the cognitive ability to reason about the relationships between about 150 humans. So, if thats a plausible upper limit for how many genes we can hold in our head too, then we’re toast. Each cell has thousands of distinct proteins, and many more small molecules. When we knock out one gene, we regularly see hundreds change in response. We just can’t hold that large of a system in our head. Parts of it, maybe, but genes are so interconnected that it’s very hard to draw a sensible boundary between distinct “parts”. Also biology behaves in really unintuitive ways. Feedback loops, randomness, long tailed distributions. These are very important concepts for biological systems. Humans are also notoriously bad at thinking about all of them.
It’s just too big and too weird to try to think about a single cell. Forget tissues or organs.
So, I think computational modeling will be really important to teach to students early. We have to rely on computer models because its too complex for our brains.
At least in the UK (the States may be different), you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned.
At A-Level standard, you are taught the physical basis of epigenetic modification (what he describes as switching genes on or off - although that in itself is a too-binary simplification, it's more to do with up- and down-regulation of expression). You're also taught other fascinating processes such as alternative splicing - where a single gene can express many different proteins.
During my first year of undergrad at a so-so Russell Group university, the history of biology featured prominently in lectures - especially those on the evolution of genetics as a field. The inherent fuzziness of categories and concepts in biology was also made very clear. I distinctly remember a lecturer telling us (in response to a question about why we say bacteria don't have membrane-bound organelles, when the topic of the lecture - the magnetosome - was clearly an exception to this rule) that when we say something is 'always true' in biology, we mean it happens 80%+ of the time, and when we say something 'never happens' in biology, we really mean that it happens less than 20% of the time.
I do agree that there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?) - but I think this case is overblown by the author.
> you are taught many of the concepts and underlying reasoning that the author bemoans not having learned
> there is sometimes a bit too much of an emphasis on rote learning the chemical minutiae at the expense of the broader, more important concepts (Krebs cycle, anyone?)
But note that the author was almost certainly only talking about high school biology.
I think the situation is that in the US, an AP Biology (bio class for seniors in high school) teacher has to trade off teaching the concepts with teaching to the AP test all the seniors will take, and that test prep does involve stuff like memorizing the Krebs cycle so that you can forget right after the test. My teacher did a pretty good job of this balance and I got a lot out of it, but mileage may vary. Next, the kids will do well on the test and that will let them dodge their university's biology requirement. That class would have been much better. (I'm was in exactly this camp.)