I should have loved biology (2020)

Nicholas_C

>It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?

srean

This is one of those perennial HN favorites https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20bi...

intrasight

I realized after getting a degree in engineering from CMU that I should've loved biology so I went back to school after working as a software engineer for a year and studied neurobiology. And since then, I've suggested that people early in their career should take a break and go back to school and study something totally different.

RivieraKid

One of the threads like this one has prompted me to start reading the book Molecular Biology of the Cell several years ago. I need to get back to it.

janalsncm

Physics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too. The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read. Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy. One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it. Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.

jhbadger

>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology] You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!

criley2

I absolutely experienced this in college. I signed up as a computer science student, as one does. I took all of the freshmen classes across broad topics, and the first biology class was basically just like the article describes. Words and memorization and microbiology and boring stuff. Who cares, let's get back to the dorm room to play CounterStrike on the school LAN. But then I took the second required biology course. And rather than be about memorizing the krebs cycle, it was macrobiology. Ecology, evolution, and everything I hadn't realized I wanted to learn about the world around me. I instantly fell in love and 99'd the class. I changed my major to Biology, went pretty heavy into biology and chemistry, and didn't take more than a few Java classes in Comp Sci. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology. I'm still a software developer, mind you, but I wouldn't trade the Biology degree for anything. Learning statistics, experimental design and experimentation, and just having the opportunity to deep dive into the physical world from the biggest to the smallest details, it was life-changing. I still ended up learning data models, algorithms, and probably would be a better engineer if I had dug in deep on comp sci, but I like to think the biology degree helped me be a better developer for different reasons.

noname123

This is a very romantic view of life sciences. Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response. The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America. The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.

yipinwong

If i had access to articles/blogs/YT/TT/AI like this, I'd have had become Leornardo Da Vinci. I used to be inquisitive but coming from a poor neighborhood, I had no access in the olden days. This type of article should persist.

alpn

[2020] previous discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590

teekert

I did always love biology, not because of my teachers, but because of my own wonder of it ("I sort of get how an engine works, but how do humans work?"). And I became a biologist, and thinking about the things this author describes indeed still blows my mind. I get the high level of a lot of things now, but every time I need to do a deep dive, I feel like "how the hell can this even work". But it works, and it works incredibly well. I still think it's the nicest field to be in (even though I love computers and Linux and FOSS as well).

loourr

This resonated strongly. I hated biology as a kid but have been blown away at the wonder of it all as I've started to study it as an adult. I wish more of the magnificence and wonder of it all was conveyed vs the rote memorization that is so commonly taught.

saintaardvark

I had a similar experience with nature. My dad was the outdoors type, a conservation officer who loved hunting & fishing; I wanted nothing more than to be inside reading an encyclopedia. I have always liked science, but biology was just one subject among many. When I became an adult, I gravitated to computers because there is so much to learn about them. My focus has been infrastructure, but I've picked up software development, assembly, kernel hacking, data science, and a dozen other things along the way (mostly at amateur levels, but I'm always happy to learn). I have have other interests (economics, homebrewing, astronomy, sociology, making music), but in each of those cases I learned what I wanted to after a few years & moved away. When covid hit, I picked up natural history through iNaturalist -- and that has so far been very very different, much more the same kind of endless opportunity for discovery that computers felt like. There is so much weirdness in biology. Parasitic wasps with genes that came from viruses that suppress caterpillar immune systems, male spiders that have appendages (pedipalps) that look like boxing gloves, the many kinds of bumble bees around me, introduced species, nests, microorganisms -- it's insane . It's higher up the stack than the stuff the author is describing, but no less wonderfully complex and fascinating. The quote from Lewis Thomas really hit home for me: "People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that" [cell|insect|weird relationship|phenology|behaviour]. Kudos to the author for putting this all into words so well, and for adding a dozen books to my must-read list.

baist0

OMG! it's true! I have skipped so much!

zabzonk

As an ex-microbiologist, the thing I can't stand is how smelly life is. Be in the same room as gangrenous flesh and your intestinal fortitude will be severely tested. Other than that, I don't mind it, but I still prefer silicon.

randomImmigrant

Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did). I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology. Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems. What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people. But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization. But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies. The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure. But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.

drc500free

This is why I loved biology; I must have had better high school teachers than the OP, because basically all of what he writes was conveyed.

vipshek

This article is ostensibly about biology but it's really about pedagogy—how traditional education squeezes out the sense of discovery and turns many subjects into rote memorization exercises. This reminds me of the pedagogical philosophy of Seymour Papert, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's "genetic epistemology" argues that knowledge and understanding is created by interacting with environments, which traditional educational approaches fail to provide. Papert combined Piaget's ideas with the emergence of computing to argue that children should be taught subjects in a hands-on, exploratory way - and not just for teaching computing! The idea is that by programming in simplified languages, children can discover ideas in subjects like mathematics and grammar - deriving them as they try to solve problems instead of having them dictated to them. Suppose that biology was taught in a game-like environment where students were designing cells or organisms in some way. Maybe the game could be structured so that each organelle could be "discovered" by the student as they designed the cell to survive in some environment. Perhaps that'd make the purpose of each cell component more grounded and memorable. Papert's book Mindstorms covers all this in detail, and I highly recommend reading it. I feel like it's especially important today given fears of how AI will affect childhood education. At best, I hope that computing can be a boon to education instead of a detriment if it's woven into pedagogy thoughtfully.

ecshafer

I like this blog and its a romantic view of Biology, and I agree with the sentiments. However I would say its a narrow view of large issue: Lack of Rigor and Depth in School . Biology doesn't get enough into the nuts and bolts, and instead focuses on regurgitation of facts, with not enough experimentation. Mathematics doesn't have enough of a focus on rigor, proofs and building models from first principles, just a formulaic approach of decomposing equations and fitting them into patterns to solve. History is a list of facts, with a little bit of essays connecting ideas, where you might say how the Leviathan affected Enlightenment thinking but you don't actually read the Leviathan, and learn how Napoleonic warfare changed things, but don't read primary evidence. Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.

ricardo81

I did (and do albeit somewhat in a neglected way) love biology. As much as I admired pure science (maths / physics) there is a certain romantic-ness to the real world application of chemistry and the emergence of it I suppose at the most scientific PoV, but really just that it's so complex and we appreciate the emergence of it. I wrote biology-online.org shortly after education and it's achieved a few thousand years worth of page views. wikipedia tends to cover all those informational queries nowadays and I've been programming for 20 years since. It's so easy to forget that much of our inspiration comes from biology (and ecology of course) and its emergent behaviour. When I hear hype about anything I think about how it's taken 4 billion years for anyone to say it and you simply can't forget we're standing on the shoulders of giants.