I should have loved biology too

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

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.

My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously rich domain of real neurons which I knew nothing about. I worked as a software engineer for a couple years after graduating but then went back to school to study Neurophysiology. I did not pursue it as my area of work or research, but I am grateful for having had the opportunity to look at the world from the perspective of a biologist.

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 invested a great deal of effort over 30+ years to learn biology, which I started to love in high school when a teacher introduced us to molecular biology. Over time I've come to appreciate that biology is a huge field and people who master one area often know little to nothing about many others.

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.

The field of biology was created by people who love to classify/name things. This has resulted in what we have now: A subject where the prerequisite to understanding is the ability to read long passages of text littered with jargon and visualize what that might represent. Even if everyone's reading skills were where they should be, the second part is not a super common skillset.

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.

This entire article reminded me of reading the introduction to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (it's in the 25th anniversary edition).

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

I had always thought of biology as 'less rigorous' than the other sciences, and consequently less deserving of merit than, say, physics (my major). Less mathematical, not as rigorous, purely memorization devoid of deep understanding,.

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.

I took some programming courses in college. I loved computers and was very interested. However, the classes were a guy reading from a book about C. That was pretty much it. You did what the book said and hoped something stuck in your head.

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.

The post by James Somers that this article references at the top inspired me to buy the David Goodsell book The Machinery of Life. I would seriously recommend that to anyone who doesn't have a background in biology (like me). The phrase is a bit of a cliché, but it genuinely blew my mind, to the extent that I had to read it slowly because there's so much fascinating stuff packed into such a small book. It's obvious to me now, but the fact that so much of this stuff is about physical shapes locking into each other, and doing it at an almost unimaginable speed, was absolutely enthralling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My interest in biology isn’t driven at all by stories, history, or “adventure”, but rather by the awe-inspiring complexity and majesty of all the microbiological processes and their interplay.

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.

This resonates with me. I live in the Netherlands and back when I was a teenager, the English language started to become trendy so high schools began programmes where certain subjects were taught in English. I enrolled in one of these, generally liked it, but it made me hate biology.

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.

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

Well, this is incredible: "The gene sequence had a strange repeating structure, CAGCAGCAG… continuing for 17 repeats on average (ranging between 10 to 35 normally), encoding a huge protein that’s found in neurons and testicular tissue (its exact function is still not well understood). The mutation that causes HD increases the number of repeats to more than forty – a “molecular stutter” – creating a longer huntingtin protein, which is believed to form abnormally sized clumps when enzymes in neural cells cut it. The more repeats there are, the sooner the symptoms occur and the higher the severity"

Not the only sequence model that exhibits stutters on repetitive inputs...

My father, who was a teacher considered teaching classes to be a kind of performance art. For getting information, you are better off with a book (or other media). His goal was to put up a performance good enough to get students interested, and ideally, read the books later.

I majored in bioengineering and this I put this entirely to the fact that I participated in my country biology olympiad. I wasn't very good (never went to the international olympiad) but I met passionate people who made biology their career and were full of astonishing stories.

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)

Likewise in school it was a bit of a "lifeless recitation of names".

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.

Related:

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)

Aside:

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

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

Where do you get your biology news from?

Where do you think the field/s are going?

Is bio harder than other STEMs?

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

Love biology. I appreciate purist mathematician/logicians prefer chemistry and physics and it seems to be an inside joke in the professions that biology isn't on the same level when it comes to axiomatic things.

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.

We are surrounded by the most fantastical biological machines - which garner almost no attention, but as people we obsessed about incremental updates to phone technology.

These machines are also unbelievably complex - one of the challenges in biology is the sheer volume of stuff to know.

> 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.

I should write a blog post entitled "I should have loved computer science"

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

I do find the author's point weird. "I 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.

I've recently been delving into paleobiology, but what inspired it was very different from what's described in the post. I ingest a lot of pop educational stuff, mostly just for entertainment; but after a few years of just hearing the highlights and fun facts it became frustrating not being able to put all of it into context.

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.

If you want to be fascinated with biology just go to nature, or a park and stay there for a while. After a while you ll start to wonder about the birds, the plants the snails, the cats. Biology is descriptive science , nothing wrong with it

One thing I was suggested when learning a new subject: pick a book like "history and philosophy of physics/chemistry/biology". This has served me well. Most of the teachers are bad; most of the text book writers are bad. In my considered view, a philosopher of biology can write a better biology textbook for newbies.

In high school I was all math>physics>chemistry>biology. So I didn't take biology. Much to my peril. I didn't learn that I wasn't just a brain on a stick until I was 25! At some point "The Inner Life of the Cell" blew my mind.

I was lucky to have a great AP Biology teacher in high school. I ended up minoring in the field and it has shaped my career. Now my child is a little biologist. It is a fascinating subject and so core to everything we are and everything we do.

This article really strikes a chord: going through high-school biology I was shocked by the dessication of life in the way everything was presented, as if death itself had written the curriculum. I focussed on maths and suspected this was the hidden agenda: only present man-made constructs, treat the rest as if it were just wrong maths.

I'm just going to recommend the biology books written by Lewis Thomas. The books are collections of essays rather than science or text books. They blew my mind and opened up a deep respect for the field of biology and gave me a deep appreciation of life in all its forms, so many of which I didn't know existed.

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.

>or a brain remembers a memory

We don't actually know this very well, do we?

I think this is true for most any subject taught in school.

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.

I hated biology in school too. I wasn't interested in any of the memory tests. Still got the top grade, but dropped it when I could.

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.

ha i studied bio in undergrad > med illustration mfa then dropped out after a semester > ms in cs

I am sure the author is a fine person, but this is an incredibly self-entitled piece. A number of biologists managed to make it through these classes just fine, and are paid much less for pursuing their passion (and making the breakthroughs the author enjoys reading about while on vacation).

A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology 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.

I think one of the things I love most about biology is its uncertainty. Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based. Life is wibbily wobbly, lifey-wifey. An enormous soup of changing alleles cast as probabilities over eons all creating endless interactions you can't ever comprehend.

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.

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Genetic algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm :

> Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems via biologically inspired operators such as selection, crossover, and mutation.

AP®/College Biology: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology