alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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It's not that they love to classify things, it's that you have no choice but to do so for people to know what you're talking about.
Not a lot of point in spending time researching something, only for no one to know what you're even referring to.
The use of latin doesn't help either. "Cytoplasmic net" (or better yet "plasma net") is a lot easier to understand, visualise and remember than "endplasmic reticulum".
>Much of biology you don't have to actually remember what things are called in order to understand the processes
But even that's besides the point of the fact that all these things are nothing more than abstractions created by humans, and ultimately it's all one giant soup of interacting molecules.
> The field of biology was created by people who love to classify/name things.
More to the point, the field of biology is so complex that for the longest time we could only name and classify things. Understanding came later, when we'd accummulated enough data and had hints from chemistry and other fields.
The problem is that once we gain that understanding, we add that as one more chapter to our textbooks, one more lesson tacked on, instead of rethinking the curriculum around our understanding.