From the article, "A few months ago, I started a magazine assignment to answer some questions about SARS-CoV-2 and the immune system. I encountered paragraphs like this"... and the author links to this this [1] New Yorker article about COVID that was published November 2020. So from context clues, was probably published in late 2020.
James Somers is awesome. Every now and then, I see another of his articles that comes up here. Really great writer, who didn't set out to be one, but switched from a career in tech I believe.
> I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.
You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring.
We are solutions along a physical, biogeochemical optimization gradient. We're fit to the world around us like a glove.
We're also distributed systems. Every sub-component of every single one of our cells is a computational system in flux, dynamically adjusting to trillions of inputs every single second.
Even the packing of "junk DNA" is a calculated encoding of spatiotemporal expression dynamics and far downstream behavior.
We are the universe encoding behavior unto itself. Exchanging gasses, assembling polymers, replicating, carefully kept in balance. Battling against other systems attempting to utilize the same energy gradients.
> I think we also need inspiration. There is a romance in biology, as in any other science, that a movie like Good Will Hunting could bring out. We need heroes. Whoever delivers us from this pandemic in the form of a slam dunk vaccine, or a cheap quick reliable test, should become a household name, not for their own glory but for our kids—a Feynman for them to dream about someday becoming.
Biology doesn't have the rockets or the fancy computers, but it stands to one day unlock some of the best things for humanity: a world free of diseases, long lives, and perhaps one day, even immortality.
The only reason it's not sexier is that it's still in the punch card phases. We're just starting to scratch the surface of the computers that make up ourselves.
> You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring.
This. I'd say it applies to a lot, If not all subjects.
In my experience teachers rarely explained, why we need the subject, and what's it's use. Now I see myself digging thing on my own, and realising how cool a lot of subjects are.
An explanation for why X is true must also be an explanation of why not X is false. But God could perfectly well explain why not X is true and X is false. If God has no predictive power, if it's consistent with anything, it can't be used to distinguish between any possibilities, and hence can't explain why they should hold.
Otherwise you can't test it, for one. It is easy to concoct all-encompassing explanations that can't be proven wrong. Here's one I just made up: instead of one god, there is a pantheon of gods. And a different one for each universe. Ours is governed by the Norse league. Prove me wrong.
Even more fundamental: anything ~false built on top of Naive Realism can exist indefinitely not just undiscovered to be false, but cannot even be identified as a candidate for consideration.
Let's hope we don't have this problem here on planet Earth, and especially at a core, fundamental level(s)!
Hmm, maybe my explanation above was too ELI5, you'll have to accept my apologies if so, and you may need to explain in more detail what you're asking exactly there.
Meanwhile can you expand on your take on Naive Realism here? What's the specific issue with Naive Realism you're pointing out? (am aware there's issues)
Humans contemplate "reality" on top of various models of it, as well as various other processes (cognition) and phenomena (culture), thinking they are contemplating reality itself. And the whole world runs on this. It's kind of funny if you think about it.
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
Feynman restates it from a different angle: he calls these kinds of things vague theories and states that they are not very useful to scientists because they can be hard to prove wrong.
Throughout he gives a bunch of examples of such vague theories that cannot be proven wrong. (eg that moogles did it, or the positions of the planets influenced when to go to the dentist, or maybe it was caused by flying saucers. )
He also points out Newtons laws which are not vague, and thus can and have been proven somewhat wrong since (see also: Einstein) .
I think further down our thread, this is in re whether saying "God did it" (or "A wizard did it" etc ) has Explanatory power:
* Why do the planets move in ellipses: "God did it"
* Why do the tides go in and out: "A wizard did it"
* How fast will an apple hit my head if dropped from precisely 10.25 meters, and will I need to wear a helmet? "Zeus knows the answer"
etc.
I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
(ps. The answer to the latter should be about ~14.17 m/s ~= 50.4 km/h . Something you could go out and measure for yourself outdoors if you like! )
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything
> and hence can explain nothing.
If I'm not mistaken, what you're referring to is the fundamental unknowability of certain things, and this state often causes the mind to hallucinate "facts" like the two above. "It is unknown, therefore it is a fact that anything is possible" is plain bad thinking, but paradoxically it is very popular thinking (thus: proper thinking), even among relatively smart people.
There must be something going on here that can "explain" (in a non-incorrect fashion) all of this, it seems unlikely that we've stumbled upon never before encountered phenomena.
> I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
I too enjoy building simple strawmen and knocking them down:
"Science exists, and "is correct", and I believe in it, therefore my personal opinion of fact is factual in fact".
I wonder which of these two strawmen most closely matches actual conversations that can be found on the internet. I constantly hear stories about religious people saying incredibly silly things (over and above standard silly Normative Cognition), but I rarely ever encounter it in real life. What I describe in my strawman though (essentially: scientism, the ~religion of science, etc), it is extremely common on all social media platforms, ion TV, in the newspaper, etc.
Ok, so I may have checked your comment history. You seem smart! Are you just over-thinking things horrendously? [*]
I'm just trying to talk about Falsifiability. That's the only thing I'm talking about.
If you posit an unfalsifiable ( == untestable) hypothesis, then -unsurprisingly- that hypothesis can't be tested.
Fun for teasing people if you're subtle about it, absolutely! Leaves people really confused until they catch on!
But when troubleshooting or dealing with issues in the real world, it's probably best to stick to testable hypotheses.
I'm not really sure how to explain this any better, it's really basic stuff, so I figure you already know this? (I mean it's basically how you can debug a program or fix a car too. I think Feynman learned it by fixing radios as a teenager, and when he grew up he ended up applying it to quantum mechanics.)
[*] Or - worse yet ;-) - are you a philosophy major?
I ran into indirect realism quite a while ago, I think in neurophysiology or ethology to begin with. (A percept relating to an object is not the object itself).
Not sure why you bring up that and CWA here at this time though. Does it have something to do with falsifiability from your perspective? I think falsifiability is more of an OWA kind of thing though, isn't it? (The idea being that you never have sufficient information to know if something is true, only if it is positively false. That sounds pretty OWA to me, right?)
I'm interested to hear what you mean by "and the consequences" , because I truly have no idea what you might be seeing, and I'm really curious now. I get the impression you see people making certain kinds of mistakes?
I have a feeling you just made the stories below up.
Could you refer to an existing proof of these claims, or at least put it in some sort of a more logical form that can demonstrate that these things are necessarily true? Narrative format can make not actually true things appear true pretty easily.
Observer selection says a plausible materialistic mechanism for origin of life could be extremely unlikely on any given planet, and so could be an impossibly hard problem to solve.
Supernatural forces are a lazy explanation and don't offer any true insight. They have been invoked time and time again, and there has always been a natural explanation for phenomena that were once attributed to God(s). It's an intellectual dead end.
What you consider "Life" is just an awe-inspiring amount of complexity that has irked out an existence in the small, brief gradient of temperature our universe
has permitted.
The clouds of Jupiter, when viewed from a planetary scale, have a similar amount of [apparent] complexity.
We simply bias familiar complexity due to our evolutionary pathway.
A planet-sized fungal-like Gaia creature that "eats" clouds by atmospheric manipulation and is able to seed it's lower planetary orbit with proto-replicative molecules would scuff at such a self-centered bias.
Can you think of anything that might distinguish the complexity of life from the complexity of the clouds of Jupiter? Or do you think life is simply a nonsense concept?
>Or do you think life is simply a nonsense concept?
yes!
Just as Carl Sagan likened consciousnesses as an emergent phenomenon that happens somewhere between the neuron count of a worm and a dog an a certain ape; " Life " is a word we use for a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF COMPLEXITY.
we are not a single species in a vacuum - we are clearly, nearly obviously, the product of our environment, literally.
We are a biosphere, stuck in a gravity well, fed by the sun: without Sol (gravity really under the hood), we cannot afford the fight on the second law of thermodynamics. We use it to locally displace some entropy and get us a lil complexity, even if temporarily.
life is just some magnitude of complexity. its an illusion.
we are not special.
we came from tidally-stirred, protein-packed, slurry pools of eventually-replicative molecules. probably packed tightly into some mineral for a backbone at first; eventually crossing the line from a repeating geologic/acid formation and more of a proto-algaeic-slime of a chain of molecules that depend on each other.
shit is moot. once you have replication - even if that seems like a massive gap to you (not to me), you have a resource-competing-selfish entity. It will then innately, by its own merit of existence, compete against itself for its own resources and be subject to random mutations due to ionizing radiation.
ionization radiating is pretty universal, so no leap there.
the molecules would be subject to increasing selective pressure.
Darwin's theory.
either we here, or we aint.
the universe, time, and pretty much everything is dominated by bacteria like molecules, i am sure.
"intelligence (as we know it)" - (the ability to arrive at the same state from different inputs) is a mini-max point in many evolutionary pathways that we can easily see felines arriving at in our absence.
I think it's far more likely that we're the simulation of some super intelligence than the creation of a mythological deity worshiped by ancient goat herders.
But to each simulant, their own programming. Unicuique suum.
What do we call the people who created the simulation? Is it unreasonable that they would give us stories to impose their own morals on us? Maybe they have a punishment or a reward for you depending on your qualities, such as getting to live in the host universe or getting stuck in an undesirable environment.
I’m more partial to God being Humans that survived the flood (being real and caused by an asteroid exploding over ice caps) and have been chilling underwater, occasionally popping their UAPs up and poking around. But I don’t hold that view too firmly.
OP's article lists the Krebs cycle as an example, to me the Krebs Cycle is a prime example of how not to teach biology.
Most high schools and every biology course uses the cycle as a milestone of learning, but usually teaches it by pure rote learning, words that have no meaning. Oxaloacetate turns into citrate via the citrate synthase and Acetyl CoA (I had to look this up; of course I learned it three times by heart and forgot immediately after the exam). Most of my teachers taught it like this, a meaningless collection of words and steps that you have to rote learn.
Except for my microbiology professor! We spent a semester learning about the basics of biochemistry, why reactions have to happen the way they happen, until we all had a relatively clear logic. We learned the Krebs cycle at the end, as a special kind of application and use case of the inherent logic. We want to 'reactivate' NAD+ into NADH, so we need an H+. But look at our Malate! There's a nice H dangling there in the OH group. Hs are taken off by dehydrogenases because they de- the hydrogen, so surely our helper is called the malate dehydrogenase. And it is! What happens to an O that has it's H taken away? the most usual outcome is a double-binded O. Which is why our oxaloacetate looks the way it does. If you know what malate looks like you know what oxaloacetate looks like. (And so on).
Of course you can't explain the entire cycle and its terms this way, as names like malate are there for historic reasons, but it gets you far closer to the inherent beauty of the thing. It's just a pity it's usually taught by rote.
I sympathize with the author even if my gripe is different. I’m surrounded by people who read pop science and regurgitate things they have no clue nor conception of. It’s very difficult to have an honest discussion and to ask “what if?” and say “interesting, I don’t know” with people who read books and think they have it figured out because so—and-so said so.
I should have loved curiosity, but what I’ve found are people looking to justify existing thinking.
Hmm, I'm studying first year biology at uni and they convey a lot of wonder with it. Especially when at the same time you study human bioscience (organ systems, tissues etc) and chemistry for biology the sheer wonder of all the little machines working together effectively by random collisions comes off as magical.
I just wish we had a better way to see it. Some sort of approach that would allow us to observe molecules in real time :| An electron microscope of some very dead extracted material just isn't the same.
My experience with high school biology was similar, though that might have been that particular teacher. He was close to retirement and while he could have identified most plants in the region, he could not answer most of my questions about biochemistry.
I found that the first semester of biochemistry at university alone changed my understanding of biology. The quality and depth of the education was so much higher than what I had in school before. A large part is of course that it is so much more focused, you could not go to that depth in a general purpose school education.
It does go again in a different direction later. Once you learned the general principles you might have to learn all the inconsistent details that are present in the actual biological systems. And the immune system is certainly one of the worst offenders here. There are a lot of really fascinating aspects about it, especially how it adapts and learns. But you quickly get to a points where you're just overwhelmed by the incredibly amount of different parts that play a role in it.
> My experience with high school biology was similar, though that might have been that particular teacher. He was close to retirement and while he could have identified most plants in the region, he could not answer most of my questions about biochemistry.
That's a totally different problem. Nobody can expect a teacher (or scientist, or ...) to be equally interested in all subfields. Of course, they should know "what is needed" - whatever that means, for example to teach the part of biochemistry that is in the curriculum.
I, as a mathematician, for example don't care much about statistics or number theory. As somebody generally interested in biology I don't care about biochemistry.
So, as long as he didn't just say "fuck off", you can't blame your teacher for liking something else than you did.
when were you in highschool? I took honors bio back in 93 in highschool and it was all memorization of aniimal and plants parts. I'm taking bio 180 at UW now (20 years after graduating college) and it's all about genetics and statistics. They're almost different subjects. One is closer to farming and exploring and the latter is more science and the unseen. I could totally see an end of career hs teacher staying with the older style.
Also I bet that dude knew where all of the morels grew.
A bit later than you, and not in the US. But as my teacher was born around World War 2 (estimated from their retirement date) I don't think it is unexpected that they had a very different view. Biology has fundamentally changed in that timeframe.
My teacher back then was in ww2. He actually was one of the army kids in the closer bunkers who were somewhat unwitting test subjects. He had a recording of him being interviewed after one of the first tests. He said he was 18 at the time. He said "I think this might just change the world" or something like it. I couldn't find the interview with a quick google. His last name was stocker. He was actually a great teacher in basic science the year before which is why I took honors bio but I zoned out memorizing all of the names of parts of sponges. The kids in regular bio were dissecting pig fetuses.
The man had a photo of an orangutan on his desk facing class with the name plate "moker joe". "An orangutan could get about 50% on this test", he'd say and walk around saying to the kids he knew weren't studying "Moker Joe's gonna get you Craig". Some of the smart kids pointed out to him that Moker would probbably get way less than 50% at random probability. "yeah but the kids moker's gonna get don't know that".
Anyway it's definitely more interesting this time around and only taking one class at a time.
> In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions.
So - not just for biology - what are some good books or other learning resources that encourage questing, curiosity and wonder?
The first one that comes to mind is Feynman’s Lectures.
Most of the pop sci books are useless for practical use cases, and similarly the Feynman lectures self select for the physics/mathematically inclined.
Biology is a leaky abstraction, it's very hard to do anything with rigor without having a strong foundation in the fundamentals. You see the same discussion on hacker news when it comes to music, people are more interested in mapping programming concepts to music notation and complaining about western music presentation than the music itself. For biology, you need need to have a firm understanding of the central dogma and biochemistry if you want to do anything beyond surface level empirical trial and error. Most people, especially the "hacker types", only have a vague understanding of the former i.e. DNA translation and transcription and that's about the limit. You absolutely have to gain an intuition for biochemistry if you want to do things with rigor, otherwise you will just be the biotech equivalent of a bootcamp web developer, fit for washing test tubes and not much else.
Absolutely right. These basic concepts like the central dogma aren't especially hard to learn, but it's important to really understand them deeply if you want anything to make sense.
Among textbooks, Molecular Biology of the Gene by James Watson et al. is a good starting point to understand the central dogma: DNA -> RNA -> Protein. Likewise Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al. for cell biology.
An Introduction to Systems Biology by Uri Alon is good for the more mathematically inclined once you're ready to get more advanced, though you should really have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of molecular and cellular biology first.
None of this is for the faint of heart, but it's not especially difficult either. It's unfortunate that it's hard to get hands-on experience with biology once you've graduated from college, which helps a lot to connect the dots, but there are still plenty of great resources out there.
Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of my all-time favorite books. Read it 15 years ago, rereading it now in the 7th (newest) edition. If someone has read the books you've listed, done the exercise and has a comprehensive understanding of the material, but no biology degree, only a passion for learning about cell biology, are there job options to keep feeding that passion?
Work/volunteer as a minimum wage software developer lab rat (or whatever your day job speciality is). There are plenty of labs that are in need of free labor when it comes to software/engineering support in general, just ask around.
If you're an experienced software developer, you can also just get a job as a software developer at any number of companies in pharma and biotech. No need to do it for free.
Funny thing : having never seen the term "central dogma" before, I looked it up, and Wikipedia says that this one (directly calling out your reference) is an incorrect version, in fact has been proven wrong in the last decades, while the original Central Dogma holds.
Even funnier thing : I kind of lied : I saw that term for the first time two weeks ago... when watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. Where it's a location. But then I guess it also throws around terms like "apoptosis" (which I did knew and which made me raise an eyebrow) as sciencey sounding words (still somewhat appropriate to the context in a metaphorical way), so of course it couldn't resist "Central Dogma" as a play on words between biology, location, and (anti-) "Orientalization" of Christianity !
The Wikipedia article is correct in a pedantic way, but for all practical purposes, DNA -> RNA -> Protein is the place to start. Then you layer on the myriad complications that have evolved over four billion years.
Just to add as a caveat that Wohlleben's books are regarded quite critically by most forest ecologists I know. The general consensus seems to be that he picks up on real phenomena and is a vivid science communicator, but has a tendency to greatly exaggerate what we know.
> 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.
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.
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.
I guess a less usual one, compared to the other comments: For me it was StarCraft multiplayer, had to type fast so I could get back to controlling my units.
Because I was rapidly going back and forth between the keyboard and mouse, it resulted in an unusual style where I use the outline of the keyboard for hand placement, and attempting to use the home row slows me down significantly.
Starseige: Tribes and Counter-Strike: Sometimes a short thing while the character is coasting through the air.
Tribes in particular also had a voice-tree, and while it was shorter than prose it still encouraged a certain degree of touch-typing.
For example, typing VSAF (mnemonically [start][self][attack][flag]) led to text and prerecorded audio for "I will attack the enemy flag." Little of it survives now beyond references like VGZ for "Shazbot!"
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.
When I took biochemistry as an undergrad, it was taught by a somewhat eccentric professor who instead taught it more like "History of Molecular Biology". And it was super interesting.
But all the premed students hated it lol
Besides that, every other bio course I ever took was just rote memorization (except ones taught in math/engineering departments). Bio 101 was maybe the hardest class I ever took because it was so damn boring to memorize all those random facts.
This is why I didn't take it when I got my undergrad. I was good at formulas and bad at memorization. I'm taking it now 20 years later after getting an EMT certification and realizing that yes I can do memorization. That said I'm taking intro bio right now and it's not that much memorization. End goal os ti take org to see how bad it is.
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.
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.
Health coverage is only worth a few thousand dollars. It's not a $50k bonus. They earn well below a typical developer salary. It's not like our cushy jobs. Yes they have extra vacation time but have to use a lot of that on unpaid planning time or additional study for ongoing certification requirements.
I agree with you. That's why I replied to a person that said they get paid below average as 1) they get paid around average as you say, and 2) they have a bunch of additional job perks that make it harder to calculate exactly.
The bureau of labor statistics is clear about the fact they are not paid less than average. Elementary and High school teachers make $73,890 mean wage compared to $65,470 for "all occupations":
You can make this more complex and say that people with equivalent training get paid more, and they do, but then they don't have the perks I mentioned, like huge vacations, having the pleasure of teaching (there's a reason so many people want to teach and supply of teachers doesn't dwindle), pension after you retire, healthcare, and so on.
"Ballpark Figure" means roughly or approximately. It is roughly around the average income. Within a standard deviation, therefore within the average salary range. A few dollars of benefits doesn't make a significant difference. Salaries have a distribution. It would be overly pedantic to say a salary is 1 cent higher than the exact average salary figure, therefore it is above average. That is not meaningful in the context of salary distribution.
The pay is pretty fair. They're teaching material that every high school graduate should theoretically be able to teach, so the barrier to entry is low. Most of the prep work can be reused for the next year. Their hours are OK, and they line up with when their kids are in school. Plus they get summers off. It's a shitty job if you actually care, but pretty cushy if you check out and just do what's required.
Teachers don't actually get a 3 month vacation in summer, they just do a shitton of unpaid labor to prep for the next school year while being told they should be grateful
One thing to keep in mind is teaching is a psychologically demanding job. A good manager will provide the tools needed to succeed professionally and may provide you with the tools to deal with personal issues, but they ultimately have the option to cut an employee loose if they cannot make positive contributions to the workplace. Contrast that to teaching. The measure of success of a teacher is the success of the students who they teach. They often learn details of a student's life that few managers would ever learn of their employees. A well functioning adult would have difficulty dealing with these things, never mind a child or teenager. These are things like children who have had a parent who committed suicide, teenagers who are aging out of the foster care system, students with psychological conditions that would preclude them from most workplaces. These, and many more things, leave teachers working in an environment where a portion of the students are not ready to learn no matter how skilled the teacher is at motivating and delivering the curriculum.
Teachers have to do much more than that. While maintaining their own mental health, which is challenging given the environment they are frequently working in. (Even more so since most teachers enter the profession with optimism and compassion.)
Who has the financial ability to switch careers like that on a dime? The only place that such a move is feasible would be a state that doesn't require a degree to teach.
So...Arizona, California, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin. Otherwise, pony up the cash for another degree and probably put your other career on hold.
Anyone in the US with a CS degree, or anything technical where they took enough math, would easily be able to get a teaching license in most states. I have a CS degree and was able to get qualified to teach while getting paid as a full time teacher. That was in 2006, and they're even more desperate for teachers today.
That was Colorado. Anyone with a degree can get certified in New Hampshire and then you can easily transfer to other states.
>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.
Bad management kills passion instantaneously. The best teacher, faced with administration which will constantly kowtow to parents and refuse to discipline bad students, will lose their passion rapidly.
I had a friend who left teaching because of this sort of thing. They had a terrible experience as a student teacher and decided to work a job that paid less money.
The policies didn't just crush the teachers. Many of the students didn't care at all. There were behavioral problems, of course. One major issue he saw was that the school just pushed kids through the grades. There was a policy of an automatic minimum grade of 50% if the kid just put their name on the test... and they still at least one kid who would refuse to put their name on the paper!
Another friend of mine also went into teaching, but they refuse to work for public schools because of the bureaucracy, even though that sometimes means taking a paycut.
Even in districts where there is a union issue with firing, you could not easily find good replacements anyways. The pool of passionate teachers willing to take these roles is a small percentage of the total jobs, and they tend to self select into good higher paying districts with better behaved students.
"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."
This definitely happens in the US too. There have been documentaries made which include things like teachers just reading the news or a book whole letting the class do whatever it wants. Then the lawsuits and fight over tenure when the administration tried to fire them. Maybe the pay and benefits aren't great in many areas, but they're better than nothing, especially considering if you can do other things during work hours.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
Exactly, there is SO much cool stuff in biology that was already known 50+ years ago, even 100+ years ago, and when you're first learning biology, it's all new and fascinating. Unless you don't click with it! And then nothing helps, it's not like there's some magic angle that hooks everyone.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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 isn't another book like "Gödel, Escher, Bach"; when I ordered it at 16, because I was curious after having seen it mentioned in very different contexts, reading it was a life-changing event.
Because this is beyond what your typical high school teachers can discuss, quickly followed orders of biochemistry university textbooks, and thankfully now - a few decades on - I get paid for life-long learning, grateful for each moment of awe.
This is probably true for almost every subject, I found myself hating chemistry in high school mainly due to a bad teacher, but then I watch thiings like red nile on YT and am amazed hor funny this subject is.
Biology is unique; no other classical study, in modern practice, (can) contain both the sheer magnitude of complexity and the propensity to sweep away that same complexity with just a mere (if only temporary) classification.
This may be a result of academic laziness - the question begs, especially when the answer is known. But showing your work is tedious in some fields, and impossible in others. The questions posed in biology must be formulated to be answerable a-priori with evidence that often appears to be biased towards confirmation outside of the domains of specialized experts.
It's hard to inspire wonder in the juxtapositional environment where any discovery will, at minimum, produce a magnitude more questions - all to be relegated to labels until another wave of motivation and technological processes facilitate another plateau of progress to be confronted.
Biology is hard. It's like reverse engineering, from scratch, the watch you found on the beach; 50 years and 50 miles away from the watch factory.
It’s much, much harder than that! The watch was at least designed by a human, with parts that have at most a few simultaneous functions. All the parts are big enough to see, and made of metal so constant shape-shifting isn’t part of their functionality. It was mostly designed to be understandable. Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder.
Finding some temporary unifying mechanism or principle to organize understanding with is the only way to make progress, but the history of biology is packed with ideas that eventually hardened into dogma and blocked progress until somebody managed to blow them up.
>Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder.
Evolution is the difficult-to-understand answer to this; we tend to anthropomorphically and erroneously assign intent and purpose in a chicken/egg and begging-the-question way.
Life continues until it doesn't; to assign any more gravitas to our collection of localized complexity is the same awe that a plebeian holds when presented with a meatball-and-spaghetti-on-a-wall painting of modern art; ignorant to them that it was all that remained after a rather particularly sticky food fight.
Thank, Dan. Some further context: this was posted in another thread yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40102956. I liked it so much I yoinked it and submitted to main.
FWIW I don’t think it’s a bad thing to repost articles that were last posted years ago. I didn’t see this article when it was posted in 2020 and 2022, and I probably wouldn’t have seen it ever if you didn’t repost it now.
My high school biology teacher (Ms Dinnetz, Kungsholmen's Gymnasium) was absolutely amazing. She had a way of really briging the material to life, or rather, to death. That is, every time she taught us a new concept she would describe the way we'd die without that concept. An extremely memorable class.
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.)
It does seem to be the norm for interesting things to be presented in a boring way, rather than the exception. I'd guess this is partly because it's difficult to explain concepts clearly in the first place, let alone make the explanation engaging...
Hypothesis: If writing educational material is like throwing a dart, you have a bigger target if you aim for just "clear" — if you aim for "clear ∩ engaging" you have less chance of being "clear".
size(clear ∩ engaging) < size(clear)
I think time pressure would come into play with this. If you have the time, you can hone in on the "clear ∩ engaging" zone; but if you are pressed for time you just aim for "clear" which you'll hit more quickly.
And if you're really pressed for time (and/or uncaring), you might aim for "passable" rather than "clear"; something that your colleagues would OK, but that isn't particularly great. This is a larger target than "clear".
A bigger issue would be that a course isn't presented to a small group of kids who need to be engaged ("shaken by the shoulder" as the author says), it's for the whole class, including:
- kids who're already engaged, though aren't studying on their own and need some bare explainations
- kids who don't want to be engaged and won't be anyway
- kids who could be engaged depending on some other factor that no other kid cares about
Teaching to a class of 30+ kids means you can't take any extreme bet on what will work as a teaching method, and going for the most energy efficient way is a good practice in general.
Biology is interesting and intellectually attractive without having to try too hard but the way it is typically taught is off-putting for the more mathematical types.
Which is a pity. Biology is the very definition of complexity science and while more fundamental physics research becomes increasingly esoteric and unproductive, life sciences provide an opportunity and a tangible challenge to invent new mathematics and computational tools that are a quantum leap versus our current toolkit.
E.g., morphogenesis has attracted people like Alan Turing and Rene Thom but it feels that there is still a vast universe to be understood more fundamentally and accelerating that pace might be even of vital importance for our welfare.
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?
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' :)
> 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.
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.
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?
Even searching for this is tricky, because you’ll see a ton of information on how the cell “knows” mitosis has begun and the chain reaction of what happens after that, but I found this article from 2015 [0], which refers to this Nature article [1].
Your post really demonstrates how different people can have very different experiences of the same field. I love biology too, yet I care very little about chemicals or chemistry, and I wish there was more of a track for studying biology while abstracting away from the biological particulars. An approach to biology focused on the large scale- ecology, biospherics, and life exists as a geophysical phenomenon, would be really nice. That's the sort of thing that I care about, and you really don't need to reference the nanoscale in detail for considering it.
I think we can all agree though that the unstructured memorization approach benefits 0 students.
You might enjoy this course form Yale. It’s called Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. I listened to it as a podcast several years ago. It was my first introduction to “real”, not high school, biology, and it blew my mind. The material is presented at exactly the level you describe, mostly abstracted to general principles that guide all of life, but the professor also presents really fascinating examples of how each principle is instantiated in nature. I found it to be very approachable too, as a computer scientist.
It was a big part of my inspiration to go to grad school to study biology. So be careful haha. Don’t end up a grad student like me.
One final note is that biology is exceptionally weird in that the chemistry and the big principles like evolution are inseparable in reality. You can certainly study them separately but there are a few things that just won’t make sense without understanding some of the molecular details.
> I found my high school and college biology classes to be a dry litany of jargon and diagrams, sucking the wonder out of the incredible machinery of life.
Indeed, same here. As of myself I always liked the biology but the way it was teached was always far from what could be considered as good.
For example, I remember classes about proteins. There were some mentions about protein structures, from aminoacid sequence to 3-d shape. But it was never explained what the proteins are actually doing and why they need to have different shapes. Why do we need so much of them? I remember that it was very profound experience when I discovered how complex is the molecular machinery and I started to look on the biochemistry from completely different perspective
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] thread(He says it was from his blog, but it's not actually in the blog.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-corona...
You just had bad teachers. The subject is all at once beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring.
We are solutions along a physical, biogeochemical optimization gradient. We're fit to the world around us like a glove.
We're also distributed systems. Every sub-component of every single one of our cells is a computational system in flux, dynamically adjusting to trillions of inputs every single second.
Even the packing of "junk DNA" is a calculated encoding of spatiotemporal expression dynamics and far downstream behavior.
We are the universe encoding behavior unto itself. Exchanging gasses, assembling polymers, replicating, carefully kept in balance. Battling against other systems attempting to utilize the same energy gradients.
> I think we also need inspiration. There is a romance in biology, as in any other science, that a movie like Good Will Hunting could bring out. We need heroes. Whoever delivers us from this pandemic in the form of a slam dunk vaccine, or a cheap quick reliable test, should become a household name, not for their own glory but for our kids—a Feynman for them to dream about someday becoming.
Biology doesn't have the rockets or the fancy computers, but it stands to one day unlock some of the best things for humanity: a world free of diseases, long lives, and perhaps one day, even immortality.
The only reason it's not sexier is that it's still in the punch card phases. We're just starting to scratch the surface of the computers that make up ourselves.
This. I'd say it applies to a lot, If not all subjects.
In my experience teachers rarely explained, why we need the subject, and what's it's use. Now I see myself digging thing on my own, and realising how cool a lot of subjects are.
Turns out, its chlorophyll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
For a hypothesis to have explanatory power, it must be falsifiable. Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
What observation in your mind would falsify the existence of God?
> and hence can explain nothing.
Could you explain your reasoning here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Let's hope we don't have this problem here on planet Earth, and especially at a core, fundamental level(s)!
Meanwhile can you expand on your take on Naive Realism here? What's the specific issue with Naive Realism you're pointing out? (am aware there's issues)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
(More seriously, Indirect Realism is actually several centuries old already, isn't it?)
And yes, it is indeed very old...old and forgotten, even by those who have knowledge of it.
But it may even be worse: what is it in the first place?
The whole video is pretty good, and the specific point starting with "You cannot prove a vague theory wrong" is explained around 5:10.
In re:
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
Feynman restates it from a different angle: he calls these kinds of things vague theories and states that they are not very useful to scientists because they can be hard to prove wrong.
Throughout he gives a bunch of examples of such vague theories that cannot be proven wrong. (eg that moogles did it, or the positions of the planets influenced when to go to the dentist, or maybe it was caused by flying saucers. )
He also points out Newtons laws which are not vague, and thus can and have been proven somewhat wrong since (see also: Einstein) .
I think further down our thread, this is in re whether saying "God did it" (or "A wizard did it" etc ) has Explanatory power:
* Why do the planets move in ellipses: "God did it"
* Why do the tides go in and out: "A wizard did it"
* How fast will an apple hit my head if dropped from precisely 10.25 meters, and will I need to wear a helmet? "Zeus knows the answer"
etc.
I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
(ps. The answer to the latter should be about ~14.17 m/s ~= 50.4 km/h . Something you could go out and measure for yourself outdoors if you like! )
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything
> and hence can explain nothing.
If I'm not mistaken, what you're referring to is the fundamental unknowability of certain things, and this state often causes the mind to hallucinate "facts" like the two above. "It is unknown, therefore it is a fact that anything is possible" is plain bad thinking, but paradoxically it is very popular thinking (thus: proper thinking), even among relatively smart people.
There must be something going on here that can "explain" (in a non-incorrect fashion) all of this, it seems unlikely that we've stumbled upon never before encountered phenomena.
> I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
I too enjoy building simple strawmen and knocking them down:
"Science exists, and "is correct", and I believe in it, therefore my personal opinion of fact is factual in fact".
I wonder which of these two strawmen most closely matches actual conversations that can be found on the internet. I constantly hear stories about religious people saying incredibly silly things (over and above standard silly Normative Cognition), but I rarely ever encounter it in real life. What I describe in my strawman though (essentially: scientism, the ~religion of science, etc), it is extremely common on all social media platforms, ion TV, in the newspaper, etc.
I'm just trying to talk about Falsifiability. That's the only thing I'm talking about.
If you posit an unfalsifiable ( == untestable) hypothesis, then -unsurprisingly- that hypothesis can't be tested.
Fun for teasing people if you're subtle about it, absolutely! Leaves people really confused until they catch on!
But when troubleshooting or dealing with issues in the real world, it's probably best to stick to testable hypotheses.
I'm not really sure how to explain this any better, it's really basic stuff, so I figure you already know this? (I mean it's basically how you can debug a program or fix a car too. I think Feynman learned it by fixing radios as a teenager, and when he grew up he ended up applying it to quantum mechanics.)
[*] Or - worse yet ;-) - are you a philosophy major?
For fun: two things to try to fit into your model:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
Not sure why you bring up that and CWA here at this time though. Does it have something to do with falsifiability from your perspective? I think falsifiability is more of an OWA kind of thing though, isn't it? (The idea being that you never have sufficient information to know if something is true, only if it is positively false. That sounds pretty OWA to me, right?)
I'm interested to hear what you mean by "and the consequences" , because I truly have no idea what you might be seeing, and I'm really curious now. I get the impression you see people making certain kinds of mistakes?
It's like this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/they...
Could you refer to an existing proof of these claims, or at least put it in some sort of a more logical form that can demonstrate that these things are necessarily true? Narrative format can make not actually true things appear true pretty easily.
The clouds of Jupiter, when viewed from a planetary scale, have a similar amount of [apparent] complexity.
We simply bias familiar complexity due to our evolutionary pathway.
A planet-sized fungal-like Gaia creature that "eats" clouds by atmospheric manipulation and is able to seed it's lower planetary orbit with proto-replicative molecules would scuff at such a self-centered bias.
yes!
Just as Carl Sagan likened consciousnesses as an emergent phenomenon that happens somewhere between the neuron count of a worm and a dog an a certain ape; " Life " is a word we use for a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF COMPLEXITY.
we are not a single species in a vacuum - we are clearly, nearly obviously, the product of our environment, literally.
We are a biosphere, stuck in a gravity well, fed by the sun: without Sol (gravity really under the hood), we cannot afford the fight on the second law of thermodynamics. We use it to locally displace some entropy and get us a lil complexity, even if temporarily.
life is just some magnitude of complexity. its an illusion.
we are not special.
we came from tidally-stirred, protein-packed, slurry pools of eventually-replicative molecules. probably packed tightly into some mineral for a backbone at first; eventually crossing the line from a repeating geologic/acid formation and more of a proto-algaeic-slime of a chain of molecules that depend on each other.
shit is moot. once you have replication - even if that seems like a massive gap to you (not to me), you have a resource-competing-selfish entity. It will then innately, by its own merit of existence, compete against itself for its own resources and be subject to random mutations due to ionizing radiation. ionization radiating is pretty universal, so no leap there.
the molecules would be subject to increasing selective pressure.
Darwin's theory.
either we here, or we aint.
the universe, time, and pretty much everything is dominated by bacteria like molecules, i am sure.
"intelligence (as we know it)" - (the ability to arrive at the same state from different inputs) is a mini-max point in many evolutionary pathways that we can easily see felines arriving at in our absence.
we are nothing special.
But to each simulant, their own programming. Unicuique suum.
I’m more partial to God being Humans that survived the flood (being real and caused by an asteroid exploding over ice caps) and have been chilling underwater, occasionally popping their UAPs up and poking around. But I don’t hold that view too firmly.
That's exactly the opposite of being "beautiful, bizarre, fascinating, daunting, mysterious, majestic, labyrinthine, and awe-inspiring".
Most high schools and every biology course uses the cycle as a milestone of learning, but usually teaches it by pure rote learning, words that have no meaning. Oxaloacetate turns into citrate via the citrate synthase and Acetyl CoA (I had to look this up; of course I learned it three times by heart and forgot immediately after the exam). Most of my teachers taught it like this, a meaningless collection of words and steps that you have to rote learn.
Except for my microbiology professor! We spent a semester learning about the basics of biochemistry, why reactions have to happen the way they happen, until we all had a relatively clear logic. We learned the Krebs cycle at the end, as a special kind of application and use case of the inherent logic. We want to 'reactivate' NAD+ into NADH, so we need an H+. But look at our Malate! There's a nice H dangling there in the OH group. Hs are taken off by dehydrogenases because they de- the hydrogen, so surely our helper is called the malate dehydrogenase. And it is! What happens to an O that has it's H taken away? the most usual outcome is a double-binded O. Which is why our oxaloacetate looks the way it does. If you know what malate looks like you know what oxaloacetate looks like. (And so on).
Of course you can't explain the entire cycle and its terms this way, as names like malate are there for historic reasons, but it gets you far closer to the inherent beauty of the thing. It's just a pity it's usually taught by rote.
I should have loved curiosity, but what I’ve found are people looking to justify existing thinking.
Do you find yourself subject to that as well? If so, have you found a way to mitigate it?
I just wish we had a better way to see it. Some sort of approach that would allow us to observe molecules in real time :| An electron microscope of some very dead extracted material just isn't the same.
I found that the first semester of biochemistry at university alone changed my understanding of biology. The quality and depth of the education was so much higher than what I had in school before. A large part is of course that it is so much more focused, you could not go to that depth in a general purpose school education.
It does go again in a different direction later. Once you learned the general principles you might have to learn all the inconsistent details that are present in the actual biological systems. And the immune system is certainly one of the worst offenders here. There are a lot of really fascinating aspects about it, especially how it adapts and learns. But you quickly get to a points where you're just overwhelmed by the incredibly amount of different parts that play a role in it.
That's a totally different problem. Nobody can expect a teacher (or scientist, or ...) to be equally interested in all subfields. Of course, they should know "what is needed" - whatever that means, for example to teach the part of biochemistry that is in the curriculum. I, as a mathematician, for example don't care much about statistics or number theory. As somebody generally interested in biology I don't care about biochemistry. So, as long as he didn't just say "fuck off", you can't blame your teacher for liking something else than you did.
Also I bet that dude knew where all of the morels grew.
The man had a photo of an orangutan on his desk facing class with the name plate "moker joe". "An orangutan could get about 50% on this test", he'd say and walk around saying to the kids he knew weren't studying "Moker Joe's gonna get you Craig". Some of the smart kids pointed out to him that Moker would probbably get way less than 50% at random probability. "yeah but the kids moker's gonna get don't know that".
Anyway it's definitely more interesting this time around and only taking one class at a time.
> In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions.
So - not just for biology - what are some good books or other learning resources that encourage questing, curiosity and wonder?
The first one that comes to mind is Feynman’s Lectures.
Children. Best before they enter a school (or anything resembling something similar).
Biology is a leaky abstraction, it's very hard to do anything with rigor without having a strong foundation in the fundamentals. You see the same discussion on hacker news when it comes to music, people are more interested in mapping programming concepts to music notation and complaining about western music presentation than the music itself. For biology, you need need to have a firm understanding of the central dogma and biochemistry if you want to do anything beyond surface level empirical trial and error. Most people, especially the "hacker types", only have a vague understanding of the former i.e. DNA translation and transcription and that's about the limit. You absolutely have to gain an intuition for biochemistry if you want to do things with rigor, otherwise you will just be the biotech equivalent of a bootcamp web developer, fit for washing test tubes and not much else.
Among textbooks, Molecular Biology of the Gene by James Watson et al. is a good starting point to understand the central dogma: DNA -> RNA -> Protein. Likewise Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al. for cell biology.
An Introduction to Systems Biology by Uri Alon is good for the more mathematically inclined once you're ready to get more advanced, though you should really have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of molecular and cellular biology first.
None of this is for the faint of heart, but it's not especially difficult either. It's unfortunate that it's hard to get hands-on experience with biology once you've graduated from college, which helps a lot to connect the dots, but there are still plenty of great resources out there.
Funny thing : having never seen the term "central dogma" before, I looked it up, and Wikipedia says that this one (directly calling out your reference) is an incorrect version, in fact has been proven wrong in the last decades, while the original Central Dogma holds.
Even funnier thing : I kind of lied : I saw that term for the first time two weeks ago... when watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. Where it's a location. But then I guess it also throws around terms like "apoptosis" (which I did knew and which made me raise an eyebrow) as sciencey sounding words (still somewhat appropriate to the context in a metaphorical way), so of course it couldn't resist "Central Dogma" as a play on words between biology, location, and (anti-) "Orientalization" of Christianity !
> The first one that comes to mind is Feynman’s Lectures.
The early books by Richard Dawkins. Also later books when he writes about biology and not about religion.
A Brief History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben
In German: Josef Reichholf, "Mein Leben für die Natur".
> 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.
MSN messenger in my case haha
Because I was rapidly going back and forth between the keyboard and mouse, it resulted in an unusual style where I use the outline of the keyboard for hand placement, and attempting to use the home row slows me down significantly.
Tribes in particular also had a voice-tree, and while it was shorter than prose it still encouraged a certain degree of touch-typing.
For example, typing VSAF (mnemonically [start][self][attack][flag]) led to text and prerecorded audio for "I will attack the enemy flag." Little of it survives now beyond references like VGZ for "Shazbot!"
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.
But all the premed students hated it lol
Besides that, every other bio course I ever took was just rote memorization (except ones taught in math/engineering departments). Bio 101 was maybe the hardest class I ever took because it was so damn boring to memorize all those random facts.
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.
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.
Compared to what? Coal mining? Sewer maintenance?
> well-above-average remuneration
No. Below average remuneration.
Median Public School Teacher Salary in the United States: $57,947 [0]
Average salary in the U.S. in 2024: $59,384 [1]
[0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll...
The bureau of labor statistics is clear about the fact they are not paid less than average. Elementary and High school teachers make $73,890 mean wage compared to $65,470 for "all occupations":
1. https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/featured_data.htm#largest2
2. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252031.htm
You can make this more complex and say that people with equivalent training get paid more, and they do, but then they don't have the perks I mentioned, like huge vacations, having the pleasure of teaching (there's a reason so many people want to teach and supply of teachers doesn't dwindle), pension after you retire, healthcare, and so on.
The pay is pretty fair. They're teaching material that every high school graduate should theoretically be able to teach, so the barrier to entry is low. Most of the prep work can be reused for the next year. Their hours are OK, and they line up with when their kids are in school. Plus they get summers off. It's a shitty job if you actually care, but pretty cushy if you check out and just do what's required.
Teachers have to do much more than that. While maintaining their own mental health, which is challenging given the environment they are frequently working in. (Even more so since most teachers enter the profession with optimism and compassion.)
If teaching paid what programming does and vice-versa, I’d… think about becoming a teacher. But I still might not. It sucks, a lot.
So...Arizona, California, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin. Otherwise, pony up the cash for another degree and probably put your other career on hold.
That was Colorado. Anyone with a degree can get certified in New Hampshire and then you can easily transfer to other states.
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.
The policies didn't just crush the teachers. Many of the students didn't care at all. There were behavioral problems, of course. One major issue he saw was that the school just pushed kids through the grades. There was a policy of an automatic minimum grade of 50% if the kid just put their name on the test... and they still at least one kid who would refuse to put their name on the paper!
Another friend of mine also went into teaching, but they refuse to work for public schools because of the bureaucracy, even though that sometimes means taking a paycut.
This definitely happens in the US too. There have been documentaries made which include things like teachers just reading the news or a book whole letting the class do whatever it wants. Then the lawsuits and fight over tenure when the administration tried to fire them. Maybe the pay and benefits aren't great in many areas, but they're better than nothing, especially considering if you can do other things during work hours.
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.
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.
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'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.
I don't fully understand why they are separated and taught as separate things, I wonder what the rationale is, apart from expediency.
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.
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.
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.
Because this is beyond what your typical high school teachers can discuss, quickly followed orders of biochemistry university textbooks, and thankfully now - a few decades on - I get paid for life-long learning, grateful for each moment of awe.
This may be a result of academic laziness - the question begs, especially when the answer is known. But showing your work is tedious in some fields, and impossible in others. The questions posed in biology must be formulated to be answerable a-priori with evidence that often appears to be biased towards confirmation outside of the domains of specialized experts.
It's hard to inspire wonder in the juxtapositional environment where any discovery will, at minimum, produce a magnitude more questions - all to be relegated to labels until another wave of motivation and technological processes facilitate another plateau of progress to be confronted.
Biology is hard. It's like reverse engineering, from scratch, the watch you found on the beach; 50 years and 50 miles away from the watch factory.
Finding some temporary unifying mechanism or principle to organize understanding with is the only way to make progress, but the history of biology is packed with ideas that eventually hardened into dogma and blocked progress until somebody managed to blow them up.
Evolution is the difficult-to-understand answer to this; we tend to anthropomorphically and erroneously assign intent and purpose in a chicken/egg and begging-the-question way.
Life continues until it doesn't; to assign any more gravitas to our collection of localized complexity is the same awe that a plebeian holds when presented with a meatball-and-spaghetti-on-a-wall painting of modern art; ignorant to them that it was all that remained after a rather particularly sticky food fight.
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments)
Discussed at the time:
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
FWIW I don’t think it’s a bad thing to repost articles that were last posted years ago. I didn’t see this article when it was posted in 2020 and 2022, and I probably wouldn’t have seen it ever if you didn’t repost it now.
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.)
Hypothesis: If writing educational material is like throwing a dart, you have a bigger target if you aim for just "clear" — if you aim for "clear ∩ engaging" you have less chance of being "clear".
I think time pressure would come into play with this. If you have the time, you can hone in on the "clear ∩ engaging" zone; but if you are pressed for time you just aim for "clear" which you'll hit more quickly.And if you're really pressed for time (and/or uncaring), you might aim for "passable" rather than "clear"; something that your colleagues would OK, but that isn't particularly great. This is a larger target than "clear".
- kids who're already engaged, though aren't studying on their own and need some bare explainations
- kids who don't want to be engaged and won't be anyway
- kids who could be engaged depending on some other factor that no other kid cares about
Teaching to a class of 30+ kids means you can't take any extreme bet on what will work as a teaching method, and going for the most energy efficient way is a good practice in general.
Which is a pity. Biology is the very definition of complexity science and while more fundamental physics research becomes increasingly esoteric and unproductive, life sciences provide an opportunity and a tangible challenge to invent new mathematics and computational tools that are a quantum leap versus our current toolkit.
E.g., morphogenesis has attracted people like Alan Turing and Rene Thom but it feels that there is still a vast universe to be understood more fundamentally and accelerating that pace might be even of vital importance for our welfare.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
[0] https://news.stanford.edu/2015/09/28/cell-division-skotheim-...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14908
I think we can all agree though that the unstructured memorization approach benefits 0 students.
It was a big part of my inspiration to go to grad school to study biology. So be careful haha. Don’t end up a grad student like me.
One final note is that biology is exceptionally weird in that the chemistry and the big principles like evolution are inseparable in reality. You can certainly study them separately but there are a few things that just won’t make sense without understanding some of the molecular details.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6299F3195349CCDA&si=GQId...
Indeed, same here. As of myself I always liked the biology but the way it was teached was always far from what could be considered as good.
For example, I remember classes about proteins. There were some mentions about protein structures, from aminoacid sequence to 3-d shape. But it was never explained what the proteins are actually doing and why they need to have different shapes. Why do we need so much of them? I remember that it was very profound experience when I discovered how complex is the molecular machinery and I started to look on the biochemistry from completely different perspective
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.