I should have loved biology (2020)

This is a very romantic view of life sciences.

Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response.

The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America.

The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.

This article is ostensibly about biology but it's really about pedagogy—how traditional education squeezes out the sense of discovery and turns many subjects into rote memorization exercises.

This reminds me of the pedagogical philosophy of Seymour Papert, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's "genetic epistemology" argues that knowledge and understanding is created by interacting with environments, which traditional educational approaches fail to provide.

Papert combined Piaget's ideas with the emergence of computing to argue that children should be taught subjects in a hands-on, exploratory way - and not just for teaching computing! The idea is that by programming in simplified languages, children can discover ideas in subjects like mathematics and grammar - deriving them as they try to solve problems instead of having them dictated to them.

Suppose that biology was taught in a game-like environment where students were designing cells or organisms in some way. Maybe the game could be structured so that each organelle could be "discovered" by the student as they designed the cell to survive in some environment. Perhaps that'd make the purpose of each cell component more grounded and memorable.

Papert's book Mindstorms covers all this in detail, and I highly recommend reading it. I feel like it's especially important today given fears of how AI will affect childhood education. At best, I hope that computing can be a boon to education instead of a detriment if it's woven into pedagogy thoughtfully.

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

This is one of those perennial HN favorites

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20bi...

Physics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too.

The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read.

Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy.

One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it.

Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.

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

I had a similar experience with nature. My dad was the outdoors type, a conservation officer who loved hunting & fishing; I wanted nothing more than to be inside reading an encyclopedia. I have always liked science, but biology was just one subject among many.

When I became an adult, I gravitated to computers because there is so much to learn about them. My focus has been infrastructure, but I've picked up software development, assembly, kernel hacking, data science, and a dozen other things along the way (mostly at amateur levels, but I'm always happy to learn).

I have have other interests (economics, homebrewing, astronomy, sociology, making music), but in each of those cases I learned what I wanted to after a few years & moved away. When covid hit, I picked up natural history through iNaturalist -- and that has so far been very very different, much more the same kind of endless opportunity for discovery that computers felt like.

There is so much weirdness in biology. Parasitic wasps with genes that came from viruses that suppress caterpillar immune systems, male spiders that have appendages (pedipalps) that look like boxing gloves, the many kinds of bumble bees around me, introduced species, nests, microorganisms -- it's insane. It's higher up the stack than the stuff the author is describing, but no less wonderfully complex and fascinating.

The quote from Lewis Thomas really hit home for me: "People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that" [cell|insect|weird relationship|phenology|behaviour]. Kudos to the author for putting this all into words so well, and for adding a dozen books to my must-read list.

I liked the connection of the central dogma of biology (DBA to RNA to Proteins) with Lisp programs.

I connected that to streaming flow-based programs though, as opposed to cell-to-cell signaling which shares many characteristics with, Erlang style, fire-and-forget message passing:

https://livingsystems.cc/posts/flowbased-vs-erlang-message-p...

[2020]

previous discussions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590

I did (and do albeit somewhat in a neglected way) love biology. As much as I admired pure science (maths / physics) there is a certain romantic-ness to the real world application of chemistry and the emergence of it I suppose at the most scientific PoV, but really just that it's so complex and we appreciate the emergence of it.

I wrote biology-online.org shortly after education and it's achieved a few thousand years worth of page views. wikipedia tends to cover all those informational queries nowadays and I've been programming for 20 years since.

It's so easy to forget that much of our inspiration comes from biology (and ecology of course) and its emergent behaviour. When I hear hype about anything I think about how it's taken 4 billion years for anyone to say it and you simply can't forget we're standing on the shoulders of giants.

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

Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.

>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology]

You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!

Isn't biology the applied reverse-engineering of a billion years of DNA evolution, where the laziest solution that works wins, is all written in assembly, with tremendous amounts of dead code and hardly any refactorings?

I've already seen the horrors that lurk inside of poorly-written 90s video games. Hard pass.

As an ex-microbiologist, the thing I can't stand is how smelly life is. Be in the same room as gangrenous flesh and your intestinal fortitude will be severely tested.

Other than that, I don't mind it, but I still prefer silicon.

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

Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did).

I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology.

Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems.

What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people.

But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization.

But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies.

The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure.

But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.

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

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

If i had access to articles/blogs/YT/TT/AI like this, I'd have had become Leornardo Da Vinci.

I used to be inquisitive but coming from a poor neighborhood, I had no access in the olden days.

This type of article should persist.

>It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach

I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?

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

I absolutely experienced this in college. I signed up as a computer science student, as one does. I took all of the freshmen classes across broad topics, and the first biology class was basically just like the article describes. Words and memorization and microbiology and boring stuff. Who cares, let's get back to the dorm room to play CounterStrike on the school LAN.

But then I took the second required biology course. And rather than be about memorizing the krebs cycle, it was macrobiology. Ecology, evolution, and everything I hadn't realized I wanted to learn about the world around me. I instantly fell in love and 99'd the class. I changed my major to Biology, went pretty heavy into biology and chemistry, and didn't take more than a few Java classes in Comp Sci. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology.

I'm still a software developer, mind you, but I wouldn't trade the Biology degree for anything. Learning statistics, experimental design and experimentation, and just having the opportunity to deep dive into the physical world from the biggest to the smallest details, it was life-changing.

I still ended up learning data models, algorithms, and probably would be a better engineer if I had dug in deep on comp sci, but I like to think the biology degree helped me be a better developer for different reasons.

We say often that the purpose of an undergraduate degree, whether taken in a specific domain or in the liberal arts, is not to teach any subject in depth, but rather to give a broad overview of the subject.

This is sometimes explained (excused?) as ingraining into the learner a kind of index of the state of a field and the methods of its practice, a thing that can be relied upon as a kind of highway map of knowledge, an intuition to direct the learner from then on onto the right arterial roads, from which their own research can then guide them to the actual street and building, per se.

But I would argue that the true function of an undergraduate degree, in surveying the subfields of a field, is to simply expose the learner to those fields, and hopefully bait them into an appreciation for one of them: to find the learner a specific cragged surface along the frontier of human knowledge that captivates them not only to explore it, but to solidify the foundations of their understanding of the field as a whole so that they feel better equipped to explore it.

(Certainly, while not everyone who graduates with an undergraduate degree can say they found such a thing, then at least everyone who continues within academia to become a researcher on the frontier of knowledge, will likely say they found their love of the subject they would eventually research some time during their undergraduate studies.)

I bring this up because it feels like early (elementary and secondary) education should be designed around the same goal, to the same degree if not moreso: to expose the learner to the many amazing things there are to be passionate about within every field of learning.

As a business would say, “you must convince your customer that they have a problem, before you attempt to sell them the solution.”

In other words, you must convince the learner that there is a promised land of continual wonderment on the other side of the huge inferential gap that separates them from those knowledgeable in a field, before they will ever be intrinsically motivated to cross that gap, and thus to accept your offer of tools and exercises to bridge that gap.

The funny thing is that everyone except the teachers and staff of primary/secondary schools, seem to know intuitively that this is the right order to approach education in. No science communicator on YouTube tries to lecture in the dry way schoolteachers do. No historian at a museum presents their subject to a tour group without a compelling framing narrative. No space center tries to teach you orbital mechanics before first convincing you how damn cool it is to ride in a rocket or do a space-walk, or how wonderfully alien the surface of another planet is. Aquariums hook you with the fleeting flashes of color of live fish you’ve never seen before first, never pushing the information about them on you, simply expecting your own building curiosity get the better of you as you decide to start reading the placards beside the most-interesting exhibits.

We have a special field, Early Chidlhood Education, that tries to guide educators into best attunement with the expectations and capabilities infants and young children bring to the table.

But we have no similar field of Late Childhood Education. We just have “education” (which is almost more the cargo-cult reverse-engineering of traditions inherited from aristocratic finishing schools, than it is a coherent theory of how to produce well-educated adults) and then, very separately, the loose assemblage of knowledge of our public educators, academic-topic communicators, edutainment media writers, etc. (which has, as far as I know, never been put together to be studied as an academic subject, let alone taught as a discipline.)

We can see fictional schoolteachers (your Mrs. Frizzles, your John Keatings) and on-camera educational personas (your Bill Nyes and Carl Sagans) doing a perfect [if implausibly-well-resourced] rendition of what an educator trained in such a field would be like, if it existed—yet we don’t expect real schoolteachers to engage with students on anything like that wavelength. We don’t expect real textbooks to present the world to children the way such a field would encourage. We don’t expect governments to evaluate late-childhood educational quality by the metrics the researchers in such a field would propose.

And while part of this is surely because we expect public education to serve certain public goods — one of those being to produce adults who are employable in the average entry-level job, jobs that in turn require certain skills and knowledge (and so to force children to absorb those skills and that knowledge whether they feel any interest in it or not) — that’s no excuse for making the process of ingraining that knowledge downright adversarial. Not when it would be both faster, cheaper, and less laborious to both the teachers and students (at least when measured by some long-term Total Cost of Education), to have the kids actually be enthusiastically cooperative in their own education.

But the downright-weird thing to me, is that even private schools don’t generally approach education this way. And nor do most homeschooling parents. They’re all either traditionalists of the “finishing school” bent who think the best possible education is each individual having a set of learned tutors there to force knowledge down their throat in a personalized way; or they’re believers in kids’ “drive to learn” (and so tend to provide no structure whatsoever, leaving kids to be “self-driven” — i.e. to either flail or hyperfocus on the few things they already know are cool, receiving little exposure to things outside their bubble, and so missing out on entire subjects because the existence of those things just never occurred to them.)

Is the problem just a lack of imagination? “This is how I learned, so this is what learning is”?

Or is it that approaching education this way would require that schoolteachers actually be both passionate and knowledgeable about something; and that each school retain enough such teachers that together they can share with their students a passion for every subject the school hopes to expose the kids to? And maybe the wrong “type” of people go into education (maybe people passionate about the process of education itself, or about giving kids opportunities, or something), so it’s actually challenging to build a school where every teacher is carrying the spark of some particular academic passion they wish to share with the students?

(Personally, I hypothesize that you could get by just fine with people holding a Masters or PhD in a subject of interest and no “education in education” at all, just common sense and empathy enough to not expect children to perform intellectual miracles. And hiring for that doesn’t seem to be too hard; there are vast swathes of “over-degreed” under-employed people, currently stuck doing something utterly divorced from their passion, who’d love to instead be communicating their love of a subject to the next generation. As long as the school can promise that that won’t translate to torturing unwilling students with rote memorization, and then giving them tests they know the kids will fail, because they never studied, because they had zero interest.)

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