【Hacker News搬运】我应该热爱生物学（2020）

hackernews

Title: I should have loved biology (2020)

我应该热爱生物学（2020）

Text:

Url: https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/

文章标题为《我本应该热爱生物学》，作者是James Somers。文章主要讨论了作者对于生物学的看法，以及他认为生物学应该被如何教授和学习。

作者认为，生物学应该是一门充满惊奇和发现的学科，而不是仅仅是名词的枯燥重复。他提到了自己在学习生物学时的一些失望，比如在教科书中学到的惊人事实被平淡地呈现，没有引起足够的关注和惊讶。作者希望在他的高中生物学课上，老师能更深入地探讨胚胎如何分化这样的问题，而不是简单地记忆化学公式。

在大学期间，作者通过阅读Douglas Hofstadter的《哥德尔、艾舍尔、巴赫》一书，开始理解细胞就像递归自修改的程序，这激发了他对生物学的兴趣。他提到，生物学就像是探索一个落在后院的外星飞船，里面包含了超越我们当前技术水平的科技。

作者还讨论了生物学的复杂性，以及如何通过图像和模拟来更好地理解生物学。他推荐了一些书籍，如David Goodsell的《生命的机械装置》和William W. Cohen的《计算机科学家细胞生物学指南》，这些书籍通过丰富的插图和深入的讲解，帮助读者更好地理解生物学的基本原理。

总的来说，作者认为生物学是一门充满魅力的学科，需要通过更加生动和互动的方式进行教授和学习，以激发学生的好奇心和探索欲。

Post by: paulgb

Comments:

plaidfuji: > For a computer scientist, a biologist’s methods can seem insane; the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.I think this is probably the part about biology that people outside of biology appreciate the least. We know a lot about how cells and proteins work now. But despite this fact, it is still extremely difficult to understand exactly what is happening within a given cell in situ. Many measurement methods are likely to destroy or alter the thing you’re trying to measure… think Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - the act of measuring the thing changes its state. Everything is sensitive to temperature, shear, ionic strength, pH, etc… and of course most methods rely on these levers to gain resolution and signal. So you have to have a clear idea of what you think is happening to even select a measurement technique that won’t ruin it. This is part of why, while we know a lot of the fundamentals, it is still hard to engineer functionality in specific environments .. engineering requires a lot of measurement and feedback.I think that also offers insight into why software can be engineered so quickly. It’s a discipline where you can (relatively) easily place a probe wherever you want and understand exactly what’s happening in a (sometimes) deterministic manner. Everyone else is taking fuzzy shots in the dark compared to software. Imagine replicates being a thing you have to think about when debugging a program. Like in software, running your code again with no changes after it just failed is insanity. In every other engineering discipline, you sometimes have entire meetings to decide how many times to retry something that just failed.

plaidfuji: &gt；对于计算机科学家来说，生物学家的方法可能看起来很疯狂；问题来自于这样一个事实，即单元太小、太多、太复杂，无法像程序员那样进行分析，比如说在逐步调试器中 我认为这可能是生物学之外的人最不欣赏的生物学部分。我们现在对细胞和蛋白质的工作原理了解很多。但是，尽管存在这一事实，仍然很难准确理解原位的给定细胞内发生了什么。许多测量方法都可能破坏或改变你试图测量的东西……想想海森堡的不确定性原理——测量东西的行为会改变它的状态。所有东西都对温度、剪切力、离子强度、pH等敏感…当然，大多数方法都依赖于这些杠杆来获得分辨率和信号。因此，你必须清楚地了解你认为正在发生的事情，甚至选择一种不会破坏它的测量技术。这就是为什么尽管我们知道很多基本原理，但在特定环境中设计功能仍然很困难的部分原因。。工程需要大量的测量和反馈 我认为这也让我们深入了解了为什么软件可以如此快速地进行设计。这是一个你可以（相对）容易地将探测器放置在任何你想要的地方，并以（有时）确定性的方式准确地了解正在发生的事情的学科。与软件相比，其他人都在黑暗中拍摄模糊的照片。想象一下，复制是调试程序时必须考虑的一件事。就像在软件中一样，在失败后再次运行代码而不做任何更改是疯狂的。在其他所有工程学科中，有时您需要召开整个会议来决定重试刚刚失败的东西多少次。

rrr_oh_man: This resonated a lot:> 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.

rrr_oh_man: 这引起了很多共鸣：&gt；对庞大的受试者最好是深入细致地研究。我在第一次学习编程时发现了这一点。课本从来没有用过；当我开始为自己做一些小项目时，这一切才开始点击。这个项目不仅仅是动机，还有一个组织原则，一块磁铁，用来排列我一路上捡来的随机铁屑。我想学习一些抽象的概念，比如“记忆”，因为我需要它来解决我的问题；根据我的例子，这些概念将失去其抽象性

bentt: There is a website called Smart Biology with amazing 3D animated videos of cellular systems.
<a href="https://www.smart-biology.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smart-biology.com/</a>Pretty cheap for individuals as well:
<a href="https://smart-biology-academy.getlearnworlds.com/courses" rel="nofollow">https://smart-biology-academy.getlearnworlds.com/courses</a>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.

bentt: 有一个名为Smart Biology的网站，里面有关于细胞系统的令人惊叹的3D动画视频。<a href=“https://；&#x2F；www.smart-biology.com&#x2F”rel=“nofollow”>https://&#x2F；www.smart-biology.com&#x2F</a> 对个人来说也相当便宜：<a href=“https://；&#x2F；智能生物学院.getlearnworlds.com&#x2F！课程”rel=“nofollow”>https://&#x2F；智能生物学院.getlearnworlds.com&#x2F；课程</a>我不喜欢；我不为他们工作，也不在他们身上有任何金钱利益。他们只是做非常酷的工作，而我；I’我希望看到他们得到更多的关注。我希望我上学的时候我们能有像他们那样的视频。

freetime2: 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.

freetime2: 我在高中时喜欢生物。我的老师是有史以来最无聊的老师之一，几乎有一半的时间都在课堂上睡觉，但后来我会回家阅读家庭作业的课本，我发现它非常有趣。老师可以随时叫醒我并问我一个问题，我总是知道答案，这有点像插科打诨，让其他学生感到好笑。但我的秘密是，我觉得它很有趣，很容易吸收 我真的不喜欢因为一个人对某个主题缺乏好奇心而责怪别人。除了教学方式之外，还有很多因素决定了我们对学习的接受程度——当前的兴趣、生活经验、我们的大脑发育程度等。例如，我现在比上学时对地质学有了更深的理解，我相当肯定，是我改变了板块构造的教学方式。

fmy105: This article resonates with me deeply. Like the author, 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.It wasn't until years later that I began to grasp the profound beauty of biology through books like "The Eighth Day of Creation" mentioned in the article. The great revelation for me was that at its core, biology is a physical, engineering discipline - it's all about how 3D shapes and surfaces interact and fit together to produce structure and function, from protein complexes up to tissues and organs.I wish more biology education focused on cultivating that sense of awe at the nanoscale world of the cell. Imagine if introductory classes posed biology as the greatest reverse-engineering project in the universe - here is this self-replicating machine of staggering complexity, your task is to figure out how it works! Let students discover for themselves the logic and elegance of core concepts like the Central Dogma.The other key point is that evolution needs to be the central organizing framework, not an afterthought. You simply cannot make sense of biology without viewing it through the lens of evolutionary processes shaping structure and function over deep time. When taught this way, even rote memorization takes on new meaning.We are living through a golden age of biological discovery, from the frontiers of neuroscience to the dizzying possibilities of synthetic biology. I hope we can inspire future generations to share in that excitement by presenting biology as it truly is - the grandest puzzle and most awesome technology on Earth. Let's bring the wonder back into how we teach the science of life.

fmy105: 这篇文章引起了我的深刻共鸣。和作者一样，我发现我的高中和大学生物课上充斥着枯燥的行话和图表，从不可思议的生命机器中汲取了奇迹 事实并非如此；直到几年后，我才开始通过《生物学》等书来理解生物学的深刻之美；创造的第八天&quot；文章中提到。对我来说，最大的启示是，生物学的核心是一门物理、工程学科；这一切都是关于3D形状和表面如何相互作用并结合在一起以产生结构和功能，从蛋白质复合物到组织和器官 我希望更多的生物学教育专注于培养对细胞纳米世界的敬畏感。想象一下，如果入门课程将生物学视为宇宙中最伟大的逆向工程项目——这是一台复杂程度惊人的自我复制机器，你的任务就是弄清楚它是如何工作的！让学生自己发现核心概念的逻辑性和优雅性，如中心教条 另一个关键点是，进化需要成为中心组织框架，而不是事后的想法。如果不从进化过程的角度来看待生物学，你就无法理解生物学在很长一段时间内塑造结构和功能。如果这样教，即使死记硬背也会有新的含义 我们正经历着一个生物发现的黄金时代，从神经科学的前沿到合成生物学令人眼花缭乱的可能性。我希望我们能通过展示生物学——地球上最宏大的谜题和最令人敬畏的技术——来激励子孙后代分享这种兴奋。设；让我们把惊奇带回我们如何教授生命科学。