Biology is a scam
I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks. Biology is a bit of a scam, as a field.
I should probably explain my thinking behind this.
The field isn’t very deep – all the underlying processes are essentially the same. For example, transport proteins work in a small number of ways, with only minor variations here and there. All polymerases do the same thing, but there are various different names for polymerases (RNA / DNA, pol I / II / III / …). Yes, there are slight differences, but they all effectively do the same thing. Nucleases, again, all do essentially the same thing – it’s just a case of minor variations here and there.
This lack of depth, and poor links between different fields, makes the subject incredibly complicated. There is SO. MUCH. JARGON. This jargon is what makes biology so complicated – not the underlying biology (ie- when you understand what all the acronyms and names actually mean, understanding the processes is the easy part).
I’d also argue that the teaching of biology is old fashioned and poor. Biology is always presented as a subject ‘to be learned’, requiring wrote learning. This is dull, time consuming, and not worth anyone’s time. Let’s look at physics (as an example): in physics, you can write questions and problems that really make you think, using the things that have been taught in a different way, allowing you to master the material quickly and effectively. This also demonstrates how everything links rather nicely. Biology, on the other hand, just tends to be regurgitation. Every biology exam I have done or seen is some variation of repeating back what you have been taught. There isn’t really any application or repurposing of knowledge because of the way the field is set up – every field is different and never seen holistically as linked / heavily related / essentially the same as every other field.
And then there is the elitism and ‘prestige’ in biology. I was sent an email from the University this week that (paraphrased) said someone from the Francis Crick Institute (‘such a prestigious institution’) would be coming to talk about her career since graduating from here. I think this is another reason biology is so full of jargon. Everyone wants their own little field to be special and unique in its own way, resulting in a huge amount of extra terminology being created. (See also the Gene Ontology project, trying to tidy up this mess by creating a standard vocabulary to describe gene function).
I wouldn’t say that my degree has been a waste of time. I’ve definitely learned a lot along the way, in things like research (both wet-lab, dry-lab, and information), data analysis, and programming. But those have been relatively small components of the entire programme. I think a couple of months with a few good textbooks (molecular biology of the cell (Alberts), microbiology (Slonczewski), any by OpenStax, …) would get you to the same level of theoretical knowledge. That brings me onto another issue: the course is very slow. All of the taught modules could be condensed into a single semester. Or even part of a single semester. Three hours of lectures per week really isn’t a lot. The amount of information that can be conveyed is fairly minimal in a lecture (but that’s a different issue – lectures are a waste of everyone’s time; I suppose this grievance is more at the university system, and not at the field specifically).
Perhaps this is all misplaced. Maybe I’m wrong. I started thinking about this after being rejected from 37 industrial placements, where I started to wonder if commercial research was for me. Then I got rejected from a PhD programme, and although I would almost certainly have not remained in academia, I did have doubts about academia being the place for me to continue further in. So perhaps this is all based on my views there.