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.
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.