People who know me often ask why I’m studying biology out of all sciences. I’m generally talented in science and math, so it seems more likely for me to go into engineering or even computer science. In general, I think this is something biology has always faced. You have probably seen the memes characterizing biology majors as math-haters. To be fair, this is a product of how biology is taught. Chemistry, physics, and math are all very closely related and are grouped together while biology is often left alone.
So back to the question: why did I choose biology?
I think one of the biggest misinterpretations in science is that biology is very static; there’s not a lot of factors that go into it. For example, when kids perform labs in high school, it’s almost certain that a physics lab will have error. In chemistry, you will never get 100% yield and sometimes the reaction just doesn’t go right. But in biology, the chance that you won’t find lungs during a dissection is almost zero. Using linear thinking, it’s easy to assume that since biology labs go right all the time, there’s nothing complex about it.
However, the underlying question we are asking is flawed: there is no nuance to finding lungs during a dissection. This is the equivalent of dropping something and seeing if it falls to test gravity, of course it’s going to fall. So once we take a look at certainty in both fields, we can now ask the question: which is more complex?
If a 3 year old were to be asked what the lungs are during a dissection, they’d probably say that’s disgusting and walk away. They’d probably also say that they have no clue what it does. However, take that same kid and ask what happens when you drop something, they’ll probably say it falls. So if ground-zero of biology is more complex than the ground-zero of physics, what does that say about the higher levels? Since physics is more intuitive and relatable to everything we see in the world, we learn about more complex ideas at a younger age, making it seem hard. However, we learn the ground-zero of biology later in life, where it seems simple and non-intuitive.
Another reason why people see biology as simple is because of the single path associated with it: medical school. If you ask any kid what people who work in biology do, they’re probably going to say a doctor first. The cause behind this is not because we aren’t taught about cell pathways and biochemistry in high school, which happens in grade 12 [1], but because we aren’t taught early enough.
In Canada at least, you do not even touch the idea of genetics until grade 11 [2], let alone biochemical pathways. However, by this point, biology is not mandatory and students who may be interested in it, may not be taking it anymore [3]. Up to this point, students have only learned about cell organelles (this even to a basic extent) and systems of the human body. This means that those who will take biology and learn about those pathways are probably all interested in becoming a doctor.
While doctors certainly are the most well-known workers in the field of biology, they are far from the only ones. In short, doctors are seen as the only path for biologists because it is the career that stems out of systems biology, therefore they are the most abundant.
If you look at the history of science, it’s easy to argue that biology is the least developed science. We have launched rockets into space, taken pictures of stars millions of light years away, engineered buildings that have reached unbelievable heights, and many other amazing feats. The concepts behind the execution of these events are often quite complex and would take many years to fully understand. I would also argue that we do know everything that makes these achievements work.
However, I would argue the opposite for biology. While we have been able to increase lifespan drastically over the past few years, this has mainly been because of experiences from the past. If we saw people eating unhealthy or working with coal all the time, we could usually correlate that this was bad. Even vaccination started off like this, we didn’t know how the body became immune to something, but we just figured out the process. This is not meant to undermine these great achievements, but rather point out the rudimentary process behind major biological discoveries.
The point here is that there isn’t a lot of understanding behind why certain concepts work in biology. My thought on this is because biology is often left to the mercy of nature, unable to be predicted by current systems (I’ll touch on this later). Physics and chemistry can almost perfectly be described by mathematics, which is itself a nearly perfect system [4]. It is much harder to fully understand biology because a) it’s hard to perform experiments without a system and b) we are limited by the tools we have.
Einstein was a big believer that randomness cannot be a fundamental part of nature. When talked about quantum mechanics, he stated that “God does not play dice with the universe.” I think that for 99% of cases, his reasoning is right. The fact that physics has gotten to the point where we are even qualified to ask this question is an achievement in and of itself. We understand the nature of particles to such a deep level that we can validate this randomness with sound scientific reasoning.
I think that biology has randomness to it as well, but this is of a different nature than quantum mechanics. While Einstein’s quote looks like he thinks nothing is random, an important part is that he assumes that we know everything about that system. In that case, biology is not random, it just has an insurmountable number of factors affecting the end result. It has a pseudo-randomness to it that makes it difficult to understand what is going on while technically still predictable. We just don’t have the tools to record all the information at a given time.
Unfortunately, this complexity is often taken as randomness, even when it’s not. There are many historical examples of this happening, even across the same field. First, we thought the traits we inherited were random, until Mendel discovered the laws of heredity. Then, we thought that genetic recombination was random, until we learned about crossing over. The point is, there will always be things that seem random even when they are not. So where does this leave biology? If we cannot predict the outcome of biological systems, where are we supposed to get our solutions?
Is there a way to account for all the patterns in biology with an ordered system? It turns out, yes. Just recently, AlphaFold has shown us how machine-learning models can reliably predict the folding of proteins given just their sequence. That is what machine learning models do: see underlying patterns within complex systems. If you look at how these models are built, it’s easy to see why this concept works. Mathematics will always lie at the heart of science, just on different levels.
At the level of physics and chemistry, simple equations work because they are able to take a small amount of features and correlate them. If you break it down to its simplest form, machine learning is basically the same. It takes a bunch of features and corresponds them to different weights with mathematical formulas. For a complex field, complex mathematics is needed to fully capture an insight. This is revolutionary for biology because, for the first time, we are able to model systems and truly capture their attributes. It is no longer random, which can lead to better problem analysis and finally, better solutions.
So what does the future look like for biology? In my opinion, I think that machine learning will soon propel biology to its peak in the scientific world. We are already starting to see this, with more and more funding going towards the development of biotechnology. I think that this is also a great use case of AI. Computers are meant to help humans, do things that would normally waste time for them or just aren’t possible to be done by head. In biology, this is super useful and necessary for the development of the next therapeutics.
Thank you for reading.
[1] We learn some in grade 11 but this is mainly just enzyme-substrate memorization
[2] We do learn about mitosis but I feel this doesn’t cover what genetics really is
[3] The Canadian school system only mandates two years of science and after that each separate science is an elective
[4] Some would argue that math is still incomplete (Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem) but for most cases, math is complete
PS: While I think the contents of this essay are true, this is from my perspective of the world. I am a high school student who is covering the basics of biology; perhaps there are more people going into the field of research and I just don’t know about it. If so, please feel free to let me know.