I agree. I know many who were driven away from appreciating biology due to its excess of nomenclature and memorization thereof. It's made worse because few terms reveal much depth of meaning about what it labels. Biology is made superficial because the language of the subject describes only surface, no depth.
That's not biology's fault. No language could hope to convey the full ‘personality’ of each character in a tale as rich and complex as unfolds in Lewis' “Life of a Cell”.
But maybe biology is ripe, now that we understand enough of its major 'characters' and their 'behaviors', for us to introduce more abstract models of biology using concepts and language that make for more intuitive players and their relationships. In this way, we might tell a more comprehensible and engaging narrative based on a much smaller set of reusable base models — the way that applied math expands on the concept of a computable function or the way electrical engineering builds on gaussian processes that model signals.
At the very least, I would LOVE for each chapter in a molecular bio textbook to be split into two parts — a short overview of the topic that follows with only the major components and activity described, and only then, to dive into the details. Seeing a city from high above it is an enormous help before trying to appreciate it on foot.
That's not biology's fault. No language could hope to convey the full ‘personality’ of each character in a tale as rich and complex as unfolds in Lewis' “Life of a Cell”.
But maybe biology is ripe, now that we understand enough of its major 'characters' and their 'behaviors', for us to introduce more abstract models of biology using concepts and language that make for more intuitive players and their relationships. In this way, we might tell a more comprehensible and engaging narrative based on a much smaller set of reusable base models — the way that applied math expands on the concept of a computable function or the way electrical engineering builds on gaussian processes that model signals.
At the very least, I would LOVE for each chapter in a molecular bio textbook to be split into two parts — a short overview of the topic that follows with only the major components and activity described, and only then, to dive into the details. Seeing a city from high above it is an enormous help before trying to appreciate it on foot.