Science Geekery
Mar. 27th, 2006 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseSpring break isn't over until 1 minute before my first class. That's my story and I'll stick to it, even as I'm doing my women's studies homework and angsting over my postgraduadtion plans. Because hey, nothing says science love like ignoring the world to reread midlist novels and contemplate the nature of the universe. Doris Egan's Ivory books are not mindblowingly thoughtful, creative, inspirational high literature, but they're great comfort reading.
This was a source of unreasonable reassurement as I tried to do my Arabidopsis crosses, whose success I need to check on today. Hand cross-fertilization? So evil. If I ever wind up in charge of an Arabidopsis lab, I am so looking into insect pollinators. If it turns out it's bees or bust, or some poor person has a moth allergy, we'll keep Epi pens on hand for the allergic. If it's spiders, I'm hiring a hypnotist and getting rid of my arachnid dislike.
I'm a semester and a half from graduating, and I'm just leaving the nice, neat, false models of the classroom for the messy, uncertain real world explanations. (Cue Fiddler on the Roof. "And why do our cells do this? I'll tell you: I don't know.") Part of it's my fault for not getting in more lab work, but some of it's the field. Someone on the Bujold list once quoted, "all models are wrong. Some are useful," and this is so true. I mean, look at electron resonance forms. The idea is something like this: electrons make things more negative by their presence and more positive by their absence. This is somewhat relative. In some types of multiatom molecules, the electron might spend more time here, with nucleus A, and then your pluses, minuses and neutral points would look like diagram A. Or it might spend more time here, with nucleus B, in which case your charge distribution (pluses, minuses and neutrals) looks much more like diagram B. But here's the thing: electrons move very fast, all the time, at least in organic chem. So diagram A is wrong, because it doesn't account for B, and B is wrong, because it doesn't describe A. What is right is an A-B hybrid, which can't be drawn on the board, but which the attentive student should be able to see in their head as they struggle through the benzene ring problems on their final exam. And even that isn't right; it's extremely unlikely that you'll get the pure, separated steps you draw, 1-2-3, in a test tube. One through three are happening at the same time! Electron resonance forms are an artificial model that describes one thing (bond formation) very well. Have I lost the non-scientists yet?
Or look at the progression of genetics, the dissolution from tidy Mendelian ratios and Punnett squares into cascade pathways and population genetics. And let us not forget the joys of LoD scores. You start by gently introducing students to the concepts of probability and discrete units of inheritance, and then you make the probabilities increasingly complicated, and the units of inheritance increasingly fuzzy, until you get to LoD scores, which are a sort of "best guess", and multilocus inheritance, where gene A, or B, or C, and sometimes D can affect whether your flower is pink, white, or exists at all.
Conclusion: anyone who thinks science is about studying the tidiness of the world is so wrong. Biology seems to thrive on discovering new ways to clutter up its reductive principles. The "central dogma" of DNA->RNA->protein is undermined by retroviruses, transcription factors, self-catalyzing RNA - and these are examples I'm pulling from the top of my head. Saying all this makes me feel a little better, because if I can BS for multiple paragraphs I must be at least qualified to be a novice, but it's also a nice reminder that in bio, even the best minds may just be making it to the middle of the middle.
"I'm not even a novice! I'm not qualified to be a novice! I'm still at the beginning of the beginning!"
"Well, never mind that," he said. "I've been doing this for half a century, and I'm just at the beginning of the middle."
-The Gate of Ivory, Doris Egan
This was a source of unreasonable reassurement as I tried to do my Arabidopsis crosses, whose success I need to check on today. Hand cross-fertilization? So evil. If I ever wind up in charge of an Arabidopsis lab, I am so looking into insect pollinators. If it turns out it's bees or bust, or some poor person has a moth allergy, we'll keep Epi pens on hand for the allergic. If it's spiders, I'm hiring a hypnotist and getting rid of my arachnid dislike.
I'm a semester and a half from graduating, and I'm just leaving the nice, neat, false models of the classroom for the messy, uncertain real world explanations. (Cue Fiddler on the Roof. "And why do our cells do this? I'll tell you: I don't know.") Part of it's my fault for not getting in more lab work, but some of it's the field. Someone on the Bujold list once quoted, "all models are wrong. Some are useful," and this is so true. I mean, look at electron resonance forms. The idea is something like this: electrons make things more negative by their presence and more positive by their absence. This is somewhat relative. In some types of multiatom molecules, the electron might spend more time here, with nucleus A, and then your pluses, minuses and neutral points would look like diagram A. Or it might spend more time here, with nucleus B, in which case your charge distribution (pluses, minuses and neutrals) looks much more like diagram B. But here's the thing: electrons move very fast, all the time, at least in organic chem. So diagram A is wrong, because it doesn't account for B, and B is wrong, because it doesn't describe A. What is right is an A-B hybrid, which can't be drawn on the board, but which the attentive student should be able to see in their head as they struggle through the benzene ring problems on their final exam. And even that isn't right; it's extremely unlikely that you'll get the pure, separated steps you draw, 1-2-3, in a test tube. One through three are happening at the same time! Electron resonance forms are an artificial model that describes one thing (bond formation) very well. Have I lost the non-scientists yet?
Or look at the progression of genetics, the dissolution from tidy Mendelian ratios and Punnett squares into cascade pathways and population genetics. And let us not forget the joys of LoD scores. You start by gently introducing students to the concepts of probability and discrete units of inheritance, and then you make the probabilities increasingly complicated, and the units of inheritance increasingly fuzzy, until you get to LoD scores, which are a sort of "best guess", and multilocus inheritance, where gene A, or B, or C, and sometimes D can affect whether your flower is pink, white, or exists at all.
Conclusion: anyone who thinks science is about studying the tidiness of the world is so wrong. Biology seems to thrive on discovering new ways to clutter up its reductive principles. The "central dogma" of DNA->RNA->protein is undermined by retroviruses, transcription factors, self-catalyzing RNA - and these are examples I'm pulling from the top of my head. Saying all this makes me feel a little better, because if I can BS for multiple paragraphs I must be at least qualified to be a novice, but it's also a nice reminder that in bio, even the best minds may just be making it to the middle of the middle.
