Considering it was a work day, quite a lot went on and I managed to spend three hours at the local library. The library full of third world nationals whose cultural heritage is to call home from public places. Everyone knows the telephone was invented in Madrid in 1491, followed by toll charges in 1492. Library means today’s trivia, which concerns sickle cell anemia, and to keep you reading, Osama Bin Laden.I did not know that sickle cell disease was a consequence of human resistance to malaria. One “copy” of the gene helps people resist malaria, two “copies” and they develop anemia. In order to find out what would be in store to someone studying biology, I read through some college-level texts. I came away with some mixed feelings.
It is like studying a foreign language. Yet, I found no concepts that were unfamiliar since my grade school courses in frog dissection. My impression is that biology is 90% cramming Latin-based terminology into one’s brain rather than learning how to think. (Suddenly a few doctor-types I’ve know make sense.) High marks on such exams is a function of how good one is at rote memorization and it is foolish to pretend otherwise. And I don't just say that because I am terrible at memorizing things. I'm actually as good at it as anyone, it's that I do better on thinking-type exams.
If there was ever a classic barrier-in-itself field, it is biology. Like the Chinese written language, it becomes itself the largest hurdle to success. Years of intense schoolwork were required just to learn the symbols, yet the Chinese could claim advancement was open to all. I get this vision of medical students poring over lists of biology terms into the early mornings, studying words instead of biology. My ability to memorize is as good as any but nothing I’ve done academically would be much preparation for such a subject.
When I lean back from a physics or computer text, I’m pondering consequences. If I pause with biology, it is trying to figure out if some word is spelled backwards. Computer acronyms probably strike many people as the same thing. Funny, that my learning curve should favor one over the other. It would be a shocking disappointment to learn that the field of medicine is largely based on the type of study I tried this evening.
Is there anything new in biology since way back when? There are now five kingdoms [in taxonomic classification]. I was taught there were two, namely plants and animals. Now fungi, bacteria and cells without a nucleus form three more. Is this really new, or just another case of public school budgetary cutbacks? One thing that has not changed is the difficulty in defining life. These new categorizations are not helping any.
In 300 pages, I took in what I could, right from cellular structure to the concept of biospheres. Most interesting were tissues and organs. I’m now more well-versed about the options. Let somebody else specialize in earthworms and heredity. It is hard to tell how much more depth there is to each sub-topic, although I assume quite a lot since it takes years to master them. An example is cell structure. Despite closer attention on those chapters, I found nothing I did not already know. Is that all there is to it, or am I about to discover an entire new section of the library? As usual, there is nobody around to ask.
ADDENDUM
Here’s some more trivia. Bin Laden, the mass murderer, is one of fifty heirs to the wealth of a Saudi construction company. That’s both some family and some construction company. What I did not know is that his original beef was that American soldiers were stationed in Saudi during some war, where he felt that desert fighters from nearby Afghanistan should have been used. This type of idle thinking is very big in many cultures.
But there is a prime example of your "other culture" mentality. They want the American dollars and color TVs, but not the American attitudes that created an atmosphere where such things could be invented, built and made into financial successes. Nope, they just want the money and the TVs.
He has vowed to fight until the last American soldier has left their ancient fabled land (that sandy stuff the British gave them in 1935). There is no mention as to why he does not think the Saudis should use their own army with him leading the charge. Odd that he attacks the Americans rather than his countrymen who invited them in. Then, we are dealing an individual whose thinking has never been tempered by a single day’s hard work. No need to study biology to see that boy is a real specimen.
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