Comments

  1. imback says

    Biology is Bigger than Binaries. True indeed! (Note there were occasional clicks in the sound recoding but the message wad clear enough.)

  2. John Morales says

    [If I may, the massaged auto-transcript YouTube generates]

    Guess it started. Okay. Hey friends, it’s the morning of Saturday, the 3rd of January 2026, and this is my last week of freedom. I start teaching again on the 12th. So I just thought I’d sit down and try to restart my brain and get my voice flowing again and just jabber for a little bit. That’s all I’m going to do today—talk a little about my philosophy of science and fun things like that. Not for a long time. Don’t worry, don’t panic, you’re not getting a long, drawn‑out philosophy lecture here.

    Anyway, in my last video I mentioned that one of the things I consider central to science in general is the concept of change. We need to introduce lots of ideas about change. What we do is measure change. Ever since Newton, that’s what science has been about: figuring out how things are changing and how to quantify it and all that good stuff.

    The problem arises because I’m teaching biology, and a lot of biology requires a foundation in basic memorization of various facts. Before you can talk about change, you need to know the starting point and the ending point and everything in between. So I often get complaints that biology is all memorization, that you just have to sit there and memorize a whole bunch of Greek and Latin terms. They’re actually thinking of anatomy more than anything else, but even in anatomy they’re getting it wrong.

    The pithiest description of this problem is attributed to Ernest Rutherford, who supposedly said that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. It’s a dismissive idea that those of us who aren’t directly doing physics are just cataloguing obscure little details, and that physics is the one true science. I don’t want to blame Rutherford—he was a smart guy and right about many things, and although the quote is attributed to him, there’s doubt he ever actually said or wrote it.

    Anyway, physics or stamp collecting. The first thing I want to say is that it’s too unkind to stamp collecting. Stamp collecting can actually be a pretty interesting hobby. It’s not just gluing little coloured pieces of paper into a book, although it can be if you’re obsessive in the wrong way. It’s about trade, history, economics, social upheaval, and the movement of peoples around the world. Stamp collecting actually has a pretty deep interest to it, and it should be valued for that.

    But anyway, the idea is that it’s often dismissed as “you just have to sit down and memorize a whole bunch of things.” It’s not very exciting, and it’s often hard for our students. Sometimes it seems like all they take out of our classes is the memorization of a pile of terms and phrases that they can later regurgitate. “The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell”—everyone knows that line, and that’s what they think biology boils down to. But in cell biology, for instance, there’s a lot of conversation and discussion about what that actually means: the movement of various ions through the mitochondrial membrane to produce energy. It’s a dynamic problem we’re talking about.

    In genetics, I’m already bracing for the fact that one of the early topics I have to cover is mitosis and meiosis. Anyone who’s had even a high‑school biology class may be getting flashbacks of having to memorize all those odd little terms like prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and so on, and memorizing the steps in mitosis and meiosis. There’s a grain of truth to that—you do need to know that material. I’m going to be drilling them on it over the next couple of weeks. It’s so fundamental to what we’re talking about that they’ve already been exposed to it in our freshman biology course, then again in cell biology when we talk about the mechanics of cell division, and of course we’ll go into it in great detail in genetics, which I’ll be teaching starting next week.

    So how do we avoid the problem where people think this is just a description of a static thing? That it’s not even a process, just a bunch of stages you march through one after another, something to learn by rote? That misconception is common, when in fact this is an essential process that generates variation in cells. Cells aren’t static; they’re constantly changing. One of the mechanisms behind that change—and not the only one, since there are many interesting things going on in the cell—is what happens during cell division. That’s our focus in genetics.

    Yes, I will lead them through a series of slides showing each part of the process, and I’ll be attaching names to everything. You have to know the difference between a centromere and a kinetochore, and so on. It all sounds very tedious and very stamp‑collecting‑ish. But here’s the thing: it’s so central to our understanding of how genetics works that you have to master it before you can do the fun stuff. So we’re going to teach them all this material again about mitosis and meiosis, and remind them that this is how you get recombination, how meiosis leads to diversity and genetic variation in cells, and that there are specific mechanisms behind it.

    There are probabilities to the events occurring in this process, and hopefully they will learn this really well, because when you get right down to it, the rest of genetics is an extension of that process. Once you understand how these different bits of information are sorted and distributed and how they vary from generation to generation, you’ve got the gist of genetics. Yes, there are more details to come, and lots of detail that needs to be memorized again, but that’s what we’re doing. If you master mitosis and meiosis, you can more or less derive much of the rest of genetics.

    So I’m going to be lecturing on mitosis and meiosis again. I’ve only been doing this for forty years. We’ll be lecturing on that, but we don’t want students to come away with the idea that all you do in biology is memorize a bunch of terms and regurgitate them on exams, because that’s not it at all. The key thing is that they will then be going into the lab.

    In our lab for this course, they have to do a complementation assay. They have to figure out whether different mutations are allelic or not. They’ll also be doing a mapping exercise where they take advantage of recombination to measure the frequency of events between two genes in the genome and use that to estimate the distance between those genes.

    That’s the real heart of what we do: learning how diversity and variety arise, and understanding that it’s a consequence of this really boring, repetitious, sometimes redundant process we talk about called mitosis and meiosis. That’s one of the issues I have to deal with. I don’t want my students coming out of class thinking, “We just memorized a bunch of facts and now we have to regurgitate them,” because that’s not how biology works. Biology is not stamp collecting—and as I mentioned, even stamp collecting isn’t what people think it is.

    So that’s what I’ll be doing next week, among other things. They’ll be doing their first lab, and the first lab is all math and probability and statistics.

    They’ll learn how to analyze data right from the start, because that’s what genetics often is. You’re going to be doing rigorous analyses of the outcomes of the crosses you perform, and you have to understand probability and statistics to do that. So we start with that. This week I’m going to be writing their first quiz, and it’s going to be all math.

    So you see, this isn’t stamp collecting at all. Ernest Rutherford would have been happy with what we’re doing—math, statistics, calculations, estimates of probability, all the things that go into genetics. I’ll be working on that. But this is something fundamental to all the sciences. All of the sciences are about change. You can’t name one that isn’t.

    That was my introduction to biology. The reason I wanted to become a biologist in the first place was that I was really interested in development. Development is one of the cooler sciences out there. Unfortunately, it’s often neglected in undergraduate education because there’s so much other material to cover. But as a young fellow, I found myself very motivated to understand development for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m the oldest of six kids, so I got to watch development throughout my childhood, observing my younger siblings becoming different over time. I don’t have a static picture of what it means to be a human being, and that’s what fascinated me.

    When I went off to college, I was fortunate enough to get into some developmental courses right away, because the University of Washington is big and has classes in just about everything.

    So I could take a course in development very early in my career. And furthermore, all of my courses seemed to be taught by people who had strong developmental foundations, and that perspective came through in the classroom. For instance, I took neuroscience from Johnny Pulkan, who mainly worked on Drosophila development. So when we were talking about how the brain works, we were actually talking about changes that occur over time in a developing organism, and that really clicked for me.

    I went off to graduate school and, of course, I studied development. I studied the development of the nervous system and how neurons get rewired and change over time—how we start with very simple beginnings and then the brain explodes in complexity. You can see that under a microscope, in behavioural experiments, and in all kinds of phenomena.

    When I was an undergraduate, I also studied anatomy for a while. Most people think of anatomy as this dry process of memorizing muscles and bones and little bits and pieces, but I learned it in the context of comparative anatomy. If you’ve ever taken a comparative anatomy course, it’s very enlightening. You take apart a salamander, a shark, a cat, and so on, and you look for homologies between them. You see the patterns, and you see how cat muscles share origins with shark muscles. Again, it’s about process. We’re not just memorizing a static situation; we’re asking how it got that way.

    To quote the developmental biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: everything is the way it is because it got that way. That’s what we’re studying.

    This ties into some of my other interests. As most of you know, I’m notorious as a creationist‑bashing scientist. I was shocked the first time I talked to creationists. They have a radically different perspective on the world. They think of the world as static, created once by a god with a plan for all of creation. Variation and change aren’t really part of their system. You have a fixed role to play, and that’s what they push. I kind of hate it. It’s the opposite of what we do in science. We don’t believe everything is static. We think everything came from somewhere else. How did it get there? Where could it go next? That’s true for genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary biology—everything. It’s the fundamental disconnect between science and creationism, and they just don’t get it.

    So anyway, today I’m going to be working on my genetics class, getting ready for that. One of the things I’m always cautious about is not getting bogged down in memorizing terms. Yes, you have to learn them, because they’re the core vocabulary of the discipline. But the important thing is understanding how to use those concepts to comprehend how things change over time.

    As I said, we’ll be doing labs all semester long where that’s exactly what they’ll be doing. They’ll start with an organism with one set of characteristics and end up with an organism with a different set of characteristics, and we’ll be asking what happens in the next generation.

    So the generation after that, and the generation after that. One of the virtues of working with flies is that we can easily do three generations in the lab under controlled conditions and make careful measurements at every step. And don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s not rigid or fixed. What comes out is a distribution—a population with varying characteristics—and the job is simply to analyze those characteristics.

    Okay. I’ve talked for a while. My voice is warming up a bit. It’s going to take some time to get back into the habit of speaking every day. A little hot tea helps; it lubricates the vocal cords, so I’ve got to keep that up too.

    I’m going to wind it up there. I’ll just say that things are progressing. I’m feeling pretty good. I’m not terrified of getting back into the teaching swim of things. I think I’m well prepared and ready to go. It’ll work.

    And that’s it. I should mention that I’m wearing a T‑shirt that says “Biology is bigger than binaries.” That’s one of the themes we’ll be talking about in genetics—that you can’t reduce whole populations to just one or two types of individuals. It’s all very woke. But then, good science is woke science.

    Okay, talk to you some other time. I’m going to be doing this informally. I don’t have a script; I’m just rattling things off the cuff. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for listening. Talk to you all later.

  3. Rob Grigjanis says

    Thanks John. I didn’t watch the video, but it’s a bit disappointing that PZ is perpetuating the attribution of the physics and stamp-collecting nonsense to Rutherford.

  4. John Morales says

    Rob, um: “I don’t want to blame Rutherford—he was a smart guy and right about many things, and although the quote is attributed to him, there’s doubt he ever actually said or wrote it.”

    He’s perpetuating the claim, but also explicitly saying it’s probably apocryphal.

  6. rwiess says

    When I got my college science education (’69-’72), I sat through a nearly identical recitation in a chemistry class. Student: why are we doing nothing but memorizing?” Professor: “Because you can’t even talk about real chemistry until you know what stuff is called.” It was also obvious to me that the first step in any scientific discipline was to figure out what’s currently there, to the limits of our instrumentation, and then we could start asking questions and making theories on how it got here and where it’s going. And figure out better instruments.

  7. Snarki, child of Loki says

    “although the quote is attributed to him, there’s doubt he ever actually said or wrote it.”

    So maybe it was Yogi Berra.

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