[daemonk]

Learning biology is a great insight to how humans think about complex systems. We tend to utilize a reductionist and engineering approach to figure out how things work. This is a perfectly valid approach when building up a complex system from knowable individual parts.

But when analyzing a complex biological system, we tend to make analogies to our own engineered components (motherboards, power sources, circuits). There are definitely a lot of similarities and it is a great way to understand one facet of the system. But it can also sometimes make us lose sight of the intertwining relationships among all of these parts through evolution.

The analogy of our genome to an informational blueprint is one of the best examples of the multi-faceted nature of biology. While the sequence of bases contained within DNA (primary structure) is informational, the complex structures the molecule itself (chromatin structure) also have mechanistic purposes.

We build engineered components to be controllable and independent so we can better assess how the system is working. However, that is not an explicit goal with biology. Biological "components" settle into the best form for the given environment over time even if it creates a potential "mess" of connections and relationships.

I think this is also why biology takes a long time to "sink in" while learning compared to other technical fields. It's very easy to over-train your mental biological model on one facet of the system and lose sight of the others.

It is not uncommon to see the same terminology used in very different ways in various sub-fields of biology. Gene Ontology is also a great example of this as people have found there are biases associated with what the originator lab is studying at the time. Genes with pleiotropic function will tend to get assigned function that's more relevant to what the lab is interested in.

Sometimes I wonder if we are really equipped to navigate it and understand it. Maybe AI/computation is really the only way to try to have a holistic view of the complexities. Perhaps trying to understand biology with our biological brain has inherent limitations like a piece of software trying to understand the hardware it resides in.

[christopherscot]

> Sometimes I wonder if we are really equipped to navigate it and understand it. Maybe AI/computation is really the only way to try to have a holistic view of the complexities. Perhaps trying to understand biology with our biological brain has inherent limitations like a piece of software trying to understand the hardware it resides in.

This is a fascinating thought.