When I was young, I was fascinated by life, in all its straight-forward manifestations: the gulls and horseshoe crabs on the beach near my home, the perfect little spiders and the even-more-perfect webs they wove, the predictably unpredictable array of multicolored warblers spangling the trees, the challenging, chattering squirrels.
But I hated “biology,” the academic study that supposedly concerned itself with these things. Not only did biology seem to have been mis-named, pre-occupied as it was with “thanatology”—the study of dead things (notably, via dissections)—but, worse yet, it abounded in brute memorization. Names, names, and more names: of phyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species, of bones and muscles, organs, and tissue types, of subcellular anatomy, and the stages of the Krebs cycle. Especially despicable, I still recall, was the obligation to memorize all of those damned digestive enzymes, where they were produced, and what they digested: ptyalin—saliva, starch; pepsin—stomach, proteins … ad infinitum and ad disgustum.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Biology: "Rocket Science" for the 21st Century - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Author: David Barash
