Why Biology Class Kills Wonder — And How to Teach It Like a Mystery

Writer James Somers argues that biology repelled him in school not because the subject is dull but because it was taught as dead memorization — organelles, cycles, and acronyms delivered as conclusions stripped of the questions that produced them. The genuinely astonishing facts (every cell carrying identical DNA, a single embryonic cell giving rise to the entire brain) were presented without any sense of astonishment, and the working scientists, their real puzzles, and their bench experiments were absent from the curriculum. He points to Oswald Avery’s 1940s Streptococcus work — a simple, replicable experiment that identified nucleic acid as the ‘transforming principle’ of heredity and set up the discovery of the double helix — as exactly the kind of quest that textbooks wring out.

Somers’ fix is to teach enormous subjects in ‘thin, deep slices’ organized around real questions, the same way he only learned programming by building small projects that gave abstract concepts (like memoization) a concrete purpose. Learning, in his telling, starts with a question — how does an embryo differentiate, why are my eyes blue — not with a vocabulary list. Reading Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach was what finally made cells click for him, reframing DNA-to-RNA-to-protein as a recursively self-modifying program, almost a Lisp system whose source code contains all the instructions for life.

The deeper argument is a structural analogy between biology and computing. Both are fractal in complexity, layered in abstractions that each hide lifetimes of work; biology is just messier because living systems aren’t designed — they’re a ‘big slop of global mutable state,’ full of exceptions, where control happens by upregulating one thing and repressing the repressor of another. But like computing, biology bottoms out in something physical and non-abstract: molecular shapes bumping into each other, the twentieth-century revelation that structure is coupled to function.