Physicist Amok

The NIH and HHMI organized a much trumpeted report entitled BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists. It came out in 2003 to much acclaim. I reach the crux of it (chapter 2, "A New Biology Curriculum") last night. I don’t like it. I have some basic philosophical objections to their approach, and a lot of quibbles with the details as they stand. In this post I’ll go through the quibbles, and in later ones I’ll attack the underlying philosophy, and propose a curriculum in my turn.

The chapter is organized into a list of core concepts to be taught from biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, and math and computer science, then a set of suggested curricula. I’ve broken my gripes down by section:

Biology: Some of the concepts listed are important ("Biological systems obey the laws of chemistry and physics." and "Lipids assemble with proteins to form membranes, which surround cells to separate them from their environment. Membranes also form distinct compartments within eukaryotic cells.") and I dearly hope they are being taught already. Others are sloppy, tautological, or espouse absurdities such as "holistic" science.

Chemistry: I know almost know chemistry and am not willing to comment on this section except for the fact that "computational methods and modeling" is a bullet point right alongside Lewis structures.

Physics: The physics recommendations largely consist of a standard intro physics course for hard science majors with a few topics moved here or there. This isn’t a bad thing. I think that the best approach would be to take an 1960’s edition of Halliday and Resnick and go through that in a year (for those who don’t know it, the early editions of Halliday and Resnick were clear, comprehensive, and had a doable number of extremely well selected problems).

The report also wants the students to do learn by interacting with simulations. I can tell you from being on the receiving end of such an attempt and from anecdotal evidence in the community that such approaches are dismal failures. Let the course be analytical and experimental. Leave the computer out of it.

Engineering: Aside from the incredibly broad heading, this has about the only interesting, concrete recommendation in the report. The introduction was written by the biologists who are convinced that systems engineering is all that they might really want. Then someone wrote a curriculum outline for the first third of a really solid neurobiology course. Whoever wrote that, bravo!

Mathematics and Computer Science: Some of the topics confuse me (computability theory? why?). The gist of this section is to give the biology students special math classes where the computer can do all the work for them. Hamming said, "The computer is an extension of the body, not the mind." (I found this quote in the preface to McNeil’s Interactive Data Analysis) I agree that biologists should be able to program, and should really understand what BLAST does. This would be better taught as a one or two semester course on numerical analysis and relevant search methods, plus data structures such as ropes to handle long sequences. And it should be taught in Scheme (or this for the ambitious), not in "higher-level languages such as Matlab, Perl, or C" as the report recommends. Everyone who knows programming languages just stopped taking the computing recommendations of the report seriously with that list.

Apparently students should be taught data analysis. I completely agree. Astonishingly, John Tukey wrote some great books for this back in the ’70’s because he was teaching people data analysis. And it’s not just biologists who need this. Every scientist would benefit. Call up your local statistics department and get them to institute an "interdisciplinary" course based on John Tukey’s two classics Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Analysis and Regression, or whatever modernized version they want to teach.

The recommended math comes down to the following classes in the math department: single and multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations (more like Arnol’d’s book than what the engineers are taught), and probability and stochastic processes (this would be a great place to use Nelson’s Radically Elementary Probability Theory). There, three years of math, a semester of computer science, and a semester of data analysis. That’s not so bad, is it?

The report also mentions that medical school admissions requirements govern a lot of what biology departments cover. My approach: ignore them. Physics departments do. If the biologists ignore the MCATs completely, then they will change to follow the biology.

The recommended solutions for dealing with not having the expertise to teach a course are frightening: "…taught…by a collaborating team of faculty from multiple departments" or "A mathematician or computer scientist might also be invited to give a guest lecture or two." Two lectures isn’t long enough to have any real effect on students’ mental processes, and team teaching makes the course scattered and disorderly. I speak from experience. Biology courses are often taught this way, and it’s absolutely useless.

There is an obsession throughout with having a course on modeling and simulation. I believe the rationale is that all the ugly mathematics stuff can be put into this, taught by one of those egg-headed math people, and the biology professors can go on doing exactly as they have been.

At one point it says, "Opportunities to learn mathematical skills in a rich content context will enhance conceptual understanding and procedural fluency." No it won’t. Math professors should (and usually do not) ask students, "Why is this theorem interesting?" If a student has not reached a level of mental abstraction sufficient to answer such a question in the context of pure mathematics, the mathematics education has failed. Later it even recommends remedial math courses before calculus! What are you doing in college if you need that?