All science is computational science
In the same vein as the all science is computational science (previously we talked about this in the context of an NYT article on the rising dominance of computation), Science has an article this week on the inadequate mathematics preparation of biology students. One of the authors in computational neuroscientist Bill Bialek. Click below for the abstract or here for the whole article.
Introductory Science and Mathematics Education for 21st-Century Biologists
William Bialek and David Botstein
Galileo wrote that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”; his quantitative approach to understanding the natural world arguably marks the beginning of modern science. Nearly 400 years later, the fragmented teaching of science in our universities still leaves biology outside the quantitative and mathematical culture that has come to define the physical sciences and engineering. This strikes us as particularly inopportune at a time when opportunities for quantitative thinking about biological systems are exploding. We propose that a way out of this dilemma is a unified introductory science curriculum that fully incorporates mathematics and quantitative thinking.
February 10th, 2004 at 12:56 am
Skimmed through the article. Let me first say that I agree very much with the idea that we should have classes that teach engineering math & computer along with motivating examples and applications in biology.
But, I disagree with the underlying premise that all bio students should be forced to learn lots of math & engineering skills. I think that it’s most productive for everyone to study what they enjoy. Some bio people love math and some hate it. It’s a good thing that, currently, biologists who hate math can avoid it, while still having a great time doing exactly what they love.
I feel, for example, that imposing basic calculus on many high school and all college students is a mistake; despite its being at the base of Newtonian physics, many students will live their lives not needing to know calculus, and despising the time they spent learning it.
If biologists really need to acquire quantitaive skills, they will find this out and become interested in learning them. The flaw in our educational/research system is not that it doesn’t force everyone to learn math at the beginning of college; it’s that it doesn’t provide enough time for older researchers (by which I mean primarily professors, but also postdocs and even grad students) to truly immerse themselves in a subject which they have discovered would be useful for them to learn.
You’ll find plenty of professors or older students in biology who did not learn math in college, but who now feel that math is important, enjoy it, and want to learn more. I’ve found that these people generally attend a seminar series or perhaps a one-semester class on math or on computer programming. They are not allowed the time to spend the years it takes to work through all those classes that they didn’t take as an undergrad. As a result, while they are eager to gain a thorough grounding in the subject, they don’t.
There is a second concern. The article assumes that time can be created for teaching additional math by making teaching more efficient by combining multiple classes into a unified science/math curriculum. This is unrealistic; additional material can only be taught either by ditching some standard material, or by extending the length of college as a whole. Were this proposal to be implemented, it would result either in pulling bio undergrads out of the standard math and physics sequences to make room for the new “biomath” sequence, or in reducing the amount of time that bio students may spend on non-bio-related electives. Either of these would ultimately INCREASE, not decrease, the disconnect between biology and other fields.
It would be far more effective to create more flexibility for education later in life than it would be to try and cram another year and a half’s worth of studies into the already crowded college curriculum. So, I propose that instead of focus on educating undergraduates more, we focus on educating post-grads more. Motivated older researchers will learn twice the math in half the time than they would have learned as college students, had they been forced to sit through another 12 classes that they hated.
February 10th, 2004 at 1:02 am
Totally agree. Bio students will learn what they need. (I’m discovering this right now with my own physics education!)
But I think it’s more of an issue of making the resources accessible. Instead of teaching pre-med physics just to get through the requirements, a biophysics course that places ideas like current and voltage in a real context might produce a deeper understanding.
February 10th, 2004 at 1:04 am
totally, they should offer more courses like that for those who want them.
February 11th, 2004 at 11:57 pm
of further interest:
Watching the Jobs Go By
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 11, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/opinion/11KRIS.html
To be permitted to read the rest of this column, you must first click
here —
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2004/02/10/opinion/11KRIS_MATH.html –
and answer the question correctly:
Go on, try it. After all, 83 percent of Japanese high school seniors
got it right (though only 30 percent of American seniors). The correct
answer is (c). If you answered incorrectly, though, keep reading ?
think of it as a social promotion.
The topic today is the growing furor over the outsourcing of jobs to
India ? and, more broadly, educational lapses here. One reason for the
jobless recovery in the U.S. is that it doesn’t make much sense to have
an American radiologist, say, examine your X-ray when it can be done so
much more cheaply in New Delhi.
Indeed, why should computer software be written, taxes prepared,
pathology specimens examined, financial analysis done or homework
graded in the U.S., when all of that can be done more cheaply in
Bangalore? I.B.M. is moving thousands of jobs to India and China, and
Reuters says it will have Indian reporters cover some U.S. companies
from there.
All this is unsettling. But to me the alarm seems overwrought ? and
dangerous, for it is likely to fuel calls for protectionism. A dozen
years ago, there was a similar panic about high-tech jobs going abroad,
and people said that Asia would be making computer chips while
Americans produced potato chips.
Instead, free trade worked. Some autoworkers lost their jobs, but
America emerged stronger than ever. Studies by Catherine Mann of the
Institute for International Economics suggest that it is the same this
time. Outsourcing raises American productivity, gives our economy a
boost, increases foreign demand for U.S. products and leaves us better
off.
Yet, as an Indian friend, Sunil Subbakrishna, pointed out to me, there
is one step we should take in response to this wave of outsourcing:
bolster our second-rate education system.
Mr. Subbakrishna, a management consultant specializing in technology,
notes that in his native Bangalore, children learn algebra in
elementary school. All in all, he says, the average upper-middle-class
child in Bangalore finishes elementary school with a better grounding
in math and science than the average kid in the U.S.
I saw the same thing when I lived in China and interviewed college
applicants there. The SAT wasn’t offered in China, so Chinese high
school students took the Graduate Record Examinations ? intended for
would-be graduate students ? and many still scored in the 99th
percentile in math.
The latest international survey, called Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study, found that the best-performing eighth
graders were, in order, from Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Japan, Belgium and the Netherlands. The U.S. ranked 19th, just after
Latvia. (India and China weren’t surveyed.)
“For too many graduates, the American high school diploma signifies
only a broken promise,” declares a major new study released yesterday
by three education policy organizations. Called the American Diploma
Project, it found that 60 percent of employers rated graduates’ skills
as only “fair” or “poor.”
The broader problem is not just in schools but society as a whole:
There’s a tendency in U.S. intellectual circles to value the humanities
but not the sciences. Anyone who doesn’t nod sagely at the mention of
Plato’s cave is dismissed as barely civilized, while it’s no blemish to
be ignorant of statistics, probability and genetics. If we’re going to
revere Plato, as we should, we should also remember that his academy
supposedly had a sign at the entrance: “Let no one ignorant of geometry
enter here.”
In 1957, the Soviet launching of Sputnik frightened America into
substantially improving math and science education. I’m hoping that the
loss of jobs in medicine and computers to India and elsewhere will
again jolt us into bolstering our own teaching of math and science.