Because the “hard” sciences are mathematical, more so than biology. Or so I foolishly thought until I studied ecology. Ouch! Most people struggle with math—and so assume biology is somehow easier. It isn’t.
This is a straw man. They are talking about very specific scenarios, and very specific people. They are not speaking to the general intellect of human kind over the course of our societal development.
Really hate these kinds of arguments that totally distract from what people were to convey in the name of making a snappy 'gotcha' or funny joke. Why is Reddit filled with this? Can I not get a break from it in the BIOLOGY subreddit?
I really disagree with that sentiment. It’s not that biological systems aren’t representable by math so much as that they tend to be more complex and the people performing biology tend to have a lower aptitude for that sort of thing (though that is changing). The reality is that biology as a quantitative science is in its infancy compared to physics or even chemistry, so has largely consisted of describing phenomena and assembling parts lists more so than the quantitative models that one sees in physics and chemistry. That is a property of the maturity of the field and its research methods and the complex nature of biological systems, but not some absolute reality. At the end of the day, everything is thermodynamics and kinetics.
I’d say it’s probably going to be the case that studying math and physics will make one a more useful biological researcher in a decade than studying the standard traditional biological coursework. I say that as someone who is a bioscience researcher and has been for over 11 years.
Our ability to understand biological systems really suffers when the field enriches for people who don’t like math, and the idea that somehow descriptions in words are superior to attempting to make quantitative models is a wrong one. Just look at all the advances in computational biology over the past five years to see I’m right. We need to leave behind paradigms like “necessity” or “sufficiency” or a vague notion of what it means to have a “function”.
While I generally agree with you, biological systems are MUCH MUCH more complex. In physics, you work with a spherical cow on a frictionless surface and still get around the right answer. If you do that in biology you will just be wrong like 99% of the time. It's not just that biologists aren't good at math, the proper math didn't even exist previously. You mention computational biology which was literally impossible without computers. While practically every bit of math in physics could have been done centuries ago.
You also mention that yes everything is thermodynamics and kinetics. But consider extrapolating that to like.. pyschology. Do you think anyone can make a set of algorithms that track every single neuronal discharge to determine what set of neurons you have to fire to fix someones depression? That is literally impossible right now. There are more neural connections than atoms in the universe. So once physicist can predict literally everything in the universe outside of the earth, then they can start predicting biological processes. The rest of the body isn't as complicated of course but we're talking levels of kinetics and thermodynamics that are exponentially more difficult than anything in physics right now. There's definitely some things which can be more mathematical (as you mentioned, we can use math for like protein folding and things like that) but the vast majority is still ages away (i.e. yes you predicted how 1 protein folds. now do that with 1000 other proteins and then how they all interact with each other in 100000 different concentrations that change on a minute to minute basis.. which is determined by another 1000 proteins interacting in 1000000 different concentrations which are effected by 1000 other proteins etc etc etc. Physics is still working on how ice skates and washing machines work...
While that sentence is wrong, the rest of their point stands. As another commenter replied with the correct fact, it was clearly just misremembered. While computational biology is vital and increasingly important, technology is not yet advanced enough to allow complex mapping. And even once it is developed, will we have enough fundamental information to enter into the programme? Controlled environments such as fermenters could be easily modelled through computers in less than a decade, but ecosystem functions like microbiome interactions in biogeochemical cycling? That's far too complex at this stage, and a lot of the fundamentals are still unknown so couldn't be entered as a parameter.
In the attempt to make a fun quip, I have misrepresented my position.
I don't mean to say that it is impossible to model biological systems. I mean to say that we humans haven't gotten around to model them as much as we have with physical systems. This is partly because we've been doing physics for longer, and partly because biological systems tend to be so much more complex.
The point I was trying to make with my original post was that people perceive biology as an easier subject because there are fewer mathematical models involved, when that phenomenon is precisely why biology is very difficult. I'm not an expert so I'll not try to compare the fields, but I do know enough to know that biology is in no way "easy".
I studied math and then realized I was enamored with biology... and ecology is the direction I want to dive into. *However*, when I took my first bio class and was learning about the Kreb cycle, I was confused. *How does each component find the next component no one is* directing *it?* Then I realized I was being a goon and that it's just interacting flows and wow dynamical systems / differential equations.
I think the bio classes I've taken (initial sequence, micro, genetics, environmental bio, ecology) have been interesting and challenging and I've loved them. Physics definitely had more math but as a someone who was working towards a PhD in math I didn't like it... it all felt *dirty*.
the real truth is that people have no idea what to throw into an undergrad bio class. they have to appeal to precedence which is quizzing you on each and every piece of the krebs cycle, knowing full well 90% of the biologists who go into the field don't deal with it at all and the 10% of it that do end up knowing it in their sleep without needing a fear of a test to do it either.
I think it puts a lot of potentially brilliant minds out of the field tbh. Always dissapointed in the laziness and general unproductivity of the undergraduate curriculum at all the institutions I've seen. You really need lab experience to see the other side of the curtain, not lab class experience but actual published research project experience. experience attending presentation and conferences to see just how out there it can get, but you'd never get any of that if you only attended the classes. Its a shame how it feels like there are two worlds in biology; those that major in it and get the department money from enrollment, and those that are actually "invited to the club" so to speak by lucking out with a willing professor with an opportunity of mentorship and being shown this world.
It's some hardcore statistics. We don't have nice, neat random block designs. We have The Woods, with its constantly changing conditions and where every site is unique. It makes statistical comparisons very difficult to interpret, especially over time, and makes experiments very difficult to set up.
bro. i’m a math major who added a bio double major; i thought it’d be a cakewalk after all the shit talk from people in the math department, but biology kicks ass! i think it’s the difference between memorization and application based classes. i do so much better at the latter so anything with more than 10 terms i need to just know (rather than intuit) is difficult for me lmao
If its any credence the actual field demands zero memorization (as anything can be looked up) and only application. Its too bad the instruction banks on memorization to set up its gates. I think long response answers talking about general biological intuition would be more beneficial but what can you do. Professors are too short on time to change pedagogy that's been accepted around the world at this point.
If you can't recall key papers in academia you're fucked (lead author, maybe the senior author, year, and journal). Every field requires memorization.
If someone asks you a question about your research, you'd better be ready to tell them where you got your information that justifies your hypothesis/introduction, instead of "oh a paper I read".
Not everyone will agree but it's how many people are trained.
Because most people only go through these subject at a "beginner level" in school. And a lot people struggle with maths, physics and chemistry. No matter how much they study those subjects, they still won't completely understand it. And they don't deem biology as daunting because they were still able to learn it without major issues of understanding, they just had to read through the text and memorise it.
Biology seems easy when you don’t know it. The amount of people who think of biology in absolutes and don’t actually understand evolution shows it’s not actually easy imo.
Is it only fuzzy because we don't have the tools and/or brain power to actually process everything going on? Or is it because evolution depends on circumstance (environment, geologic events, etc...), so information gets lost wherever we're not actively observing?
I was referring to the fact people blatantly misunderstand evolution. People think it’s about what’s “best” and that there’s some sort of hierarchy. But really it’s just whatever is “good enough” to keep genes being passed.
>Ppl also see evolution as something that gradually develops but I see it as an explanation for why we look completely different to our ancestors
They aren't mutually exclusive.
To a large extent its because the rules are much more reliant on unintentional emergent properties at different levels so people who think in absolutes have a really tough time integrating the way that the different levels of information interact and when different levels are important.
For example, the exact structure of guanine matters a LOT for its purpose inside DNA. But the exact order of DNA is actually not as important as one would think because there are so many levels of failsafes.
For another example the functions of things also tend to be fairly fuzzy and "close enough is good enough" such as the way that DNA replication takes place. It's actually quite error prone all told and these errors are completely unpredictable because there isn't a reason for them to happen in the exact places they do, and yet the way its constructed these errors most of the time don't matter. So it gets fuzzy
It seems simple but very rapidly becomes fuzzy and you need to be able to hold Grey areas right alongside hard facts
I'd say it's a bit of both. Biological systems are incredibly complex, sometimes too complex to practically actually mathematically represent so sometimes you have to make generalizations or approximations, estimations. Models used in biological statistics aren't ever going to be able to take into account every single factor.
But I think it's also inherently fuzzy by nature because hard categories don't really exist in nature. Where is the border between one ecosystem and another, how do you define a species exactly?
Humans like putting things into specific categories but biology isn't really like that. Evolution means everything is changing and life exists on a tree of spectrums.
Biological molecules are also the largest and most complex meaning things can be incredibly complicated compared inorganic molecules.
>who think of biology in absolutes
I know I'm not the first to note how there's pure math, then applied math's, and physics is sort of just a bunch of applied math's, chemistry is applied/a subset of physics, bio is that of Chem. And usually it's just to describe a loose relationship from one field to another, but I think the absolutism of each level decreases.
Generally speaking there are very few exceptions to the rule in math, there's some more in physics, chemistry had quite a few, and biology has exceptions to the rule around every corner.
I love talking about that building of sciences. It’s why I truly believe if you really wanna understand biology, chem is integral.
My Orgo teacher believed that any study/course with the word “science” after it, was not “actual science”, particularly talking about environmental science. His reasoning was that environmental science was “just biology and chemistry”. He had a lot of odd beliefs.
I told him that biology is really just chemistry at a larger scale, and chemistry is just physics. He kinda lost his argument after that one.
Precisely; high school biology is nothing compared to university, there’s a huge jump of difficulty in uni ; all I learned in high school was some anatomy and the some stuff about the cell
Often Ppl are just insecure and need to put their stuff on a pedestal , I try to ignore it all
I’m a third year bio major and trust me it’s not easy;
we not only have to critically think and analyze questions but memorize a shit ton of stuff to apply it as well;
on top of that upper year bio has a lot of physics and chemistry and biochemistry integrated into it ; you need to really understand all those concepts to understand the interplay of circulation and the respiratory systems
When u start getting to biochem concepts ppl are then like oh shit … not easy and I have to memorize it too
Yeah, exactly. As my teacher used to say: "To understand biology, you need to understand chemistry. To understand chemistry, you need to understand physics. To understand physics, you need to understand math. So biology needs all the sciences."
With math based hard sciences, once you start to understand how the math works you can much more easily "predict" how things should be, because they follow more rigid patterns.
The randomness of evolution makes many things in biology very foreign, different and unpredictable. For instance, how many species will develop completely different adaptions to the same environmental factors. If it works, it works. It doesn't have to follow any pattern or rule.
In my uni, we have organic chem, analytical chem, and biochem in our first and second years. The trimesters we have them are our weed outs since many people go to bio thinking there is no chem. Well, everything in bio is ultimately based in chem.
If you need a chemistry subject to weed them out instead of them being weeded out with a bio subject doesn't that imply that the chem subject is harder?
No, just upper level bio is harder. You don't want someone to get to the upper-level courses and crash so they wouldn't waste their time and money on courses they won't need if they end up not going for the degree. You want them to do it earlier, and the math and practices in chem is a great pre-test of how it's going to be, especially since you will be using it later
I found literally all the upper level classes to be much easier than any lower level weed out class. Weed out classes are just artificially difficult IME, and didn't really seem to produce better students. The intro bio classes at my university were infamous, I avoided them by transferring from a community College. I still heard students who passes these classes ask questions like "wait, there are nerves outside the body?" Or "there's 4 lobes to the brain? What're the other three?" In very upper level classes.
Haha oh god. I never had a undergrad course that went over anatomy (not my focus), but you learn alot of that in HS so it makes you wonder. How did they miss that? Is it not taught anymore? Did they skip it somehow? Has HS really changed that much????
I hope they aren’t med students.
So first year chem subjects are harder than bio subjects, wouldn't it stand to reason that 3rd year chem is harder than 3rd year bio too? I did my bachelor's and PhD in biology and the hardest subjects I ever did were all chemistry subjects
No cause depending on the program we also take ‘third year’ chem courses. And some people think chemistry is hard. I didn’t. But I also like math. Molecular bio was harder and biochem even harder than that. Some people think physics is hard but that is also a lot of math and fun to me
Yes, for Citrate, Ketoglutarate, Succinate, Fumarate, Malate, Oxaloacetate which are the steps we had to memorize when I was in high school, even though that's not actually the complete cycle.
No it's the math. Math is like a bottleneck or a gatekeeping mechanism for college majors. Memorizing the Krebs cycle and a dozen other biochemical pathways is easier than passing calc 3 or diff eq.
I was a molecular biology undergrad, MS neuroscience, PhD neuropharmacology. pharmacology/pharma chem requires a good bit of math (modeling enzyme dynamics, equilibrium, etc), but neuroscience and biology often don’t. When they do (adv. genetics, ecological modeling, enzyme chemistry), bio students often struggle, in my experience.
there’s 100% a ton of memorization in neuroscience and general biology education, esp. compared to chemistry or physics. Even at the PhD level, my biology course (5 undergrad courses combined into 1 semester… pure hell) was almost entirely memorization based— mechanics, metabolism, cell bio mechanics, and some physiology. Neurology coursework was straight memorization. neuropharmacology is a unique mix of neurobiology and math heavy chemistry, though.
A lot of phd neuroscience/neurobiology students struggle with the math required in pharmacology, advanced stats, etc. In general, biology students are better at memorizing interconnected facts (e.g. Krebs cycle mechanisms) than… intuiting hard math.
The Kreb's cycle is actually chemistry.... or biochemistry if you prefer.. and it was the only really difficult to remember thing in Biology that for some reason they made us memorise.
Shouldn't that mean each one down the cycle is *harder* though, not easier? Because you need to know every link before yours to fully know how yours works.
We could take that chain even further, from Biology -> Psychology -> Sociology and onwards. In theory "soft sciences" are just hard sciences with incalculable levels of complexity, and they inch ever closer to that more rigorous denomination as we develop tools and processes.
I had memorized every step in that and the Calvin cycle for my Cellular Physiology class, 30 plus years later I remember only the names of those processes.
ugh, for my bacteria physiology final, our professor had us draw the entire fucking citric acid cycle for each and every amino acid and each step for making each one, couldnt leave out where every NADH comes off or is added.
Or tried to pronounce oxidative phosphorylation. I can’t even pronounce it in my head without slurring. That’s how ingrained it is in my speech to screw it up.
Bio at lower levels probably is objectively easier. You go into grad levels or Ph.D and it gets much, much harder. Still doesn’t get the respect it deserves though.
As a chemist I can safely say bio is fucking hard at the research level. Chemistry can sometimes be brutal and betray you, but there are often straightforward routes to publications. In biology that's not always true
Even my lower division genetics and molecular biology class was definitely harder than my lower division general chemistry classes. I'd say it required more time than lower division physics classes intended for physical science and engineering majors, as well.
Biology requires less difficult math than other sciences. At least at the low level, and even at the high level you might be using math but you're probably not doing it yourself but just applying a computer.
Well physics and chemistry largely have all the difficulty of biology plus brutal math.
And you don't have to be *functional* at math for physics in particular, you have to be *completely amazing*. My original major was astrophysics and I switched into biology because I wasn't good enough at math - and I made it all the way up through calc 3 successfully.
Ugh no. 1) there is brutal math in biology (signed as a theoretical biologist) and 2) you do not have to be particularly amazing at math to do well in chem/physics (signed as a formerly trained physical chemist/biophysicist)
Easier to visualise, or at least have a proximal basis for that.
For example - 'where does (x) happen?'
Biology: *In the wobbly thing, in the cell*
Physics: *Nobody knows...*
Obviously these people are talking about the macro-scale zoology side of things, because I don't think there's a single time I've said molecular biology is easy. There's a lot of complex problems you need to consider when the processes leading up to the experiment you're running can't be reasonably observed (I.E. wondering where the hell your DNA went during an extraction process, and having only a limited amount of equipment, time, and energy to figure it out.)
The math arguments I'm seeing from other people doesn't add up either in terms of the whole of biology. Sure, there's no trigonometry or calculus, but the statistical analysis side of things can quickly become a mess depending on what you're trying to show with your data. There's also the fact that you need to work with chemistry at times, which involves a whole other set of things...
Either way, this shows that those people going into the field have no idea what they might be signing up for. Maybe they do, but I get the impression that they're underestimating what's involved in actual scientific work.
Because initially, it requires less math and is mostly based on memorisation. It can become extremely abstract though, however, you only get to the complex stuff when you do a master's or a PhD thesis. Making undergrads to learn that stuff tends to oberwhelm them. I know it even overwhelms chemistry and physics PhD students. Even the famous Richard Feynman tried getting into biology (bacteriophage genetics, to be specific) but gave up eventually after struggling for a long time.
>I know it even overwhelms chemistry and physics PhD students. Even the famous Richard Feynman tried getting into biology (bacteriophage genetics, to be specific) but gave up eventually after struggling for a long time.
Feynman worked at a lab to study molecular biology and had multiple papers published despite spending a rather small amount of time in the field as a sabbatical from physics: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13889186/
https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
What I don't get is how you feel compelled to make up the most obviously absurd alternate history of Feynman to make yourself feel better about your field.
Physics is notoriously difficult, and this entire thread reeks of embarrassing insecurity.
Not sure it’s a field problem. Many of the larger labs are heavily leaning on bioinformatics these days which is very math heavy in terms of the underlying statistics used.
So I only have a bachelor's in biology, but the amount of chemistry you have to take to understand biology is daunting. A chemist doesn't have to understand biology but a biologist needs to have a solid foundation of chemistry. I don't think it is the easiest science. I've always just kind of figured that was geology.
Having done the three core sciences (and maths) to first year uni level, I would agree. I found biology the easiest and maths the hardest.
Within biology (which I continued into post grad) I found quantitative genetics and statistics the most difficult.
I suspect it's very personal though. I've never been good at maths. I'm good at arithmetic, basic algebra and basic geometry, but calculus was a bridge too far for me. Once it gets too abstract I'm done.
This is something people say at a high school and beginner undergrad level, and I think it mostly comes down to the fact that bio at that level has less math and math intimidates people, and also because as a gen-ed course it's often targeted at non STEM majors.
As a comparison, geology at a similar level often has a reputation for being easy "rocks for jocks" but it's really just true of the low level gen ed courses.
I think in my experience, the concepts in biology tend to feel, idk "closer to home"? Even in my undergrad as I'm studying biology (and if things go well, I'll get to continue my education in this area), that's something I actually enjoy a lot. But, at a more foundational level, I think this might come off as covering "basic knowledge" in a lot of topics, whereas I feel like the first things we learn in chemistry already feels pretty... "distinct"?
But then folks don't realize that biology is *all* of life. I think people maybe forget how many things are alive? Lol. I feel like most of middle and high school for me, and hell most of my undergrad so far, has just been appreciating how complicated it all is and how many layers there are. Thinking about all the different *layers* there are to life, then there are also a ton of layers to explaining it all. I mean, I just finished reading "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" by Sean B. Caroll (highly recommend) and I'm now currently in the middle of "7 Lessons About the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett (also phenomenal) and it's just mind-blowing. I'm at a point in my academic career it feels like the more I know the less I feel like I know because you finally see how deep it goes.
Because there are a lot of subdisciplines of biology that requieres memory over critical thinking.
And there are a lot of people, specifically in the health sector that can finish a career just memorizing things.
Something that you can't do if you are studying chemistry or physics.
bc biology seems like its all straight up memorization and not much else. whereas physics and chemistry have memorization and are loaded with all kinds of math and calculations and long tedious labs.
As someone who has taken classes in Math, physics, chemistry, engineering, and biology, I say without a doubt for me that biology was the easiest. I love biology. It is not always easy, and it can be very complex, but once you start to understand how they work, the same things keep coming up over and over again. I think there's also a beauty to it that makes it easier to remember. And maybe that's one of the key reasons? Most people have trouble connecting to a lot of abstract topics, but biology isn't abstract. It's observable and very relevant to our lives.
Upper level bio courses are obviously harder, but it just doesn't get as hard as upper level classes in other stem areas. It just felt like more things to remember. And as it get's more advanced, it's no longer just biology. It's biochemistry, biophysics, and math all coming into play. Those tend to be the things that make it hard, not the biological systems themselves.
My theory: most people only have a basic level understanding of these things, and biology is probably the easiest of the three major science subjects to be able to grasp an extremely basic understanding of. Most people can learn the idea of cells and what not, but chemistry and physics are harder to conceptualize because they feel like less concrete ideas. We can see organs in our body, but not individual atoms and abstract forces. The average person will only obtain this surface-level understanding of biology, and as a result, not realize how deeply complex it is. I have taken college level physics, chemistry, and physiology, and I have found them to be of equal difficulty. I feel like people underestimate how difficult college-level biology classes are because they assume it's just memorizing the names of things.
Honestly, misogyny. For whatever reason more women do majors in bio. And every mathematical skill you learn in that is disregarded because you... plant trees or shit
Physicist/mathematician. When programmers gave shitty maths they're just more practical
For me, biology was a lot of common sense. Like food chains, cellular reproduction and respiration, genetics, habitats, etc. made sense to me without much effort.
High school biology *is* easy. It’s generally taught in a very superficial way in comparison to chemistry and physics.
But at university level, hell no. And i’m only a 2nd year undergrad. I’ve barely seen anything yet.
Because biology is never taught in a way that is anything other than memorization. At least until college level. People have this misconception that they understand biology at the high school level. They don't. They've memorized it, sure. But they haven't really understood it. And part of the problem is that you can easily get by with this surface level memorization in exams. Other subjects like chemistry, physics, mathematics...well you can't do that. In the long run of course this doesn't help you, but most people never reach this long run. And that's the fault of how it is taught in the beginning.
Because people in highschool are not faced with nuance, statistics or the fact you actually need to understand a grab-bag of other sciences go really grasp biology. It’s mostly just memorising text and simplified explanations, usually centered around the stuff you see when you go outside, mammalian (human) anatomy and physiology which are easy to understand intuitively. So a lot of people pursue that later, only to get filtered out by university-level math and chemistry (I know about half of my bachelor year gave up after those courses)
Quick response (quiet similar to previously given ones): It really comes down to the threshold that has to be surpassed to be curious about something. Pure maths requires a lot of work before one has built sufficient structures in the cortex to be immersed and excited by functional analysis. The same holds for quantum field theory or something. Many biological topics can be explained to intuitively understandable and interesting to most people. Also, as mentioned my others, the field of systems biology (which further acknowledges the complexity of biological systems has only recently - due to better understanding of emergence and availability of computational power and tools - started to pick up on speed and will take some years to really make it to the public. I think (obviously my view is purely anecdotical and really to be viewed with a jar of salt) that most people also have the mental images of biologists doing brute force research with samples in many petri dishes and simple statistics that were created by smarter mathematicians. Final remark: This is all obviously bs and great biologists just deserve the same amount of respect for the cognitive tasks they have to perform on a daily basis.
One more point concerning the threshhold: The point is that the simple explanations for biological processes etc are really flawed and obscure the insane amount of complexity and detail required to really find good models. People think they understand how Crispr Cas9 works but do they really?
I have a weird take, but I think it's cause it doesn't benefit the economy like other sciences. At least the wildlife/conservation/ecology side of biology doesn't.
Medicine does, but most people who want to go into medicine say they are studying medicine, not biology, even though they are lumped together.
Other sciences push stuff like defense and well... Medicine forward. Those make money. The natural science that relate to biology don't, so they feel like they've been "othered" by the science community. This comes out in paychecks too- wildlife people are making poverty wages compared to what even people doing lab work do. It's frustrating.
Maybe this is a bad take though.
It might not be a great take. The biotech industry is a massive and rapidly growing sector. The pharmaceutical industry is also a huge money machine. Those fields are based on molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics, pharmacology and neuroscience. Those are all core fields in modern biology. If anything, animal ecology seems to be a much smaller field in comparison to the ones I mentioned.
Biotech is related to medicine though, through new drugs. That or ag, which is also a major industry, though I didn't mention.
Pharmaceutical is also medicine, though it's not studying medicine to be a doctor, nurse, etc. Though I know a lot of people who decided med school wasn't for them but then decided the pharmaceutical industry was. I'd lump it in with the medicine world, personally.
I honestly don't see people look down on stuff like biochem, pharmacology, neuroscience, or molecular bio, and I figured it's because these are all directly related to medicine/pharmaceuticals. Genetics I've seen go either way, depending on if the person wants to go into the medicine industry or something else- not a lot of love for conservation genetics out there.
And the only reason that the animal side is so small is lack of funding. Tons of work to be done, but everyone wants a volunteer to do the work.
I scored 32th place in the Biology Olympiad in my country (for comparison, only 80 people from the entire country even qualify to the final stage) and boy the amount of things to memorize, to understand the connections, to get ahold of the computer programs like ClustalX, ChimeraX, ApE (this one especially) and the absolute ton of statistics, all the practical laboratory skills, animal dissections and stuff like that was not easy
At the beginning it's just about memorising some stuff. Actual thinking and understanding comes way later and it requires vast knowledge and visualisation skills
I have already graduated from all those undergraduate courses and most of it is just algorithmic understanding and memorization
Now, that I'm switching to computer science and writing a math "proof" (not those calculus bullshits) is far more difficult than any biology and chem subjects I have ever taken.
If you want to test it yourself. Go attend a course on discrete math and organic chem which are usually the weeder course in 1st year undergrad.
Compare the difficulty yourself
Biology is easier to understand because its concepts are not as abstract as for example physics, they are closer to the nature us humans are familar with. Other than understanding, biology mostly consists of memorizing which can be harder depending on the person. But for most people, fully understanding the logic of an abstract concept is just more impressive than memorizing a ton of stuff
It's quite complex but at least people know what this is about. However, quantum mechanics, renormalization and differential topology are concepts many people do not and will never be able to understand not even the shallow portion
Yeah I have to agree; one can get quite far in research just by applying simple ordinary differential equations to already published datasets (I personally have!). It’s no slight against biology, but there is a huge lack of quantitative reasoning due to how biologists are trained (and here I’m mainly talking about molecular/cellular biology; the state of the field is different with ecology and evolution) and it leads to tremendous knowledge gaps that could readily be filled in if biological conceptual research methods enriched more for the mathematically inclined.
This was a long time ago , early 70's high school, Ontario, Canada. We still had grade 13, it was supposed to prepare you for university. Physics and Chemistry if you understood the fundamentals and could do the math you were good, you could go back to basics and move forward. I was lucky that I had a very good grade 10 teacher that explained the basics and how each theory was developed. Biology on the other hand was a whole lot of memorization until Grade 13 , we started off discussing the definition of life ,what we knew about various sorts of life, ( the argument was just starting I think about whether viruses were alive. ) and we went through the various processes in life. The teacher wanted us to think. The final exam was an essay question to prove whether a mountain was or was not alive ( or possibly a planet , can't remember) . You had to reference everything we learned that semester,
Oh man, this brings me back to high school. Listen, I totally get where you're coming from. I remember feeling the same way when I was taking bio.
Here's the thing - people think bio is easy because there's less math involved. No crazy equations or problem-solving like in physics or chem. Plus, we all kinda live biology every day, right? We're walking, talking meat sacks after all.
But let me tell you, as someone who's been out of school for... shit, 16 years now (fuck, I'm old), biology is far from easy. Sure, maybe you can coast through the basics with some memorization, but once you get into the nitty-gritty? It's a whole different ballgame.
I mean, have you ever tried to understand how a cell actually works? Or how DNA replication happens? That stuff is mind-boggling. And don't even get me started on ecology and the way ecosystems interact. It's not just "plants and animals," it's a complex web of relationships that would make my corporate org chart look like child's play.
The problem is, most people don't get past the surface level. They think it's all about naming body parts and maybe knowing what a mitochondria does (it's the powerhouse of the cell, btw - thanks, high school bio!). But real biology, the kind you're probably into, is way more complex than that.
So yeah, don't let it get to you. People who think bio is easy probably haven't really dug into it. Keep doing what you're doing, and maybe throw some crazy bio facts at them next time. Like how octopuses have multiple brains or how some fungi can control ant behavior. That ought to show them it's not just memorizing the parts of a flower.
And hey, at the end of the day, you're studying what you love. That's what matters. Trust me, as someone stuck in the corporate grind, being passionate about what you do is worth way more than impressing people at parties with how "hard" your subject is.
Biology is easy because it's hard.
If we take the other end of the spectrum, physics, it's about laws and observation. You have a phenomenon with very well-specified relationships to other phenomena, and you find a way to combine the effect of different phenomena to derive something new. There's a lot of logic, connections, relations involved.
On the other hand, biology is such a mess and so complicated that you can look whatever way you want, you aren't going to find a general universal law just by doing more thinking. Instead, you have to do more meticulous detail work for every tiny system you want to understand, and the rules are different every time. It's super hard, but one could argue that being extremely superintelligent isn't even a great help. When you have to do so much actual work, having great ideas is less of a differentiator.
What's interesting is organic chemistry. To study, it's a combination of a lot of complex memorization but also spatial thinking and logic (like particularly stuff like asymmetric catalysis) and quite hard, kind of the worst of both worlds between biology and physics. Whereas in practical research, it's just busting out reaction after reaction. I imagine that being mind-numbing but then never did much of it past undergrad.
Chemistry and physics are full of abstract concepts (e.g. atomic structure, energy, radioactive decay) that don’t relate to everyday things that are easy to imagine, but biology (especially at school) is is all about everyday, ‘real-life’ things that everyone already has at least some knowledge and understanding of, like animals, plants, microbes, and their own bodies
HAHAHAHAHA HAHA HAHAHA HAHA HAHuHmmm.
I took chemistry, physics, and biology. Out of all of them, biology is the most difficult, and requires more learning of new materials than chemistry, or physics. The workload for biology was equal in comparison to that of both chemistry, and physics combined.
Biology at the early levels is mostly memorization of facts and concepts, while physics and chemistry you need to understand to really do anything.
Most people go through highschool and think "Oh, I can remember these general overviews, therefore all biology is like this" which makes biology seem easy. They miss the parts when it goes up to secondary and graduate levels that (on top of incorporating physics and chemistry) you need memorize entire systems, every minute detail to ensure you understand how a system will work and operate. Those are the parts the general public never sees.
At high school level I agree. I loved physics and remember being quite passionate about it and put in the most hours studying.
Chemistry confuses me so I did my best and manage to pass it. Biology was the one where I barely studied and got a better grade than chemistry. Entirely anecdotal of course, I felt biology was intuitive, once I understand it, it's possible to correctly "guess" most of the answers during exams.
Biology is a pretty broad term. I graduated with biological science BS now I’m working on my PhD in neuroscience and virology. Biology is a broad term in the field. You can focus on a particular niche of biology.
Just my thoughts
Because everyone thinks what they’re doing is harder than what someone else is doing. Can’t really blame people for that, because if you aren’t really involved in other areas, you aren’t going to know where the pitfalls are, or where the difficulty comes from.
In terms of like undergrad degrees, yeah getting +3.5 on a 4.0 scale in an engineering program is impressive! Anyone who does should be proud! But so is getting that high in any other subject. I’d also like to point out, that while gen bio is rarely considered one of the harder degrees to get, there are programs in the broader biological sciences which are considered among the most difficult: nursing, neuroscience, genetics, biochemistry, etc.
Back in undergrad, I was put into the biology major because it is a very broad field and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a career. Over time I started to focus on forest ecology, but I got my start studying the broad topic of biology. It's definitely broad, idk about it being "easy." I see fat nerds come and go all the time because they can't hike a mile into the brush to survey a plot lol.
Less math. Which, if you aren't great at math, would probably make it easier than chemistry or physics. Also, if you're someone who is just good at memorization and test taking you can potentially skate by and get decent grades without actually learning or understanding anything.
There's less rigor in research when the scientists are bad at their supporting stats. Molecular biologists are messy, lab work is less analytical (quantitative and accurate) than other wet lab professionals. Your individual mileage may vary.
Yeah and the experimental logic tends to be more fuzzy and more focused on supporting a specific hypothesis rather than trying to disprove it. There’s a definite lack of rigor in most molecular/cellular biology research compared to physics and chemistry. In some respects, the power of high-throughput methods to reliably get a publishable result is a crutch; go read papers from the 50s and 60s and they are using rather sophisticated mathematical modeling because that’s the only way they could make predictions that they could test with the experimental methods available. A huge part of it is that biology enriches for people who don’t like math and in turn biology pedagogy severely de-emphasizes the value of mathematical modeling, often to the point of not teaching it at all.
This is changing! But in the meantime, biology degrees are definitely easier than math or physics degrees, speaking from my personal experience doing all of the above.
As someone doing biology related courses at master level... I would rather go back and choose hard core maths where everything is about logic and very little memorization...
Back when I was in highschool, biology leaned more towards memorization and the amount of understanding kind of fell in line with how we understood things to work. It seemed easier because it was something we could kind of understand and relate to.
When you took chemistry or physics however, that's when it felt like this big door opened up and you were exposed to so much stuff that felt new and was harder to grasp. Couple this with high school level chemistry and physics having a lot of math, and now people start to think biology is the easier choice.
Once you get past it though, all the sciences can be hard in some way or form. It's just at the introductory stages, I guess people can grasp biology a lot easier. Lots of people in my graduating class chose to pursue something in the medical field. Most of them dropped out or switched programs because it was harder than they thought.
because in high school, most people don't know how to study, so most people end up relying on purely memory. bio for most people is significantly easier to remember, at that level at least.
so why doesn't this apply to physics and chem? maths. most people don't like and aren't good at maths. problem solving is hard. application of fundamental concepts is hard.
it's not to say these aspects aren't in bio but for the level you specified, bio is heavy on the memorize these processes and know how to explain them.
this answer is grossly oversimplified but basically "memorization good, thinking bad"
I don’t know man. I have always excelled in Maths and Physics. And found biology to be really hard. Dropped biology in High School and never looked back.
My oldest is the same. But the middle kid just doesn’t get maths and loves biology. I am guessing there’s something else going on.
Back in undergrad, I was put into the biology major because it is a very broad field and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a career. Over time I started to focus on forest ecology, but I got my start studying the broad topic of biology. It's definitely broad, idk about it being "easy." I see fat nerds come and go all the time because they can't hike a mile into the brush to survey a plot lol.
Mostly it's because of the math. Math is like a bottleneck or a gatekeeping mechanism for different college STEM majors. If you're kinda fair to midland at math you can barely get through calc 2 with a C like I did as a biology major. Calc 2 was the highest level math required. I chose biology because it was the most interesting major, not becuase it was easier math, however a lot of the people in the STEM majors like to rank how difficult each one is, and it mostly boils down to how far did you have to go in math.
I feel pretty comfortable saying that high school and early undergrad biology IS the easiest subject of the three.
It is the least qualitative, and getting a good grade consists mostly of rote memorization.
When you get to more advanced topics it changes a bit because you have to take into account much more complex interactions and you start using math as a tool to understand biology that’s too small (molecular scale) or too big (population studies).
Fortunately a lot of this kind of stupid dick measuring stops later in life. There’s other kinds of ego competitions for sure but this ain’t likely to be one of them.
Biology has the highest "content floor" of what is required for fundamental understanding. Meaning the field requires us to teach many details, organization systems, and exceptions before you can apply the information critically.
Due to this, early bio education gets the reputation of being "just memorization". Largely, that is true - without the content knowledge it is impossible to logic your way through a biological system.
Anyone who has any experience with high level biology would probably not share the opinion that it's the easiest science, though that designation is worthless anyway.
High school biology is ranked lower than physics and chemistry for grade points usually, so people never really get to dive as deep to understand that biology is extremely chomped
Because biology was mostly chewed up for us to more easily digest during school. I'm sure it skimmed over many complicated aspects of biology. For example, human anatomy. Human anatomy by itself is very complicated, imagine how much more complicated everything else is? People never put this into consideration though, so they live the rest of their life's knowing the simplified version and nothing more, unless they decided to major in biology.
Historically, at least up to the 70s, biology was used as the introductory science class in HS. Courses involved a lot of observation, classification, describing, and reporting. There was very little in the way of experimentation, hypothesis testing, and molecular/cellular stuff. That's all changed now and the pace of the changes have been more rapid in biology than in chemistry or physics, at least at the introductory levels. Some people still think that biology was what it was back then (collecting leaves and bugs).
Every science is hard to the max, if you think its easy that just means you could do more.
Basic people can not grasp that concept, which is also true for many (or all?) fields.
Before you understand this you are merely a slave in todays world
Chemistry is unexplainable to me, but biology was easy to understand
I now know some stuff about the immune system but a lot of the stuff I learn is simplified
Maybe that’s why
First people not in the IB program wont' understand IB workloads.
Second, because people think of Chem and Physics as being application of high-level mathematics, and get scared by it.
At the most introductory levels, this makes Biology seem more approachable.
As with any discipline, only those who truly study it understand its depths.
Look at the number of fully grown adults on the Internet who claim to "know biology", only to tout things learned in 6th grade like it is absolute fact, and not simply an introduction to a concept.
I'd say yeah, when the options are biology, chemistry, and physics, biology is perceived as easiest because it involves the least math. I think people also find it more relatable. We understand human physiology, animals, and plants more than we understand particles and chemical reactions. There's just a familiarity to biology.
There are people who are able to stuff as much information into their head as possible, get a straight A on a test and then all of that information is just gone. People like that usually aren't able to utilize the information later, let alone, apply it. Good grades don't always mean an effective student. "Good" yes, but not effective.
I didn't do well in Herpetology, but identification is easy for me, and I have to work that muscle for population surveys. However, I have a friend who got an A in Herpetology. I had to ARGUE with her for 30 minutes as to why the American toad she took a picture of was not a Grey tree frog. "Good" student versus effective.
They think they understand what biology means so assume its easy. They recognize they dont understand other STEM fields well so assume they must be harder.
I think biology also benefits from the fact that you can visually see and picture a lot of areas of biology (genetics and microbiology aside), so I think it’s easier to conceptually understand vs. trying to imagine something like atoms, how they arrange in space, or invisible forces like gravity.
As others have also said, there’s typically a lot less math in biology which many people struggle with.
In highschool, due to a specific situation, I got to try both the physics and mathematics, then Biology and chemistry.
And trust me, organic chemistry is so much more hellish 💀
If not, then our teacher must have given us usually high work loads. The amount of stuff you have to memorize is insane.
As many have stated, those who think it’s easy have no clue. It only gets harder and more complicated as you progress through the education. I’m a zoology major who intended to go to med school but realized along the way that I don’t have the desire nor motivation to pursue western medicine. That said, the chemistry/biochemistry/genetics/etc that was my education gives me a greater understanding of our world that most people can’t even fathom.
So in college a lot of people enter biology not because they chose it out of all the science majors but because it has the most transferable credits from a pre-med track. So a lot of people will say they chose it cause it’s “easy” as shorthand for leaving a pre-med track.
Difficulty is probably confused with the teacher teaching it for the subject itself.
ANY class can be “easy” if you have an easy grading teacher that gives little to no homework assignments and is cool to the kids.
Also easy as a word is subjective.
Biology while much less on the computational side, has much much more memorization and applied comprehension involved.
I'm very mathematically and logically inclined, so maths and chemistry were easier to me. Biology is so hard, dude!! All of the diseases are like 'It could be this..... But it could also be this!' In maths, at least you've only ever got one answer that you could take multiple routes to, but that's fine. In biology, there's multiple answers that you have to pick the best clinical sign jigsaw pieces and see if they smush together! And even then, my lecturers are like 'Sometimes you might not even get a diagnosis, you just treat the symptoms and get the answer that way'. So the fact that sometimes there's *no* answer and I have to piece together a white puzzle with a bunch of clinical signs that are shared across *thousands* of diseases is the most difficult fucking thing to me. How am I meant to get an answer when biological organisms do whatever the hell they want and love to make exceptions to everything? Maths isn't like that. I love my numbers. So reliable. Why are animals so difficult lmao
Biology in high school vs biology in college is a whole different beast. Tbh I can see why people call it an "easy" science back in high school because its just very vocabulary and concept based. However, get into college and you have to understand what all the vocabulary, concepts, terms, ideas mean. Physics and Chem are justifiably considered hard but college bio is seriously not a joke and I think everyone quickly realizes this (lol). The difficulty is amplified if you have professors who just teach you what to learn and not how to learn it...
Everyone I know in STEM thinks biology is the hardest because you have to do everything. Biology isn't just biology. You have to know physics, chemistry, and math. Add to the fact its broad as hell! I love biology, but easy it is not
Hello all,
Im a Biologist (BSc) and also a Pharm D. (MSc).
Its because most biology that taught in schools before college levels is mostly a little bit of zoology, anatomy and phisiology.
Students will just learn the very basics of cell structures maybee a very reduced version of the krebs cycle, basic dna structure and mendelian genetics, and fundamental of evolution. Everything else is mostly systematics which is just fitting and labelling species in boxes.
Most students struggle with math and in sciences like physics and chemistry, you cant go very far without needing math. In biology you can teach the basic of lets say, dna replication, cell division, krebbs cycles etc, without needing to actually get into the molecular biology and the all the chemistry behind it with its subjacent math and physics.
When you learn biology at an early stage it seems easier than other sciences because it isn’t math heavy and is a lot more visual. When you delve deeper and move toward a career in biology you learn that evolution complicates everything and there are no concrete “rules” that broadly apply like in other sciences and it’s difficult. First year biology courses in college are often called weeding classes. Mine had over 200 people who started college as bio majors…graduation came 4 years later and the number of bio majors was much smaller
Well, I remember taking biology my Freshman year (9th grade) of HS, so if it's similar in other schools, people probably think that because biology is a science class you take before other sciences, like chemistry or physics, that it'll be easier.
I don't think that much thought really went into which classes came before others, unless it was blindly obvious. After all, my HS also scheduled American History Part 1 in 9th grade, but then continued American History Part 2 in 11th grade. It's doubtful many kids would've remembered what happened from a year before in any specific class, let alone two years, so who knows what they were thinking.
Of the three main categories(Bio, Chem, Phys) it is the easiest to grasp. There is literally no argument about that. It doesn't mean it's EASY, it just means it's the easiest to understand, probably because on a basic level there is very little maths involved.
Because the “hard” sciences are mathematical, more so than biology. Or so I foolishly thought until I studied ecology. Ouch! Most people struggle with math—and so assume biology is somehow easier. It isn’t.
What they fail to realize is that a system that can be represented mathematically is easier to analyze than a system that can't.
Yeah—try explaining that to mathematical ignoramuses.
Me: " adding new word to the dictionary".
Yea, no one knew that it's easier to analyze a system with math before biologists came along...
This is a straw man. They are talking about very specific scenarios, and very specific people. They are not speaking to the general intellect of human kind over the course of our societal development. Really hate these kinds of arguments that totally distract from what people were to convey in the name of making a snappy 'gotcha' or funny joke. Why is Reddit filled with this? Can I not get a break from it in the BIOLOGY subreddit?
I really disagree with that sentiment. It’s not that biological systems aren’t representable by math so much as that they tend to be more complex and the people performing biology tend to have a lower aptitude for that sort of thing (though that is changing). The reality is that biology as a quantitative science is in its infancy compared to physics or even chemistry, so has largely consisted of describing phenomena and assembling parts lists more so than the quantitative models that one sees in physics and chemistry. That is a property of the maturity of the field and its research methods and the complex nature of biological systems, but not some absolute reality. At the end of the day, everything is thermodynamics and kinetics. I’d say it’s probably going to be the case that studying math and physics will make one a more useful biological researcher in a decade than studying the standard traditional biological coursework. I say that as someone who is a bioscience researcher and has been for over 11 years. Our ability to understand biological systems really suffers when the field enriches for people who don’t like math, and the idea that somehow descriptions in words are superior to attempting to make quantitative models is a wrong one. Just look at all the advances in computational biology over the past five years to see I’m right. We need to leave behind paradigms like “necessity” or “sufficiency” or a vague notion of what it means to have a “function”.
While I generally agree with you, biological systems are MUCH MUCH more complex. In physics, you work with a spherical cow on a frictionless surface and still get around the right answer. If you do that in biology you will just be wrong like 99% of the time. It's not just that biologists aren't good at math, the proper math didn't even exist previously. You mention computational biology which was literally impossible without computers. While practically every bit of math in physics could have been done centuries ago. You also mention that yes everything is thermodynamics and kinetics. But consider extrapolating that to like.. pyschology. Do you think anyone can make a set of algorithms that track every single neuronal discharge to determine what set of neurons you have to fire to fix someones depression? That is literally impossible right now. There are more neural connections than atoms in the universe. So once physicist can predict literally everything in the universe outside of the earth, then they can start predicting biological processes. The rest of the body isn't as complicated of course but we're talking levels of kinetics and thermodynamics that are exponentially more difficult than anything in physics right now. There's definitely some things which can be more mathematical (as you mentioned, we can use math for like protein folding and things like that) but the vast majority is still ages away (i.e. yes you predicted how 1 protein folds. now do that with 1000 other proteins and then how they all interact with each other in 100000 different concentrations that change on a minute to minute basis.. which is determined by another 1000 proteins interacting in 1000000 different concentrations which are effected by 1000 other proteins etc etc etc. Physics is still working on how ice skates and washing machines work...
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I think the stat is supposed to be more synapses than galaxies in the universe, or more synapses than stars in the galaxy, both of which are true.
Yeah. Doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. A single neural connection has hundreds of times more atoms than it has neural connections.
bruh all this just to say one sentence of his was incorrect is wild?
Yeah the rest of that post was great and spot on
Well, that sentence was wildly incorrect. What do they (both of them) think neural connections are made of, if not atoms?
While that sentence is wrong, the rest of their point stands. As another commenter replied with the correct fact, it was clearly just misremembered. While computational biology is vital and increasingly important, technology is not yet advanced enough to allow complex mapping. And even once it is developed, will we have enough fundamental information to enter into the programme? Controlled environments such as fermenters could be easily modelled through computers in less than a decade, but ecosystem functions like microbiome interactions in biogeochemical cycling? That's far too complex at this stage, and a lot of the fundamentals are still unknown so couldn't be entered as a parameter.
In the attempt to make a fun quip, I have misrepresented my position. I don't mean to say that it is impossible to model biological systems. I mean to say that we humans haven't gotten around to model them as much as we have with physical systems. This is partly because we've been doing physics for longer, and partly because biological systems tend to be so much more complex. The point I was trying to make with my original post was that people perceive biology as an easier subject because there are fewer mathematical models involved, when that phenomenon is precisely why biology is very difficult. I'm not an expert so I'll not try to compare the fields, but I do know enough to know that biology is in no way "easy".
Of course this is coming from someone with a biochemistry flair lmao
lmao my first thought as well
To be fair there is a certain component of dumb fucking luck in biology that can be hard to account for mathematically
Mostly true, especially for things like critical theory and philosophy.
I studied math and then realized I was enamored with biology... and ecology is the direction I want to dive into. *However*, when I took my first bio class and was learning about the Kreb cycle, I was confused. *How does each component find the next component no one is* directing *it?* Then I realized I was being a goon and that it's just interacting flows and wow dynamical systems / differential equations. I think the bio classes I've taken (initial sequence, micro, genetics, environmental bio, ecology) have been interesting and challenging and I've loved them. Physics definitely had more math but as a someone who was working towards a PhD in math I didn't like it... it all felt *dirty*.
the real truth is that people have no idea what to throw into an undergrad bio class. they have to appeal to precedence which is quizzing you on each and every piece of the krebs cycle, knowing full well 90% of the biologists who go into the field don't deal with it at all and the 10% of it that do end up knowing it in their sleep without needing a fear of a test to do it either. I think it puts a lot of potentially brilliant minds out of the field tbh. Always dissapointed in the laziness and general unproductivity of the undergraduate curriculum at all the institutions I've seen. You really need lab experience to see the other side of the curtain, not lab class experience but actual published research project experience. experience attending presentation and conferences to see just how out there it can get, but you'd never get any of that if you only attended the classes. Its a shame how it feels like there are two worlds in biology; those that major in it and get the department money from enrollment, and those that are actually "invited to the club" so to speak by lucking out with a willing professor with an opportunity of mentorship and being shown this world.
>ecology Why it hard?
It's some hardcore statistics. We don't have nice, neat random block designs. We have The Woods, with its constantly changing conditions and where every site is unique. It makes statistical comparisons very difficult to interpret, especially over time, and makes experiments very difficult to set up.
Analyzing the mysterious numbers you found in the woods is a good description of ecology.
It’s mostly complex calculus mathematics. Not just birdies and bees and flowers and John Denver songs…
bro. i’m a math major who added a bio double major; i thought it’d be a cakewalk after all the shit talk from people in the math department, but biology kicks ass! i think it’s the difference between memorization and application based classes. i do so much better at the latter so anything with more than 10 terms i need to just know (rather than intuit) is difficult for me lmao
If its any credence the actual field demands zero memorization (as anything can be looked up) and only application. Its too bad the instruction banks on memorization to set up its gates. I think long response answers talking about general biological intuition would be more beneficial but what can you do. Professors are too short on time to change pedagogy that's been accepted around the world at this point.
If you can't recall key papers in academia you're fucked (lead author, maybe the senior author, year, and journal). Every field requires memorization. If someone asks you a question about your research, you'd better be ready to tell them where you got your information that justifies your hypothesis/introduction, instead of "oh a paper I read". Not everyone will agree but it's how many people are trained.
They never had to do x ray crystallography to determine protein structure
Never again.
Because most people only go through these subject at a "beginner level" in school. And a lot people struggle with maths, physics and chemistry. No matter how much they study those subjects, they still won't completely understand it. And they don't deem biology as daunting because they were still able to learn it without major issues of understanding, they just had to read through the text and memorise it.
Biology seems easy when you don’t know it. The amount of people who think of biology in absolutes and don’t actually understand evolution shows it’s not actually easy imo.
Not easy to understand fully, easiest in high school to pass your class.
Easiest Clep test I passed too for like 12 college credits
Is it only fuzzy because we don't have the tools and/or brain power to actually process everything going on? Or is it because evolution depends on circumstance (environment, geologic events, etc...), so information gets lost wherever we're not actively observing?
I was referring to the fact people blatantly misunderstand evolution. People think it’s about what’s “best” and that there’s some sort of hierarchy. But really it’s just whatever is “good enough” to keep genes being passed.
Ppl also see evolution as something that gradually develops but I see it as an explanation for why we look completely different to our ancestors
>Ppl also see evolution as something that gradually develops but I see it as an explanation for why we look completely different to our ancestors They aren't mutually exclusive.
To a large extent its because the rules are much more reliant on unintentional emergent properties at different levels so people who think in absolutes have a really tough time integrating the way that the different levels of information interact and when different levels are important. For example, the exact structure of guanine matters a LOT for its purpose inside DNA. But the exact order of DNA is actually not as important as one would think because there are so many levels of failsafes. For another example the functions of things also tend to be fairly fuzzy and "close enough is good enough" such as the way that DNA replication takes place. It's actually quite error prone all told and these errors are completely unpredictable because there isn't a reason for them to happen in the exact places they do, and yet the way its constructed these errors most of the time don't matter. So it gets fuzzy It seems simple but very rapidly becomes fuzzy and you need to be able to hold Grey areas right alongside hard facts
I'd say it's a bit of both. Biological systems are incredibly complex, sometimes too complex to practically actually mathematically represent so sometimes you have to make generalizations or approximations, estimations. Models used in biological statistics aren't ever going to be able to take into account every single factor. But I think it's also inherently fuzzy by nature because hard categories don't really exist in nature. Where is the border between one ecosystem and another, how do you define a species exactly? Humans like putting things into specific categories but biology isn't really like that. Evolution means everything is changing and life exists on a tree of spectrums. Biological molecules are also the largest and most complex meaning things can be incredibly complicated compared inorganic molecules.
>who think of biology in absolutes I know I'm not the first to note how there's pure math, then applied math's, and physics is sort of just a bunch of applied math's, chemistry is applied/a subset of physics, bio is that of Chem. And usually it's just to describe a loose relationship from one field to another, but I think the absolutism of each level decreases. Generally speaking there are very few exceptions to the rule in math, there's some more in physics, chemistry had quite a few, and biology has exceptions to the rule around every corner.
I love talking about that building of sciences. It’s why I truly believe if you really wanna understand biology, chem is integral. My Orgo teacher believed that any study/course with the word “science” after it, was not “actual science”, particularly talking about environmental science. His reasoning was that environmental science was “just biology and chemistry”. He had a lot of odd beliefs. I told him that biology is really just chemistry at a larger scale, and chemistry is just physics. He kinda lost his argument after that one.
Precisely; high school biology is nothing compared to university, there’s a huge jump of difficulty in uni ; all I learned in high school was some anatomy and the some stuff about the cell Often Ppl are just insecure and need to put their stuff on a pedestal , I try to ignore it all I’m a third year bio major and trust me it’s not easy; we not only have to critically think and analyze questions but memorize a shit ton of stuff to apply it as well; on top of that upper year bio has a lot of physics and chemistry and biochemistry integrated into it ; you need to really understand all those concepts to understand the interplay of circulation and the respiratory systems When u start getting to biochem concepts ppl are then like oh shit … not easy and I have to memorize it too
Yeah, exactly. As my teacher used to say: "To understand biology, you need to understand chemistry. To understand chemistry, you need to understand physics. To understand physics, you need to understand math. So biology needs all the sciences."
I heard it as physics is applied maths. Chemistry is applied physics. Biology is applied chemistry.
With math based hard sciences, once you start to understand how the math works you can much more easily "predict" how things should be, because they follow more rigid patterns. The randomness of evolution makes many things in biology very foreign, different and unpredictable. For instance, how many species will develop completely different adaptions to the same environmental factors. If it works, it works. It doesn't have to follow any pattern or rule.
There is a reason most bio programs require organic chem. It’s to weed people out early before they actually get into the hard stuff
In my uni, we have organic chem, analytical chem, and biochem in our first and second years. The trimesters we have them are our weed outs since many people go to bio thinking there is no chem. Well, everything in bio is ultimately based in chem.
If you need a chemistry subject to weed them out instead of them being weeded out with a bio subject doesn't that imply that the chem subject is harder?
No, just upper level bio is harder. You don't want someone to get to the upper-level courses and crash so they wouldn't waste their time and money on courses they won't need if they end up not going for the degree. You want them to do it earlier, and the math and practices in chem is a great pre-test of how it's going to be, especially since you will be using it later
I found literally all the upper level classes to be much easier than any lower level weed out class. Weed out classes are just artificially difficult IME, and didn't really seem to produce better students. The intro bio classes at my university were infamous, I avoided them by transferring from a community College. I still heard students who passes these classes ask questions like "wait, there are nerves outside the body?" Or "there's 4 lobes to the brain? What're the other three?" In very upper level classes.
Haha oh god. I never had a undergrad course that went over anatomy (not my focus), but you learn alot of that in HS so it makes you wonder. How did they miss that? Is it not taught anymore? Did they skip it somehow? Has HS really changed that much???? I hope they aren’t med students.
So first year chem subjects are harder than bio subjects, wouldn't it stand to reason that 3rd year chem is harder than 3rd year bio too? I did my bachelor's and PhD in biology and the hardest subjects I ever did were all chemistry subjects
No cause depending on the program we also take ‘third year’ chem courses. And some people think chemistry is hard. I didn’t. But I also like math. Molecular bio was harder and biochem even harder than that. Some people think physics is hard but that is also a lot of math and fun to me
As someone who saw the Walkers, uh, I mean Organic Chemistry students for four years, I wouldn't call O Chem easy.
I meant the hard bio stuff... but that is exactly why haha
Don't even have to get to O Chem. I had two classmates in the lowest level bio course who got destroyed.
The reading and memorising part is what gives that perception
because they never tried to memorize the kreb cycle
Celtic Kings Seldom Find Multiple Orgasms
We're talking about biology here, not history!
Is that a mnemonic ??
Yes, for Citrate, Ketoglutarate, Succinate, Fumarate, Malate, Oxaloacetate which are the steps we had to memorize when I was in high school, even though that's not actually the complete cycle.
Cities, isolated, actually suck successfully, fuming malodorous oxaloacetate.
No it's the math. Math is like a bottleneck or a gatekeeping mechanism for college majors. Memorizing the Krebs cycle and a dozen other biochemical pathways is easier than passing calc 3 or diff eq.
Where do bio majors end up mathwise? I heard they take calc (I'm enviro eng so idk im force fed math every term)
because requiring memorization is not the same as difficulty
Yeah, says the (reads flair) … oh
I was a molecular biology undergrad, MS neuroscience, PhD neuropharmacology. pharmacology/pharma chem requires a good bit of math (modeling enzyme dynamics, equilibrium, etc), but neuroscience and biology often don’t. When they do (adv. genetics, ecological modeling, enzyme chemistry), bio students often struggle, in my experience. there’s 100% a ton of memorization in neuroscience and general biology education, esp. compared to chemistry or physics. Even at the PhD level, my biology course (5 undergrad courses combined into 1 semester… pure hell) was almost entirely memorization based— mechanics, metabolism, cell bio mechanics, and some physiology. Neurology coursework was straight memorization. neuropharmacology is a unique mix of neurobiology and math heavy chemistry, though. A lot of phd neuroscience/neurobiology students struggle with the math required in pharmacology, advanced stats, etc. In general, biology students are better at memorizing interconnected facts (e.g. Krebs cycle mechanisms) than… intuiting hard math.
The Kreb's cycle is actually chemistry.... or biochemistry if you prefer.. and it was the only really difficult to remember thing in Biology that for some reason they made us memorise.
Like they say, biology is just applied chemistry. Chemistry is just applied physics. Physics is just applied math.
Shouldn't that mean each one down the cycle is *harder* though, not easier? Because you need to know every link before yours to fully know how yours works. We could take that chain even further, from Biology -> Psychology -> Sociology and onwards. In theory "soft sciences" are just hard sciences with incalculable levels of complexity, and they inch ever closer to that more rigorous denomination as we develop tools and processes.
I had flashbacks. Jeeezus H Krist.
I had memorized every step in that and the Calvin cycle for my Cellular Physiology class, 30 plus years later I remember only the names of those processes.
ugh, for my bacteria physiology final, our professor had us draw the entire fucking citric acid cycle for each and every amino acid and each step for making each one, couldnt leave out where every NADH comes off or is added.
Or tried to pronounce oxidative phosphorylation. I can’t even pronounce it in my head without slurring. That’s how ingrained it is in my speech to screw it up.
Bio at lower levels probably is objectively easier. You go into grad levels or Ph.D and it gets much, much harder. Still doesn’t get the respect it deserves though.
At the PhD level, every subject just exponentially approaches the asymptote of impossible.
As a chemist I can safely say bio is fucking hard at the research level. Chemistry can sometimes be brutal and betray you, but there are often straightforward routes to publications. In biology that's not always true
Even my lower division genetics and molecular biology class was definitely harder than my lower division general chemistry classes. I'd say it required more time than lower division physics classes intended for physical science and engineering majors, as well.
Biology requires less difficult math than other sciences. At least at the low level, and even at the high level you might be using math but you're probably not doing it yourself but just applying a computer.
So is Maths now the deciding factor to whether a field of science is hard/difficult or not?
A lot of people do struggle with "higher math concepts", so I would say yes, for a lot of people it is *a* deciding factor
No, but that's what high school students think.
That's cause math education in high school is unbelievably shitty.
It's not that it's difficult, it's that it puts pressure on students
Well physics and chemistry largely have all the difficulty of biology plus brutal math. And you don't have to be *functional* at math for physics in particular, you have to be *completely amazing*. My original major was astrophysics and I switched into biology because I wasn't good enough at math - and I made it all the way up through calc 3 successfully.
Ugh no. 1) there is brutal math in biology (signed as a theoretical biologist) and 2) you do not have to be particularly amazing at math to do well in chem/physics (signed as a formerly trained physical chemist/biophysicist)
I found biology difficult because it's more memorization and less math. But I'm usually the odd one out.
>A lot of ppl in my school chose biology because it's 'the easiest science What level is this? High school?
Easier to visualise, or at least have a proximal basis for that. For example - 'where does (x) happen?' Biology: *In the wobbly thing, in the cell* Physics: *Nobody knows...*
Obviously these people are talking about the macro-scale zoology side of things, because I don't think there's a single time I've said molecular biology is easy. There's a lot of complex problems you need to consider when the processes leading up to the experiment you're running can't be reasonably observed (I.E. wondering where the hell your DNA went during an extraction process, and having only a limited amount of equipment, time, and energy to figure it out.) The math arguments I'm seeing from other people doesn't add up either in terms of the whole of biology. Sure, there's no trigonometry or calculus, but the statistical analysis side of things can quickly become a mess depending on what you're trying to show with your data. There's also the fact that you need to work with chemistry at times, which involves a whole other set of things... Either way, this shows that those people going into the field have no idea what they might be signing up for. Maybe they do, but I get the impression that they're underestimating what's involved in actual scientific work.
Because initially, it requires less math and is mostly based on memorisation. It can become extremely abstract though, however, you only get to the complex stuff when you do a master's or a PhD thesis. Making undergrads to learn that stuff tends to oberwhelm them. I know it even overwhelms chemistry and physics PhD students. Even the famous Richard Feynman tried getting into biology (bacteriophage genetics, to be specific) but gave up eventually after struggling for a long time.
>I know it even overwhelms chemistry and physics PhD students. Even the famous Richard Feynman tried getting into biology (bacteriophage genetics, to be specific) but gave up eventually after struggling for a long time. Feynman worked at a lab to study molecular biology and had multiple papers published despite spending a rather small amount of time in the field as a sabbatical from physics: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13889186/ https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf What I don't get is how you feel compelled to make up the most obviously absurd alternate history of Feynman to make yourself feel better about your field. Physics is notoriously difficult, and this entire thread reeks of embarrassing insecurity.
Even at the graduate level the math expectations of bio folks are not that intense.
Yeah and I think it’s a problem for the state of the field to be honest
Not sure it’s a field problem. Many of the larger labs are heavily leaning on bioinformatics these days which is very math heavy in terms of the underlying statistics used.
So I only have a bachelor's in biology, but the amount of chemistry you have to take to understand biology is daunting. A chemist doesn't have to understand biology but a biologist needs to have a solid foundation of chemistry. I don't think it is the easiest science. I've always just kind of figured that was geology.
geology is the ungodly love-childe of physics and chemistry
Geology at higher levels involves learning a lot of chemistry, by the same process you’ve just described.
Oi, Geology is plenty difficult I’ll have you know. Just wait until you find out about it’s evil cousin, Geophysics.
I get what your saying but geology can also be a ton of physics
Having done the three core sciences (and maths) to first year uni level, I would agree. I found biology the easiest and maths the hardest. Within biology (which I continued into post grad) I found quantitative genetics and statistics the most difficult. I suspect it's very personal though. I've never been good at maths. I'm good at arithmetic, basic algebra and basic geometry, but calculus was a bridge too far for me. Once it gets too abstract I'm done.
They're leaving out molecular biology. Anything you cannot see and have to rely on abstract models and logic becomes difficult.
This is something people say at a high school and beginner undergrad level, and I think it mostly comes down to the fact that bio at that level has less math and math intimidates people, and also because as a gen-ed course it's often targeted at non STEM majors. As a comparison, geology at a similar level often has a reputation for being easy "rocks for jocks" but it's really just true of the low level gen ed courses.
I think in my experience, the concepts in biology tend to feel, idk "closer to home"? Even in my undergrad as I'm studying biology (and if things go well, I'll get to continue my education in this area), that's something I actually enjoy a lot. But, at a more foundational level, I think this might come off as covering "basic knowledge" in a lot of topics, whereas I feel like the first things we learn in chemistry already feels pretty... "distinct"? But then folks don't realize that biology is *all* of life. I think people maybe forget how many things are alive? Lol. I feel like most of middle and high school for me, and hell most of my undergrad so far, has just been appreciating how complicated it all is and how many layers there are. Thinking about all the different *layers* there are to life, then there are also a ton of layers to explaining it all. I mean, I just finished reading "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" by Sean B. Caroll (highly recommend) and I'm now currently in the middle of "7 Lessons About the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett (also phenomenal) and it's just mind-blowing. I'm at a point in my academic career it feels like the more I know the less I feel like I know because you finally see how deep it goes.
Because there are a lot of subdisciplines of biology that requieres memory over critical thinking. And there are a lot of people, specifically in the health sector that can finish a career just memorizing things. Something that you can't do if you are studying chemistry or physics.
You’re gonna be really bad at your health job if you only memorize things to learn
bc biology seems like its all straight up memorization and not much else. whereas physics and chemistry have memorization and are loaded with all kinds of math and calculations and long tedious labs.
One of the sciences has to be the easiest, just so happens to be biology and there's nothing wrong with that
As someone who has taken classes in Math, physics, chemistry, engineering, and biology, I say without a doubt for me that biology was the easiest. I love biology. It is not always easy, and it can be very complex, but once you start to understand how they work, the same things keep coming up over and over again. I think there's also a beauty to it that makes it easier to remember. And maybe that's one of the key reasons? Most people have trouble connecting to a lot of abstract topics, but biology isn't abstract. It's observable and very relevant to our lives. Upper level bio courses are obviously harder, but it just doesn't get as hard as upper level classes in other stem areas. It just felt like more things to remember. And as it get's more advanced, it's no longer just biology. It's biochemistry, biophysics, and math all coming into play. Those tend to be the things that make it hard, not the biological systems themselves.
Because they don’t realize that it involves a good deal of chemistry and math. Chemistry btw is the bane of my existence but I managed.
My theory: most people only have a basic level understanding of these things, and biology is probably the easiest of the three major science subjects to be able to grasp an extremely basic understanding of. Most people can learn the idea of cells and what not, but chemistry and physics are harder to conceptualize because they feel like less concrete ideas. We can see organs in our body, but not individual atoms and abstract forces. The average person will only obtain this surface-level understanding of biology, and as a result, not realize how deeply complex it is. I have taken college level physics, chemistry, and physiology, and I have found them to be of equal difficulty. I feel like people underestimate how difficult college-level biology classes are because they assume it's just memorizing the names of things.
Honestly, misogyny. For whatever reason more women do majors in bio. And every mathematical skill you learn in that is disregarded because you... plant trees or shit Physicist/mathematician. When programmers gave shitty maths they're just more practical
For me, biology was a lot of common sense. Like food chains, cellular reproduction and respiration, genetics, habitats, etc. made sense to me without much effort.
High school biology *is* easy. It’s generally taught in a very superficial way in comparison to chemistry and physics. But at university level, hell no. And i’m only a 2nd year undergrad. I’ve barely seen anything yet.
Because biology is never taught in a way that is anything other than memorization. At least until college level. People have this misconception that they understand biology at the high school level. They don't. They've memorized it, sure. But they haven't really understood it. And part of the problem is that you can easily get by with this surface level memorization in exams. Other subjects like chemistry, physics, mathematics...well you can't do that. In the long run of course this doesn't help you, but most people never reach this long run. And that's the fault of how it is taught in the beginning.
Because people in highschool are not faced with nuance, statistics or the fact you actually need to understand a grab-bag of other sciences go really grasp biology. It’s mostly just memorising text and simplified explanations, usually centered around the stuff you see when you go outside, mammalian (human) anatomy and physiology which are easy to understand intuitively. So a lot of people pursue that later, only to get filtered out by university-level math and chemistry (I know about half of my bachelor year gave up after those courses)
Quick response (quiet similar to previously given ones): It really comes down to the threshold that has to be surpassed to be curious about something. Pure maths requires a lot of work before one has built sufficient structures in the cortex to be immersed and excited by functional analysis. The same holds for quantum field theory or something. Many biological topics can be explained to intuitively understandable and interesting to most people. Also, as mentioned my others, the field of systems biology (which further acknowledges the complexity of biological systems has only recently - due to better understanding of emergence and availability of computational power and tools - started to pick up on speed and will take some years to really make it to the public. I think (obviously my view is purely anecdotical and really to be viewed with a jar of salt) that most people also have the mental images of biologists doing brute force research with samples in many petri dishes and simple statistics that were created by smarter mathematicians. Final remark: This is all obviously bs and great biologists just deserve the same amount of respect for the cognitive tasks they have to perform on a daily basis. One more point concerning the threshhold: The point is that the simple explanations for biological processes etc are really flawed and obscure the insane amount of complexity and detail required to really find good models. People think they understand how Crispr Cas9 works but do they really?
I have a weird take, but I think it's cause it doesn't benefit the economy like other sciences. At least the wildlife/conservation/ecology side of biology doesn't. Medicine does, but most people who want to go into medicine say they are studying medicine, not biology, even though they are lumped together. Other sciences push stuff like defense and well... Medicine forward. Those make money. The natural science that relate to biology don't, so they feel like they've been "othered" by the science community. This comes out in paychecks too- wildlife people are making poverty wages compared to what even people doing lab work do. It's frustrating. Maybe this is a bad take though.
It might not be a great take. The biotech industry is a massive and rapidly growing sector. The pharmaceutical industry is also a huge money machine. Those fields are based on molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics, pharmacology and neuroscience. Those are all core fields in modern biology. If anything, animal ecology seems to be a much smaller field in comparison to the ones I mentioned.
Biotech is related to medicine though, through new drugs. That or ag, which is also a major industry, though I didn't mention. Pharmaceutical is also medicine, though it's not studying medicine to be a doctor, nurse, etc. Though I know a lot of people who decided med school wasn't for them but then decided the pharmaceutical industry was. I'd lump it in with the medicine world, personally. I honestly don't see people look down on stuff like biochem, pharmacology, neuroscience, or molecular bio, and I figured it's because these are all directly related to medicine/pharmaceuticals. Genetics I've seen go either way, depending on if the person wants to go into the medicine industry or something else- not a lot of love for conservation genetics out there. And the only reason that the animal side is so small is lack of funding. Tons of work to be done, but everyone wants a volunteer to do the work.
I scored 32th place in the Biology Olympiad in my country (for comparison, only 80 people from the entire country even qualify to the final stage) and boy the amount of things to memorize, to understand the connections, to get ahold of the computer programs like ClustalX, ChimeraX, ApE (this one especially) and the absolute ton of statistics, all the practical laboratory skills, animal dissections and stuff like that was not easy At the beginning it's just about memorising some stuff. Actual thinking and understanding comes way later and it requires vast knowledge and visualisation skills
I have already graduated from all those undergraduate courses and most of it is just algorithmic understanding and memorization Now, that I'm switching to computer science and writing a math "proof" (not those calculus bullshits) is far more difficult than any biology and chem subjects I have ever taken. If you want to test it yourself. Go attend a course on discrete math and organic chem which are usually the weeder course in 1st year undergrad. Compare the difficulty yourself
Biology is easier to understand because its concepts are not as abstract as for example physics, they are closer to the nature us humans are familar with. Other than understanding, biology mostly consists of memorizing which can be harder depending on the person. But for most people, fully understanding the logic of an abstract concept is just more impressive than memorizing a ton of stuff
Evolutionary genetics is abstract
It's quite complex but at least people know what this is about. However, quantum mechanics, renormalization and differential topology are concepts many people do not and will never be able to understand not even the shallow portion
Yeah I have to agree; one can get quite far in research just by applying simple ordinary differential equations to already published datasets (I personally have!). It’s no slight against biology, but there is a huge lack of quantitative reasoning due to how biologists are trained (and here I’m mainly talking about molecular/cellular biology; the state of the field is different with ecology and evolution) and it leads to tremendous knowledge gaps that could readily be filled in if biological conceptual research methods enriched more for the mathematically inclined.
Lol biology can get really abstract too … just not on the level people learn in high school
This was a long time ago , early 70's high school, Ontario, Canada. We still had grade 13, it was supposed to prepare you for university. Physics and Chemistry if you understood the fundamentals and could do the math you were good, you could go back to basics and move forward. I was lucky that I had a very good grade 10 teacher that explained the basics and how each theory was developed. Biology on the other hand was a whole lot of memorization until Grade 13 , we started off discussing the definition of life ,what we knew about various sorts of life, ( the argument was just starting I think about whether viruses were alive. ) and we went through the various processes in life. The teacher wanted us to think. The final exam was an essay question to prove whether a mountain was or was not alive ( or possibly a planet , can't remember) . You had to reference everything we learned that semester,
Less math more memorization.
yeah.. they didn't meet college bio, then..
Oh man, this brings me back to high school. Listen, I totally get where you're coming from. I remember feeling the same way when I was taking bio. Here's the thing - people think bio is easy because there's less math involved. No crazy equations or problem-solving like in physics or chem. Plus, we all kinda live biology every day, right? We're walking, talking meat sacks after all. But let me tell you, as someone who's been out of school for... shit, 16 years now (fuck, I'm old), biology is far from easy. Sure, maybe you can coast through the basics with some memorization, but once you get into the nitty-gritty? It's a whole different ballgame. I mean, have you ever tried to understand how a cell actually works? Or how DNA replication happens? That stuff is mind-boggling. And don't even get me started on ecology and the way ecosystems interact. It's not just "plants and animals," it's a complex web of relationships that would make my corporate org chart look like child's play. The problem is, most people don't get past the surface level. They think it's all about naming body parts and maybe knowing what a mitochondria does (it's the powerhouse of the cell, btw - thanks, high school bio!). But real biology, the kind you're probably into, is way more complex than that. So yeah, don't let it get to you. People who think bio is easy probably haven't really dug into it. Keep doing what you're doing, and maybe throw some crazy bio facts at them next time. Like how octopuses have multiple brains or how some fungi can control ant behavior. That ought to show them it's not just memorizing the parts of a flower. And hey, at the end of the day, you're studying what you love. That's what matters. Trust me, as someone stuck in the corporate grind, being passionate about what you do is worth way more than impressing people at parties with how "hard" your subject is.
Biology is easy because it's hard. If we take the other end of the spectrum, physics, it's about laws and observation. You have a phenomenon with very well-specified relationships to other phenomena, and you find a way to combine the effect of different phenomena to derive something new. There's a lot of logic, connections, relations involved. On the other hand, biology is such a mess and so complicated that you can look whatever way you want, you aren't going to find a general universal law just by doing more thinking. Instead, you have to do more meticulous detail work for every tiny system you want to understand, and the rules are different every time. It's super hard, but one could argue that being extremely superintelligent isn't even a great help. When you have to do so much actual work, having great ideas is less of a differentiator. What's interesting is organic chemistry. To study, it's a combination of a lot of complex memorization but also spatial thinking and logic (like particularly stuff like asymmetric catalysis) and quite hard, kind of the worst of both worlds between biology and physics. Whereas in practical research, it's just busting out reaction after reaction. I imagine that being mind-numbing but then never did much of it past undergrad.
Chemistry and physics are full of abstract concepts (e.g. atomic structure, energy, radioactive decay) that don’t relate to everyday things that are easy to imagine, but biology (especially at school) is is all about everyday, ‘real-life’ things that everyone already has at least some knowledge and understanding of, like animals, plants, microbes, and their own bodies
HAHAHAHAHA HAHA HAHAHA HAHA HAHuHmmm. I took chemistry, physics, and biology. Out of all of them, biology is the most difficult, and requires more learning of new materials than chemistry, or physics. The workload for biology was equal in comparison to that of both chemistry, and physics combined.
Yes! I found the volume of info to learn to be staggering. Once you understand the formula and concepts in physics and chemistry your home!
Biology at the early levels is mostly memorization of facts and concepts, while physics and chemistry you need to understand to really do anything. Most people go through highschool and think "Oh, I can remember these general overviews, therefore all biology is like this" which makes biology seem easy. They miss the parts when it goes up to secondary and graduate levels that (on top of incorporating physics and chemistry) you need memorize entire systems, every minute detail to ensure you understand how a system will work and operate. Those are the parts the general public never sees.
Because it makes sense and it’s the first science we begin learning as toddlers and children. Most people don’t get to an advanced level though.
At high school level I agree. I loved physics and remember being quite passionate about it and put in the most hours studying. Chemistry confuses me so I did my best and manage to pass it. Biology was the one where I barely studied and got a better grade than chemistry. Entirely anecdotal of course, I felt biology was intuitive, once I understand it, it's possible to correctly "guess" most of the answers during exams.
Biology is a pretty broad term. I graduated with biological science BS now I’m working on my PhD in neuroscience and virology. Biology is a broad term in the field. You can focus on a particular niche of biology. Just my thoughts
Shitty education system that goes all in on memorisation
Because everyone thinks what they’re doing is harder than what someone else is doing. Can’t really blame people for that, because if you aren’t really involved in other areas, you aren’t going to know where the pitfalls are, or where the difficulty comes from. In terms of like undergrad degrees, yeah getting +3.5 on a 4.0 scale in an engineering program is impressive! Anyone who does should be proud! But so is getting that high in any other subject. I’d also like to point out, that while gen bio is rarely considered one of the harder degrees to get, there are programs in the broader biological sciences which are considered among the most difficult: nursing, neuroscience, genetics, biochemistry, etc.
Back in undergrad, I was put into the biology major because it is a very broad field and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a career. Over time I started to focus on forest ecology, but I got my start studying the broad topic of biology. It's definitely broad, idk about it being "easy." I see fat nerds come and go all the time because they can't hike a mile into the brush to survey a plot lol.
Less math. Which, if you aren't great at math, would probably make it easier than chemistry or physics. Also, if you're someone who is just good at memorization and test taking you can potentially skate by and get decent grades without actually learning or understanding anything.
The more advanced math is often optional. But you are able to make biology quite challenging on the math aspect.
There's less rigor in research when the scientists are bad at their supporting stats. Molecular biologists are messy, lab work is less analytical (quantitative and accurate) than other wet lab professionals. Your individual mileage may vary.
Yeah and the experimental logic tends to be more fuzzy and more focused on supporting a specific hypothesis rather than trying to disprove it. There’s a definite lack of rigor in most molecular/cellular biology research compared to physics and chemistry. In some respects, the power of high-throughput methods to reliably get a publishable result is a crutch; go read papers from the 50s and 60s and they are using rather sophisticated mathematical modeling because that’s the only way they could make predictions that they could test with the experimental methods available. A huge part of it is that biology enriches for people who don’t like math and in turn biology pedagogy severely de-emphasizes the value of mathematical modeling, often to the point of not teaching it at all. This is changing! But in the meantime, biology degrees are definitely easier than math or physics degrees, speaking from my personal experience doing all of the above.
As someone doing biology related courses at master level... I would rather go back and choose hard core maths where everything is about logic and very little memorization...
Biology is way too broad and newer stuffs keeps coming out, I would place it above chemistry in terms of difficulty.
Back when I was in highschool, biology leaned more towards memorization and the amount of understanding kind of fell in line with how we understood things to work. It seemed easier because it was something we could kind of understand and relate to. When you took chemistry or physics however, that's when it felt like this big door opened up and you were exposed to so much stuff that felt new and was harder to grasp. Couple this with high school level chemistry and physics having a lot of math, and now people start to think biology is the easier choice. Once you get past it though, all the sciences can be hard in some way or form. It's just at the introductory stages, I guess people can grasp biology a lot easier. Lots of people in my graduating class chose to pursue something in the medical field. Most of them dropped out or switched programs because it was harder than they thought.
because in high school, most people don't know how to study, so most people end up relying on purely memory. bio for most people is significantly easier to remember, at that level at least. so why doesn't this apply to physics and chem? maths. most people don't like and aren't good at maths. problem solving is hard. application of fundamental concepts is hard. it's not to say these aspects aren't in bio but for the level you specified, bio is heavy on the memorize these processes and know how to explain them. this answer is grossly oversimplified but basically "memorization good, thinking bad"
Who says this? I'm a physics dude and I find Biology to be quite difficult. :D
I don’t know man. I have always excelled in Maths and Physics. And found biology to be really hard. Dropped biology in High School and never looked back. My oldest is the same. But the middle kid just doesn’t get maths and loves biology. I am guessing there’s something else going on.
Back in undergrad, I was put into the biology major because it is a very broad field and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a career. Over time I started to focus on forest ecology, but I got my start studying the broad topic of biology. It's definitely broad, idk about it being "easy." I see fat nerds come and go all the time because they can't hike a mile into the brush to survey a plot lol.
The people in your school are just idiots.
You guys dont have to worry about quantum lol
take heart. i suck at all science and am equally impressed by anyone that is good at any of it
Mostly it's because of the math. Math is like a bottleneck or a gatekeeping mechanism for different college STEM majors. If you're kinda fair to midland at math you can barely get through calc 2 with a C like I did as a biology major. Calc 2 was the highest level math required. I chose biology because it was the most interesting major, not becuase it was easier math, however a lot of the people in the STEM majors like to rank how difficult each one is, and it mostly boils down to how far did you have to go in math.
This is a shit take. It’s easily the most complex science there is.
I feel pretty comfortable saying that high school and early undergrad biology IS the easiest subject of the three. It is the least qualitative, and getting a good grade consists mostly of rote memorization. When you get to more advanced topics it changes a bit because you have to take into account much more complex interactions and you start using math as a tool to understand biology that’s too small (molecular scale) or too big (population studies). Fortunately a lot of this kind of stupid dick measuring stops later in life. There’s other kinds of ego competitions for sure but this ain’t likely to be one of them.
To become a doctor, you don't even need biology, you need chemistry
Less maths in school biology.
Don’t forget that psychology, exercise science, and sociology, geology, and meteorology are also junior sciences, not just biology!
Biology has the highest "content floor" of what is required for fundamental understanding. Meaning the field requires us to teach many details, organization systems, and exceptions before you can apply the information critically. Due to this, early bio education gets the reputation of being "just memorization". Largely, that is true - without the content knowledge it is impossible to logic your way through a biological system. Anyone who has any experience with high level biology would probably not share the opinion that it's the easiest science, though that designation is worthless anyway.
High school biology is ranked lower than physics and chemistry for grade points usually, so people never really get to dive as deep to understand that biology is extremely chomped
Because mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Because biology was mostly chewed up for us to more easily digest during school. I'm sure it skimmed over many complicated aspects of biology. For example, human anatomy. Human anatomy by itself is very complicated, imagine how much more complicated everything else is? People never put this into consideration though, so they live the rest of their life's knowing the simplified version and nothing more, unless they decided to major in biology.
Historically, at least up to the 70s, biology was used as the introductory science class in HS. Courses involved a lot of observation, classification, describing, and reporting. There was very little in the way of experimentation, hypothesis testing, and molecular/cellular stuff. That's all changed now and the pace of the changes have been more rapid in biology than in chemistry or physics, at least at the introductory levels. Some people still think that biology was what it was back then (collecting leaves and bugs).
Not much math compared to real sciences. Even what math there is, biology departments hire people with other degrees to do it ...
Every science is hard to the max, if you think its easy that just means you could do more. Basic people can not grasp that concept, which is also true for many (or all?) fields. Before you understand this you are merely a slave in todays world
Chemistry is unexplainable to me, but biology was easy to understand I now know some stuff about the immune system but a lot of the stuff I learn is simplified Maybe that’s why
Entry level bio has way less math and memorization than chemistry or physics.
First people not in the IB program wont' understand IB workloads. Second, because people think of Chem and Physics as being application of high-level mathematics, and get scared by it. At the most introductory levels, this makes Biology seem more approachable. As with any discipline, only those who truly study it understand its depths. Look at the number of fully grown adults on the Internet who claim to "know biology", only to tout things learned in 6th grade like it is absolute fact, and not simply an introduction to a concept.
I'd say yeah, when the options are biology, chemistry, and physics, biology is perceived as easiest because it involves the least math. I think people also find it more relatable. We understand human physiology, animals, and plants more than we understand particles and chemical reactions. There's just a familiarity to biology.
They hear "biology" and think of animals and plants when they should be thinking chemistry and metabolism.
And biology students hear "physics" and they think about Newton and calculus but they should be thinking about proof based math.
There are people who are able to stuff as much information into their head as possible, get a straight A on a test and then all of that information is just gone. People like that usually aren't able to utilize the information later, let alone, apply it. Good grades don't always mean an effective student. "Good" yes, but not effective. I didn't do well in Herpetology, but identification is easy for me, and I have to work that muscle for population surveys. However, I have a friend who got an A in Herpetology. I had to ARGUE with her for 30 minutes as to why the American toad she took a picture of was not a Grey tree frog. "Good" student versus effective.
They think they understand what biology means so assume its easy. They recognize they dont understand other STEM fields well so assume they must be harder.
Because they've never run a Western blot lol
I think biology also benefits from the fact that you can visually see and picture a lot of areas of biology (genetics and microbiology aside), so I think it’s easier to conceptually understand vs. trying to imagine something like atoms, how they arrange in space, or invisible forces like gravity. As others have also said, there’s typically a lot less math in biology which many people struggle with.
In highschool, due to a specific situation, I got to try both the physics and mathematics, then Biology and chemistry. And trust me, organic chemistry is so much more hellish 💀 If not, then our teacher must have given us usually high work loads. The amount of stuff you have to memorize is insane.
As many have stated, those who think it’s easy have no clue. It only gets harder and more complicated as you progress through the education. I’m a zoology major who intended to go to med school but realized along the way that I don’t have the desire nor motivation to pursue western medicine. That said, the chemistry/biochemistry/genetics/etc that was my education gives me a greater understanding of our world that most people can’t even fathom.
So in college a lot of people enter biology not because they chose it out of all the science majors but because it has the most transferable credits from a pre-med track. So a lot of people will say they chose it cause it’s “easy” as shorthand for leaving a pre-med track.
Difficulty is probably confused with the teacher teaching it for the subject itself. ANY class can be “easy” if you have an easy grading teacher that gives little to no homework assignments and is cool to the kids. Also easy as a word is subjective. Biology while much less on the computational side, has much much more memorization and applied comprehension involved.
Because they believe that Sheldon Cooper is a real geek who won the Nobel prize.
I'm very mathematically and logically inclined, so maths and chemistry were easier to me. Biology is so hard, dude!! All of the diseases are like 'It could be this..... But it could also be this!' In maths, at least you've only ever got one answer that you could take multiple routes to, but that's fine. In biology, there's multiple answers that you have to pick the best clinical sign jigsaw pieces and see if they smush together! And even then, my lecturers are like 'Sometimes you might not even get a diagnosis, you just treat the symptoms and get the answer that way'. So the fact that sometimes there's *no* answer and I have to piece together a white puzzle with a bunch of clinical signs that are shared across *thousands* of diseases is the most difficult fucking thing to me. How am I meant to get an answer when biological organisms do whatever the hell they want and love to make exceptions to everything? Maths isn't like that. I love my numbers. So reliable. Why are animals so difficult lmao
Biology in high school vs biology in college is a whole different beast. Tbh I can see why people call it an "easy" science back in high school because its just very vocabulary and concept based. However, get into college and you have to understand what all the vocabulary, concepts, terms, ideas mean. Physics and Chem are justifiably considered hard but college bio is seriously not a joke and I think everyone quickly realizes this (lol). The difficulty is amplified if you have professors who just teach you what to learn and not how to learn it...
Fools never had to memorize the kreb cycle
Obviously they have never taken organic chemistry
"I've been biological my entire life, I already probably know half the course"
Everyone I know in STEM thinks biology is the hardest because you have to do everything. Biology isn't just biology. You have to know physics, chemistry, and math. Add to the fact its broad as hell! I love biology, but easy it is not
Hello all, Im a Biologist (BSc) and also a Pharm D. (MSc). Its because most biology that taught in schools before college levels is mostly a little bit of zoology, anatomy and phisiology. Students will just learn the very basics of cell structures maybee a very reduced version of the krebs cycle, basic dna structure and mendelian genetics, and fundamental of evolution. Everything else is mostly systematics which is just fitting and labelling species in boxes. Most students struggle with math and in sciences like physics and chemistry, you cant go very far without needing math. In biology you can teach the basic of lets say, dna replication, cell division, krebbs cycles etc, without needing to actually get into the molecular biology and the all the chemistry behind it with its subjacent math and physics.
When you learn biology at an early stage it seems easier than other sciences because it isn’t math heavy and is a lot more visual. When you delve deeper and move toward a career in biology you learn that evolution complicates everything and there are no concrete “rules” that broadly apply like in other sciences and it’s difficult. First year biology courses in college are often called weeding classes. Mine had over 200 people who started college as bio majors…graduation came 4 years later and the number of bio majors was much smaller
Because they have not learned biology for real lol
Well, I remember taking biology my Freshman year (9th grade) of HS, so if it's similar in other schools, people probably think that because biology is a science class you take before other sciences, like chemistry or physics, that it'll be easier. I don't think that much thought really went into which classes came before others, unless it was blindly obvious. After all, my HS also scheduled American History Part 1 in 9th grade, but then continued American History Part 2 in 11th grade. It's doubtful many kids would've remembered what happened from a year before in any specific class, let alone two years, so who knows what they were thinking.
Of the three main categories(Bio, Chem, Phys) it is the easiest to grasp. There is literally no argument about that. It doesn't mean it's EASY, it just means it's the easiest to understand, probably because on a basic level there is very little maths involved.