Do you people think biology is all about mugging up or is it actually logical?

Question

anonymous · Answer

there is no subject in this world that relies on memorising. Biology is more concept oriented than anybody thinks. Life science is vast and needs more learning.... not memorising.....

anonymous · Answer

Mugging up?  Must be a colloquial phrase which means straight-up unthinking memorizing...  Yes?

The terminology is just used to understand and describe the concepts.  Would you say physics is all about knowing the words "addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponent, logarithm, derivative, integral", how to pronounce the numbers, and memorizing various formulas that have the names of famous scientists?  

Heck no!  

It's about knowing how to OPERATE the knowledge to find meaningful results.  This is one of the reasons that mathematics and language classes (i.e.: English vocabulary) annoy the heck out of me at time, especially considering they are frequently glorified in standardized exams.  So what if you know what the words "plethora" or "pneumoconiosis" mean?  What matters more is that you can THINK and REASON about the concepts.  

IMHO, the terms are ONLY useful for the sole purpose of communication (written or verbal) of thoughts.  Is communication important too?  Oh most definitely, but to say that a science is all about memorization and not logic is so incorrect as to make one sound stupid for even asking. :-/ The logic is the truly important part, the terminology is there to support the logic and not the other way around.

That said, I thank you for asking, and having the courage to bring this topic up.  For students, it's good to know that just because you may have trouble remembering a which is which with an either-or terminology pair, it's more important that you can think critically.  And for teacher, please remember, if you are not teaching and testing on how this relates back to application, you are doing your students a disservice in the long-term.

Also IMHO, this applies to ALL sciences.  I hope I'm making sense here :D

kayne · Answer

Nice on @agentx5 ^^  Moreover, biology has become a very dynamic field of study.  Genetics is one good example. It's not about retaining the sequence of nucleotides but rather the study of the effects of the latter, and to do so you really need to be logical and exhibit so much more than just be able to memorise things. ^^

kainui · Answer

Well there are some things that are memory, such as the latin and greek words behind it. Once you get a good understanding of things like exo-, endo-, homo-, hetero-, and a few other terms you start to understand that these aren't just random made-up words, they actually have some context that lets you guess as to what they are even if they're your first time hearing them. Since you live in a biological system every day, a lot of biology makes sense, but a lot of it that doesn't is very interesting because you never had any clue that these strange, complex things were going on inside of you! So as long as you're curious you should be able to learn it all.