In college, I distinctly remember a colleague calling my major a “soft science.”
Non-biologists’ impression of biological research is a scientist sitting with a notebook and scribbling down organisms’ behaviors and characteristics. While this could be true - it was true for scientists like Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, two notable early biologists - it has recently become so much more.
The early 20th century was a great time to be a physicist. With physicists like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman publishing on relativity and quantum mechanics, biology seemed unquantifiable and permanently entangled. However, towards the 1940s, groundbreaking discoveries in the field began to slow down and many physical scientists started to dabble in biology, hoping to make discoveries as big as those made in physics.
Among those include Max Delbrück, Francis Crick, and Linus Pauling. Feynman says in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! about his foray into molecular biology that “it was very easy to find a question [in biology] that was very interesting, and that nobody knew the answer to.”
Biology has since become increasingly more quantifiable. With large data sets come the necessity of a mathematical, statistical, and computational foundation. Observed biological phenomena became new problems for mathematicians, and this field continues to contribute novel ideas and problems to all other scientific fields.
The question I have gotten the most often in graduate school, particularly in an evolutionary genomics lab, is “why are you interested in this topic?”
My long-winded answer starts from this video I remember watching as an undergraduate in 2013. Xiangjun Shi, who was a student at Brown University, describes her love for physics because it connects things all things in the universe together. In physics, objects are simplified to a point in space and time, and all things are governed by equations and laws. However, the part that stuck out to me the most was when she started describing her awe with nature: “I’m just dumbstruck by how nature totally enjoys being imperfect and asymmetrical.”
She goes on to describe how some fish have eyes on only one side of their bodies and how crabs and humans are generally right- or left-handed. At this moment, I thought of how we develop as bilaterally symmetrical organisms - but nobody is really perfectly symmetrical. The shape of our eyelids, the position of our teeth, birthmarks, right-/left-handedness, the arrangement of our internal organs, the shape of our brain - these are all asymmetrically symmetrical. We are perfectly imperfect.
This dichotomy of stochasticity and order that exists while relentlessly increasing entropy is what fascinates me the most. Long before life emerged on Earth, random elements interacted and reacted and eventually gave rise to the molecules that formed the current fundamental necessities of life. DNA sequences favorable to the survival of organisms remained while random errors and mutations continued to occur as cells divided. Although our genomes have never stopped changing from generation to generation, the remnants of our evolutionary ancestors are still observable in present-day genomes.
We humans differ by less than 0.1% in our genomes. Our biochemical processes, developmental stages, and instinctive responses are all identical and are a result of millions of years of evolution. From a distance, we look very homogenous, but if you take a closer look, you’ll realize that we are all quite different. Some people are more likely to become diagnosed with cancer or other diseases; some people are more likely to have twins; some people are safe from cystic fibrosis despite having a causative gene.
Furthermore, the environment in which an individual lives plays a huge role in their genetic expression. The combination of genetic variation and the probability of living in a 100% identical environment is so highly unlikely. Mathematical models can provide theories concerning certain phenomena and make predictions about the result of others, but in a field riddled with exceptions and anomalies, the complexity of life as a result of evolution leaves us much to ponder.
What trajectories did our ancestors take that resulted in the present form of Homo sapiens? Is it possible that another species could have been the dominant “intelligent” life form? What would have happened if a different plague had taken place in the 1300s? How would our genomes have changed as a result of these?
With so many questions left unanswered, how could you possibly want to study anything else?
