Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did).

I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology.

Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems.

What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people.

But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization.

But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies.

The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure.

But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.