Don’t sweat the details

I did not study biology in high school, and via my studies in psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science I have learned a lot more about evolution and behaviour, than about the nuts and bolts of biology. My observations so far on doing a crash course in biology? Wowee there are a lot of details! So much specific terminology, and so many detailed and complex processes that do not map very accurately onto things from other domains (which could allow for more speedy learning).

However, if, like me, you have an end goal in mind that is not heavily reliant on rote learning the details of mitosis, respiration or mRNA behaviour, I think it is very useful to approach this in a specific way. Namely: don’t sweat the details. This approach has served me well as a software developer as well, when first getting up to speed with a new programming language or framework. Of course in the end, ultimately details matter a lot. When tackling a new domain of knowledge though, I prefer to get a fairly high altitude, sketch like overview in mind of the terrain of the domain, and a rough idea of all the parts and how they fit together. Then, when I drill down and learn more about the details of something, it is already couched cozily in the correct context.

So right now I could not tell you the difference between the metaphase and the anaphase in cell reproduction, and that’s okay with me, but I do have a comfortably gradually growing feeling of dim comprehension of the fundamentals of biology, which in itself feels comfortingly organic and biological.