I should have loved biology (2020)

There's a specific kind of pain that hits when you read Somers' essay, and it's not nostalgia — it's regret with a side of resentment. He articulates something that every technically-minded person has felt at some point: the realization that the subjects we dismissed as "boring" in school were never boring at all. They were just taught by people who'd had the curiosity beaten out of them, or who were forced to teach to a test, or who were so deep in the weeds that they forgot to show the forest. The fact that this essay from 2020 is still climbing Hacker News in 2025 tells you we haven't solved this problem. We're still producing kids who think biology is about flashcards and dissection, not about the insane, self-replicating molecular machinery that runs every living thing on this planet. What's particularly sharp about Somers' piece is how he connects the dots between biology and the kind of systems thinking that programmers love. When he describes the wonder of cellular machinery — the ribosomes, the protein folding, the sheer computational complexity of a single cell — he's speaking the language of engineers. The tragedy is that we gatekeep this wonder behind years of memorizing taxonomy before we ever get to the good stuff. It's like teaching someone to love programming by making them memorize the ASCII table for a semester before letting them write a single line of code. We front-load the drudgery and back-load the magic, and then we're surprised when people bounce off the subject forever. There's also a deeper cultural critique buried in here. The essay is a reminder that our obsession with STEM career pipelines has actually done a disservice to genuine scientific curiosity. We've turned biology into a pre-med hazing ritual or a data science feeder course, when it should be treated as the most profound philosophical subject available to us. Somers isn't just saying "biology is cool" — he's saying that our entire approach to education is backwards, that we optimize for credentialing instead of wonder. That's a critique that applies to every STEM field, but it's especially damning for biology, where the subject matter is objectively the most fascinating thing humans have ever studied. The HN comments on this thread are predictably full of people sharing their own "I should have loved X" stories, but the real takeaway is more uncomfortable. It forces us to ask what else we've been missing. If biology — arguably the most relevant science to our own existence — can be effectively hidden from us for our entire schooling, what other wonders are we walking past every day? Somers' essay is a reminder that the world is full of awe if you know how to look, and that the cost of a bad education isn't just a poor GPA — it's a lifetime of blindness to the incredible machinery we're all made of. That's a hard pill to swallow, but it's worth swallowing. Source: [https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/](https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/)