Pursuing praxis

I’ve heard it said that if you major in biology, the first thing you’ll do upon graduating is go to grad school. An undergrad degree is simply too general to be of much use.

I also had a biology professor who liked to remind us that the amount of knowledge in biology doubles every five years.

I also once heard of a physicist who switched to biology and claimed that biology ruined his baths. He used to lay in his tub and do physics research, but after changing fields he constantly had to get out of the tub to look up some fact - that the knowledge in biology is both vast and complex - too much to hold in the mind.

This doesn’t prove that biology is complex, or inherently multidisciplinary - but it supports it. Add to it the observation that I can associate with myself almost a dozen sub-fields of biology in less than 5 years of bonafide research, and biology starts to look humongous indeed.

In thinking about this, I realized that there are several potential taxonomies for the subfields of biology: subject, technique, and question. 

The taxonomy of subjects basically follows a hierarchy of organization, starting with the gene (I think below the gene level grades quickly into organic chemistry, but the line is admittedly fuzzy). It might go something like this:

Gene/Genetics (which - in my book - can include the study of RNA)
Molecules/Molecular biology (all gene and RNA products, as well as functions of DNA and RNA)
Cells/Cell biology
Tissues/Histology
Organs/Physiology
Organisms/zoology/botany/entomology/etc.
Ecosystems/ecology

There are also the living/dead and extant/extinct distinctions one can make, perhaps as a further subdivision of all the above groups, although that’s easier to do with some levels than others, obviously. But you actually can do all of them, in some way, for live, dead, and long-dead animals. 

But this is not completely satisfactory, because some subject-fields cross levels of this organizational heirarchy, such as endocrinology, where molecules produced by cells or tissues or organs, affect other cells or tissues or organs or organisms or individuals.

We might try a function taxonomy (physiology, pathology, parisitology, behavior, nutrition, etc,) but I see no obvious organization for the taxonomy.

Next up: technique. This looks to be a laundry-list taxonomy as well:

Mathematical tools
     Statistics (includes many aspects of phylogenetics)
     Geometry (morphometrics)
     Genetics - quantitative, population, etc (basic algebra thru matrix algebra)
     Informatics - genomics, RNAomics, proteomics, just to scratch the surface
     Complexity theory
     Game theory, bioeconomics

Physics tools
     biomechanics
     astrobiology
     radiology

Chemistry tools
     protein biology - enzymology, etc.
     ecosystem chemistry
     biogeochemistry
     isotope analysis
     too many that I don’t know

Geology tools
     biostratigraphy
     taphonomy
     areas of paleontology
     paleoclimatology

Instrument-driven fields
     Surgery
     Microscopy (pathology, histology)
     Bioimaging (xrays, CAT scans, f/MRI scans, PET scans)

I’ll stop here. You get the idea. 

Finally, there’s the question-based taxonomy. What do you want to know? It might break down like this:

Temporal questions
     How did life start?
     How long does it last?
     How does it change from one point in time to the next?
     How does life terminate?

Functional questions
     How does X structure/function/process work?
     How did it get that way?

Questions of heredity and variance
     Does X vary in a given group? How? Why?
     What amount of similarity is the result of heredity/phylogenetics?
     Where do differences/variations come from? How do they propagate?

Meta-questions
     What factors most influence biological change we see over time? (In morphology, genetics, biodiversity, ecosystems, biogeography, etc.)

By the simple fact that everyone is trying to answer a set of questions, and that to answer questions you must have a material basis and techniques to investigate that material basis, it’s no wonder that anyone who’s a biologist, is a biologist with many different labels. Perhaps it’s a case of taxonomic splitting - i.e. giving every discipline that’s remotely different a new name - that this proliferation of disciplines and the pandemic five-fingers-in-five-pies exist.

It also explains, in part, why it’s so hard to explain to people what exactly I do, even though conceptually it’s really simple. I want to know how life and evolution work, at scales around a million years or so. To do this, I will use (or already have used) perspectives, knowledge, techniques and/or material from comparative anatomy, physiology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, paleontology, paleoclimatology, stratigraphy, paleobiology, biogeography, wildlife ecology, behavioral ecology, philosophy of biology, macroevolution, statistics, phylogenetics, taxonomy/systematics, genetics, histology, programming, and perhaps a foreign language or two.