#366 overall
Biology: The Science of Life
The Great Courses
2 recommenders · 2 threads · recommended in 1 year, 2020 · score 1.4
A survey lecture course covering the biology of life, from cell machinery and how cells work through evolution, genetics and the central dogma (DNA, RNA, proteins), to the immune system and ecology. It is offered as an audiobook with a downloadable companion book.
Commenters describe it as thorough and well-tied-together, with a lot of detail on the cell machinery, genetics and central dogma, and say it is worth starting with.
General Learningbeginnerpaidvideo lectures#cell biology#genetics#central dogma#evolution#immunology#ecology
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Even if that narration is something easily relatable by software developers, the simplification is too big to allow the reasonable comprehension of the subject.
So I still suggest anybody interested to really try to learn more about the actual science topics, instead of comforting themselves falsely believing they "understood" anything.
For the start, I would suggest the nicely produced courses:
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/biology-the-science-...
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-geneti...
Just to illustrate how non-intuitive our "common sense" is, the current estimate of the number of human cells in human body is 30,000,000,000,000 (30e12). The current estimate of the number of bacteria in human body (in the mouth and guts) is 3 times more.
The size of human genome (present in each human cell) is around 3 billion (3e9) base pairs (encoding information units of DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair ). But not all the information is in the DNA alone.
The biochemical reactions happen in parallel even when a single cell is observed.
The reconstruction of gene transcription, also played in the speed it actually happens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&t=248
I listened to the Great Courses audiobook about Biology. There's a lot about how the machinery of the cell works, how it evolved, and so on. He goes through everything else as well, including the immune system, ecology, and so on. It all ties together.
Regarding the genes and central dogma, he gives a LOT of detail about how for instance it was discovered that codons work in threes (not twos or fours). Also how it was discovered that DNA is the thing with the code, how the transcription process works, how the different kinds of RNA are involved, all the way to how the protein comes out.
The audiobook also comes with a downloadable book in case you'd rather read it.