You might not know what your major is, but regardless, I am totally going to sell you my major anyway.
I happen to be majoring in biology, which everyone knows is the study of life. I can’t possibly imagine why that doesn’t cause more excitement. I mean, it’s the study of why we exist. Why do we exist? Are you sure you’re going to find the answers for that in a philosophy class? Hmmm. All I’m going to say is, you know what they say. Trust the science. Did anyone ever say “trust the philosophy?”
Scientists have all sorts of theories for how life came to be. The basic idea is that the atom carbon has the chemical ability to form all sorts of complex polymers, which is what the study of organic chemistry is all about. And then those complex polymers got put inside a lipid membrane that has the ability to self-form around the complex polymers (because of its weird chemistry) and that’s how we got cells. And then those cells eventually became multicellular…and somehow along the way, they became us. Do any of you ever just sit down and wonder to yourselves how life came about? If not, then you totally should, because who doesn’t love a good existential crisis, right?
And biology also gives us a rundown of who we are now, at the very least physically speaking. If you take biology, you will understand how all your genes get expressed, the chemistry and physics behind how your organs function, how we as humans interact (and how we should interact) with the environment around us, how we are evolutionarily related to the animals around us, how scientists can clone animals, grow stem cell lines, use gene therapy, and so much more.
I mean, you are basically a product of your genes plus whatever environmental situation you grew up in. Those little chemical bases in DNA are the reason you are here, surviving or thriving. So wouldn’t you want to know how those little molecules could possibly create something as complex as you? How could four different bases possibly combine to give all the genetic information you need to create such a complex person? We share almost all of our genomes with our closest evolutionary relatives (nonhuman primates), how could such a small amount of our genome produce such a noticeable difference? How are those genes translated into a physical product in the cell? How does that physical product (pretty much just proteins) make you into who you are?
And we know our body is made up of cells; how on earth do those small little things coordinate together to make our tissues and organs? How on earth are we one cohesive person with one genome in all the cells but so many cells turn out looking so different? (A stomach cell does not look anything like a nerve cell, obviously.) We humans laugh, cry, love, and play and yet we were made by the same chemical and physical processes that also produced every nonliving thing on earth. How could these processes form something as complex as us?
Biology also has some serious relevance to the capitalist and consumer culture that we currently live in. In the world we live in, we produce so much waste. We’ve heard it all before. Obviously, there are so many things we throw away on a daily basis, tons of plastic wrappers for food, et cetera, and our culture revolves around buying new things. Like you need the newest model phone, your computer stops working, you need another car, and it goes on and on and on. Not to mention the fact that almost all of us drive, and what does that do? Put carbon dioxide out into the atmosphere, of course. And if you weren’t aware, carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas that we have been carelessly pumping into our atmosphere for decades through industrial byproducts. The fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas tells us that it is supposed to be in our atmosphere to make sure the sun warms up our earth enough. When light bounces off the surface off our earth, we need greenhouse gases to make sure the sunlight is reabsorbed. If we did not have them, we would have a planet that is way too cold. But if we have too much of them in our atmosphere, we have a planet that is way too hot.
When you take biology classes, no matter what your specialization is, you will learn about the effects of our society on the natural processes of our planet, and how important our natural resources are. We do not want our trash to pollute our rivers or water because the earth’s system of lakes, reservoirs, rivers, and rain purifies our water for us. We all know that the water we drink has been recycled numerous times, hence the name “the water cycle”, because when water evaporates it leaves behind any impurities it may have had on the ground. In lakes and rivers, impurities often sink to the bottom, microorganisms can even remove some of the toxins in the water, and when it percolates through the ground to our groundwater, it often leaves behind more impurities. The water cycle provides one example of how the natural systems put here by our earth take care of many essential services that we need. In addition, the presence of forests prevents erosion, and erosion ruins good soil. And because of the interconnectedness of all the animals in the food webs, you learn about in elementary school, if one animal is eliminated, the entire food web is disrupted, which can lead to us losing precious seafood for instance. It is also the reason why if we lose pollinators like bees, we are going to also lose flowers and essential plants. These few examples among many are why we need to acknowledge that we evolved amongst nature and we cannot pretend it does not exist, or that we somehow live in a vacuum apart from it.
Finally, biology teaches us about so many amazing new technologies and can open up a vast world of incredible careers. Stem cell development is an essential new technology for growing new tissue for people who may need transplants, for instance, without having to rely on donors and the problem of the immune system rejecting someone else’s tissue. Stem cell development is also the main reason scientists study cloning, not to reproduce other people, even though that would be cool. Scientists are also able to transfer genes from one person to the next, which can help fix severe immunodeficiencies. In the field of biology, you may learn how to use GPS and other mapping technologies to do studies in the field and thus learn how we can actually start protecting the animals that are losing their habitats and resources. You might get to learn how to work with DNA, RNA and proteins in a molecular biotechnology lab or learn how to work with and handle reptiles in a herpetology class.
And there are several different careers you could go into after you get your bachelor’s degree. You could go to dental school, med school, become a PA, go into graduate school, help make new vaccines, become a professor while working in a research lab, work for pharmaceutical companies, work for forestry and fishing organizations, et cetera, all of which are careers which that are consequential and essential to the world in which we live in.
So, even if you’re not majoring in biology, why wouldn’t you like it? This is my encouragement to you to at least definitely keep up on the news about the latest fascinating and amazing biology developments. They are more understandable and just as cool as anything new developed in physics or chemistry if you ask me, plus it’s just biology. And like I’ve been saying through this article, why would you not like it?