![]() ![]() But no biologist did that stuff any more - at least not for the major part of their time. I loved the classes especially that taught me about the diversity of life, that took me out into the field to see it up close, that let me watch it moving and wiggling under the microscope, that let me dissect animals or flowers to see how they worked, that taught me about their evolution and the history of life on Earth. But those were the ones I wanted to read most. The chapters on the diversity of life in the ocean? We skipped those. ![]() We studied vague notions of food webs and nutrient cycling rather than learning what dinoflagellates or copepods were. In oceanography my freshman year of college, we studied ocean currents, salinity, and the ecology of plankton. And yet I had no desire to change my major. It got so bad I felt physically ill every time it was time to go into the lab where I was doing my independent research. I wanted to be a generalist - to study lots of different kinds of things. The thought of interminable hours spent in a windowless room staring at tubes of clear liquids and working on one tiny slice of molecular biology to the exclusion of all other intellectual curiosities depressed me beyond belief. It wasn't until late high school, in fact, that I realized I loved biology and wanted to be a biologist (incredibly, in middle school and early high school I thought I wanted to be a lawyer).īut within two years of arriving at college, I knew two things. That quiet time wandering, listening, and looking among the loblolly pines and playing in the red dirt planted a love in me of nature that didn't germinate until years later. I remember roaming the big yard and woods around our rural Tennessee home solo at four, five, six years old. To me, this is a shocking dereliction.Īs a child, I had access to something that few children do today: nature. In other words, the people society depends on to know the most about life - people with college biology degrees - in nearly all cases have no obligation to learn anything about actual living organisms. You'll note that since 1995, the median number of courses has been zero. ![]() The median number is indicated in writing inside the bar. The left axis and the bars show the minimum number of natural history-related courses required for a BS degree in biology in US colleges and universities since 1955. On the right axis and indicated by the line surrounded by dots is the proportion of introductory biology texts devoted to natural history since 1935. The error bars represent the (positive) standard error of the mean. The minimum number of natural history–related courses required for a BS degree in biology in US institutions (the bars the median is indicated within each bar) and the proportion of introductory biology texts devoted to natural history–related material (the circles, right axis see the supplemental material). ![]()
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