I Love Biology Part I: The Replicators and The Blind Watchmaker

A few months ago, I read James Sommer’s article on the flaws on biological pedagogy: aptly called “I should have loved biology”. As a mathematically inclined teenager who thought he was going to be an engineer, I had the very experience that Sommer’s wished he had had with biology. Freshman year at MIT, I took a alternative biology class with Michael Laub (who was later my biology advisor) and Hidde Plough. While other biology classes, especially cell biology, were identical to what Sommer’s complained about in his article, this class was…