I attended Florida State University on an academic and leadership scholarship, changed my major from biology to broadcasting, and transferred to the University of South Carolina for my last two years.
I don't believe in any particular definition of the afterlife, but I do believe we're spiritual creatures and more than our biology and that energy cannot be destroyed, but can change. I don't know what the afterlife is going to be, but I'm not afraid of it.
One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.
The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics is a bit like the difference between biology and medicine. Knowing that certain genes increase the risk of cancer is relatively easy. Figuring out exactly which people will get sick, or how to cure them, is a lot more complicated.
I like to surf. I like to play guitar. I want to do college classes online. I wanted to do marine biology for a long time, but I don't know.
No matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one's social and political rights, surely we can't pretend biology doesn't matter in sports. Surely there's a reason we don't let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.
I think it is fine to have sports divided into men's and women's, just as it is fine to say a fifteen-year-old is incapable of consenting to sex. But we should recognize these are social distinctions based on biology, and not categories foisted upon us by nature.
Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.
We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don’t have enough coming into physics and engineering. It’s a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral.
