Ask a Science Blogger

The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is:

Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?

I had to smile a bit when I saw this question. You see, one of the main reasons I went into mathematics was my distaste for actually doing scientific research. To me it seemed that mathematics had all the things I liked about science - the logic; the clear thinking; the steady, methodical progress; - without the things I didn't like. Specifically, the part where you slave away in a laboratory, tediously crafting, setting up and carrying out experiments, recording data as meticulously as possible, spending as much time worrying about all the sources of error in the data as the data itself, and on and on.

Still, given the nature of this blog I think it would be fun to study biology in a more formal way than I have to date. In particular, evolutionary genetics seems fascinating to me. I took several physics and computer science courses in college, but nothing in biology. Of course, that was mainly because the main introductory biology course at Brown (where I went to school) was notoriously grueling (it was intended to weed out the more inadequate future doctors), and also featured Saturday morning labs. Who needed that?

In retrospect, however, it might have been nice to have a class with Ken Miller.