Your post really demonstrates how different people can have very different experiences of the same field. I love biology too, yet I care very little about chemicals or chemistry, and I wish there was more of a track for studying biology while abstracting away from the biological particulars. An approach to biology focused on the large scale- ecology, biospherics, and life exists as a geophysical phenomenon, would be really nice. That's the sort of thing that I care about, and you really don't need to reference the nanoscale in detail for considering it.
I think we can all agree though that the unstructured memorization approach benefits 0 students.
You might enjoy this course form Yale. It’s called Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. I listened to it as a podcast several years ago. It was my first introduction to “real”, not high school, biology, and it blew my mind. The material is presented at exactly the level you describe, mostly abstracted to general principles that guide all of life, but the professor also presents really fascinating examples of how each principle is instantiated in nature. I found it to be very approachable too, as a computer scientist.
It was a big part of my inspiration to go to grad school to study biology. So be careful haha. Don’t end up a grad student like me.
One final note is that biology is exceptionally weird in that the chemistry and the big principles like evolution are inseparable in reality. You can certainly study them separately but there are a few things that just won’t make sense without understanding some of the molecular details.
> I found my high school and college biology classes to be a dry litany of jargon and diagrams, sucking the wonder out of the incredible machinery of life.
Indeed, same here. As of myself I always liked the biology but the way it was teached was always far from what could be considered as good.
For example, I remember classes about proteins. There were some mentions about protein structures, from aminoacid sequence to 3-d shape. But it was never explained what the proteins are actually doing and why they need to have different shapes. Why do we need so much of them? I remember that it was very profound experience when I discovered how complex is the molecular machinery and I started to look on the biochemistry from completely different perspective
