Thank you so much for your explanations - I have learned a lot. I have some more questions but also have about 40 tabs of papers and terms to digest first, and I think the thread will probably go stale by then. May I ask what you studied and how you came into this type of knowledge from an engineering background, and whether you'd recommend any recent texts to come up to date on this stuff with?
I did a career change from particle physics to bioengineering and neuroscience ( and now AI/ML for EE applications with bioreactors, but that's another story).
There's not a lot of recent texts really. US based academia in the last few years has been really bad, as the replication crisis turned into a dry cough; I.E. make up data all you want, no one will care.
I'd really recommend reading Darwin though. Going way back to the literal foundation really helps set the stage, mentally, and bring you back to what is really going on with relation to the wider human condition.
Just about any review article more than 10 years old is also going to be pretty good. I'd stay way from review articles less than 5 years old though, as things change and retractions come out.
I'll warn you though, the concepts and mental models that you've built up on the Engineering side are not really going to help you with the bio side. Yes, the study habits will help. But bio is really really complicated. You can't abstract the cow into a meter sphere of water. In bio, you really do care about that cell on the medial side of the fourth mesenchymal layer of the second stomach of the cow. You are going to have to get comfortable memorizing pathways and strange names for a few years before all the pieces will even start fitting together. Again, bio is something that's been surviving, ripping, and gouging, for ~4 billion years. She don't have time to stop and let us know what is up.
In parallel with Darwin also try more recent advancements,like Don Hoffman's "The case against reality", where they prove that the probability that evolution will equip an organism to see the true reality is Zero.
