>>11479395I am biased, but this is what I would do:
1. I would just try to find some high school AP bio textbook or maybe look at your local university's first bio textbook for bio majors
2. skim through it, get a feel for it
3. Find the chapter about natural selection and evolution/Darwin, all that, there should really only be one chapter, ignore the shit about ecology and taxonomy, that's boring and pointless, then read up on evolution and natural selection as much as you want, it really sort of is the unifying theory of biology
4. next, read about cells and their structure, memorize all major organelles, and importantly, learn a bit about the cell cycle and specifically about chromosome organization, ploidy, and gametogenesis, and crossing over/recombination; make sure you can do those problems where they ask you identify which step of meiosis nondisjunction occured and you're golden
5. read up on genetics and gregor mendel's experiments, read all chapters about genetics, punett squares, modes of inheritance, etc, try to read all chapters you can find on genetics
6. find what you can about molecular biology in this hypothetical highschool textbook and read about that
7. finally, once you feel accomplished with all the stuff before this, you can start reading modern literature, almost none of it you will be able to understand, but you'll find information on all the techniques and acronyms bit-by-bit and you can get to know whichever field you want
I would say these are the essentials of biology and if you have a solid background in them then you're set to start learning about modern biology. Others might disagree with me though, but I am a molecular bio major and I really just mentioned all the stuff from lower division classes that I still think about on a regular basis.
