Scientific ideas it's time to get rid of: Highlights from edge.org's Question of the Year

Edge.org asked 175 people scientists, intellectuals, and others about what scientific idea should be retired. A quick roundup of some of my favorite answers:

Provocatively, Paul Saffo argues that we should stop evaluating scientific knowledge with the traditional notion of progress: instead of measuring scientific progress/change by how much we know, we should think about how science helps us realize how many mysteries are still out there.

Brian Christian explains why traditional academic publishing is an outdated way to disperse scientific knowledge.

Kathryn Clancy makes excellent points about labor exploitation (and sexual harassment) in science, tying it to a acientific culture that devalues people for the sake of ideas.

Bart Kisko challenges assumptions that statistical independence even exists. This point reminds me of theorist Karen Barad's notion of intra-action, the idea that all interactions are actually intra-actions within a connected system.

Geoffrey West wants to stop the quest for a Theory of Everything. He points out that Questioning A Theory of Everything may be beating a dead horse since I’m certainly not the first to be bothered by its implicit hyperbole but let’s face it, referring to one’s field of study as The Theory of Everything smacks of arrogance and naivité."  Good point, but doesn't everyone secretly believe that their own field holds the real key to knowledge?
    He goes on to argue that "Perhaps, then, the most surprising consequence of a visionary Theory of Everything is that it implies that, on the grand scale, the universe, including its origins and evolution, though extremely complicated, is not complex but, in fact, is surprisingly simple since it can be encoded in a limited number of equations, conceivably only one.... So, while applauding and admiring the search for a Grand Unified Theory of all the basic forces of nature, let’s drop the implication that it can, in principle, explain and predict Everything. Let us instead incorporate a parallel quest for A Grand Unified Theory of Complexity."

Seirian Sumner provides a clear explanation of why we should scrap the idea that Life Evolves Via A Shared Genetic Toolkit. Near, the end, she states:"But the presence of unique genes in all evolutionary lineages studied to date now tells us that de novo gene birth, rather than a reordering of old ingredients, is important in phenotypic evolution. The over-abundance of non-coding DNA in genomes is less puzzling, if they are a melting pot for genomes to exploit and create new genes and gene function, and ultimately phenotypic innovation. The current thinking is that genomes are constantly producing new genes all the time, but that only a few become functional."

Laurie Santos and Tamar Gendler provide an amusing name for this fallacy: "And so the idea that cognitive science needs to retire is what we'll call the G. I. Joe Fallacy: the idea that knowing is half the battle. It needs to be retired not just from our theories of how the mind works, but also from our practices of trying to shape minds to work better."

Fiery Cushman explains why it's not true that Big Effects have Big Explanations.

Robert Sapolsky uses interesting metaphors to explain what's wrong with the phrase "a gene-environmental interaction."

Dean Ornish urges people to remember that Large Randomized Controlled Trials are always best.

Benjamin Bergen provides a succinct explanation of the problems with Universal Grammar.

Gary Marcus provides good advice on not idolizing Big Data.

Amanda Gefter on the idea of "the" universe. 

There are a few posts on altruism, but Tor Nørretranders explains clearly the logical problem behind the concept itself.  Jamil Zaki makes interesting comments on altruism as well.

N.J. Enfield on the idea of Competence in the field of linguistics.

Steve Giddings on problems with Spacetime.

It seems like everywhere you turn, there's some nonsense about left brain/right brain. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains well why this is a problem. So does Stephen Kosslyn.

Gerd Gigerenzer slams common issues with fMRI studies in Scientific Inference Via Statistical Rituals.

Kurt Gray explains why psychology needs to focus less on taxonomy.

Samuel Arbesman on why Big Science is not the key to all science.

Gregory Benford explains why it's not that the case that The Intrinsic Beauty and Elegance Of Mathematics Allows It to Describe Nature.

W. Daniel Hillis on the Cause and Effect Paradigm.

Azra Raza on the failures of using mouse models in medical research.

Nicholas Christakis on overstating the importance of the Average.

Rebecca Goldstein on why science does not make philosophy obsolete.

Scott Atran on the problems with IQ.

Roger Schank on Artificial Intelligence.

Adam Waytz takes on the idea that Humans Are By Nature Social Animals.

Lee Smolin on the idea that The Big Bang Was The First Moment Of Time.

Eric Topol on the idea of One Genome Per Individual.

Carlo Rovelli on the idea that geometry represents physical space.

Max Tegmark on the concept of infinity.

Edward Slingerland on Scientific Morality.

Rodney Brooks on the computational metaphor.

Sean Carroll on Falsifiability.

Kevin Kelly on Fully Random Mutations.

The Science of Lunar Calendars

In honor of Lunar New Year, a quick round up of interesting sites talking about the science and math behind early lunar calendars:

A basic intro from today's edition of the Christian Science Monitor, on why Chinese New Year is not on January 1.

An astronomy perspective on the development of calendars.

A lunar calendar find in Scotland.

The oldest lunar calendar found so far.

A history of the Chinese calendar, including both cultural and scientific information.

Review: Daniel Tammet, Thinking in Numbers

Daniel Tammet’s book Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning and Math is an engaging tour through a multitude of sites where mathematics and numbers weave through art, literature, history, and our daily lives. With lively, quick-reading prose, Tammet encourages us to appreciate mathematical thinking both as an imaginative art form and as a fundamental way we understand the world around us.  

The book describes its own structure as “eclectic,” and indeed each chapter is a separate journey into some new permutation of memoir, historical anecdote, and mathematical meditation. Tammet draws extensively on his own personal experience to illustrate that mathematics is beautiful and even life-affirming. The discussion spans from Archimedes’ estimation of the number of grains of sand in the world to Tolstoy’s use of calculus to theorize war and peace to the mathematics of income inequality to religion’s role in helping mathematicians imagine the infinite. The book continues its path, traversing through the history of mathematics, the distinct beauty or cultural meaning of specific numbers, and many other ways that math intersects with other parts of culture, society, and family. 

In some ways, this book is part of the genre of popular mathematics books whose main goal is to convince the non-mathematically-inclined to take pleasure in mathematics and to appreciate it as an art form similar to poetry or music (and, secondarily, to provide math-lovers with mathematical-historical-cultural tidbits to relish, though one suspects this secondary goal is the more common one). In this regard, this book is one of the better ones, though not necessarily a stand-out. 

Where Tammet’s book stands out is through its persistent fascination with how personal experience shapes mathematical thinking in diverse and often surprising ways. Tammet writes, for example, of how growing up in a large family of nine children shaped his understanding of sets and subsets, how his diagnosis of Asperger’s and savant syndrome helped him think about the mathematics of individuality, and how his synaesthesia affects his intimate connection to particular numbers. Tammet also speculates about the role of personal experience in the mathematical or scientific thinking of figures from the past and present, analyzing, for instance, the influence of the new “zero” on Shakespeare’s understanding of nothingness.  Other examples include wondering if Anne Boleyn’s rumored 11^th finger affected how she understood counting and halves, or suggesting that growing up in a large city makes one more interested in studying the very large numbers needed to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life. These speculations are only sometimes convincing but almost always thought-provoking and original. 

Indeed one of the strongest chapters, “Poetry of the Primes,” begins with a conjecture about poet Arnaut Daniel, the inventor of the sestina who was both admired by Dante and likely a gambling addict. Tammet suggests that the importance of the number six may have had some connection to Daniel’s lifelong devotion to dice, but then expands the discussion to include poet Raymond Queneau’s calculation of which numbers allow for a sestina-like structure (fewer than you’d think, and the reason relates to prime numbers). Tammet then considers haiku and various other traditions where prime numbers play a special role in poetry, all leading up to a riveting (if sometimes a bit confusing) argument that poetry is like the prime numbers in its most essential qualities: like poetry, the prime numbers are mysterious, knowable only in gaps and fragments, “unpredictable, difficult to define” and containing a multitude of meanings, just as life itself does.

Another stand-out chapter is “A Model Mother,” in which the notion of abstraction and modeling are used to explore Tammet’s relationship with his mother. Tammet recalls childhood experiences in which his mother diverged from the way he imagined her to be as an example of how models differ from observed data. But when his mother does not live up to his idealized image, Tammet frames the experience not as a disappointment but as a realization that allowed him to understand his mother better as a human being. He ends this chapter on models with a meditation on the complexity and the emotional highs and lows of identifying strongly with a parent, adding another layer to what a mathematical “model” can mean.

The book does have some weaknesses. The structure jumps from one anecdote to the next, touching on a myriad of issues but only occasionally going in depth. I, for example, was eager to hear much more of his opinion on whether mathematical proofs that rely on computers can be beautiful or reflect the personal style of the mathematician. There are also a couple of factual errors in the historical information (the claim that money was invented by the ancient Greeks, for example). Most of the information about history and even much of the waxing rhapsodic on mathematical beauty can be found more fully developed in other books. Tammet’s book, however, is eminently readable and contains some unique and chapters that discuss mathematics’ relationship to life and art through captivating examples and provocative arguments.  In all, it effectively conveys Tammet’s point: that “often we are barely aware of it, but the play between numerical concepts saturates the way we experience the world.”  More importantly, Tammet convinces us that this constant interplay of numbers in our lives is something to be savored.

 

Glowing plants on Kickstarter

Depending on whom you ask, the chance to buy genetically engineered glow-in-the-dark plants is a fun addition to the garden, an environmental disaster in the making, a tricky ethical problem, or a symbol of the future and all its pleasures and dangers.

The plants were offered as rewards for making donations tothe glowing flower project on Kickstarter, the site used mainly to fund arts projects through crowdsourcing. It’s common for Kickstarter campaigns to offer contributors an item in return – for example, a contributor to an independent film might receive a DVD of the film when it is completed. The glowing plants Kickstarter page, which offered seeds for glowing mustard plants or a rose, quickly reached and surpassed its goal of $65,000 to draw $484,013 from 8,433 backers. After objections from Kickstarter users, particularly over the dangers of releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment, Kickstarter allowed the project to proceed but created a rule stating that in the future, campaigns on the Kickstarter website cannot distribute genetically engineered life forms.

The science behind creating glowing plants is not all that new. Not only is it possible to move genes from one species to another, biotechnology has made it cheaper and easier than ever. The genes for luminescence from a jellyfish or fireflies are inserted into the plant’s DNA in a place where it won’t interfere with the other genes’ activities.  They use software designed specifically to design synthetic life forms, which helps make the massive amount of genetic information easier to work with.  (In an interesting if self-serving bit of metaphor, a spokesman for Genome Compiler software says that “We are democratizing creation…. Cells are nothing more than a computer, running a program and the program is the genetic code. The code is DNA. The software are the chromosomes. The hardware is the wetware.”)  They will then obtain the genetic material that they have “programmed” by using a Cambrian Genomics gene printer, a product that has made the process far cheaper.  Then, they plan to use a “gene gun,” sometimes called a biolistic particle delivery system, which will shoot tiny metal particles covered in glow-causing DNA through the cell walls of the plant cells. In some of the plant cells, the new DNA becomes part of a chromosome. Then, cells that have been effectively modified according to plan are cultivated.  The Kickstarter plans to use this process to make glow-in-the dark Arabidopsis, or mustard seed, which is the plant most commonly used in scientific experiments (in the way that rats are the most commonly used animal); in other words, there is a huge amount of information about Arabidopsis genes. The project also hopes to engineer a glow-in-the-dark rose.

The original Kickstarter page asking for contributions includes the following statement:

      Once we have proven the designs work we will then insert the same gene sequence into the plant using a gene gun. This is more complicated, as there's a risk the gene sequence gets scrambled, but the result will be unregulated by the USDA and thus suitable for release.

     Funds raised will also be used to support our work to develop an open policy framework for DIY Bio work involving recombinant DNA. This framework will provide guidelines to help others who are inspired by this project navigate the regulatory and social challenges inherent in community based synthetic biology. The framework will include recommendations for what kinds of projects are safe for DIY Bio enthusiasts and recommendations for the processes which should be put in place (such as getting experts to review the plans).

First of all, one has to wonder at the logic of the phrase: “unregulated by the USDA and thus suitable for release.” At the very least, it conflates “suitable” with “not illegal.” Even more interesting, however, is the commitment to ‘open source’ bioengineering, with its seeming attempts to develop a culture of responsibility. While one might cynically note that this is probably good PR for the project, there certainly is a need for more discussion about how Do It Yourself culture in the biotech age might need some more explicit conversations on community values.

Controversy over glowing genetically engineered organisms, however, is not new. In the 1980s, scientists made a glow in the dark tobacco plant by inserting genes from fireflies. Artist Eduardo Kac created a stir in 2000 when he genetically engineered a glowing rabbit, angering animal rights groups and starting heated conversations about the nature of art and the ethics of bioengineering. (Genetically engineered zebrafish are now available as pets as well.) But for Kac and his collaborators, the processes were much more cumbersome than they are now.

New technologies and software tools for genetic engineering are making it easier and less exorbitantly expensive to create new variations on organisms, especially for scientists without connections to – or oversight from – traditional institutions (academia, industry, government, etc.). Crowdsourcing, and its underlying anti-institutional philosophy, is another push in the same direction. Due to both technology and broader decentralizing cultural forces, individuals and groups are participating in knowledge work that was once reserved for tightly controlled spaces, blurring the public and private spheres in ways that people have found liberatory, frightening, or both (see for example, the controversy about using 3-D printers to make guns).  

So the glowing plants conversation is not just about Kickstarter. It’s about the fact that old mechanisms of information control are rapidly shifting.  Even if it weren’t for this one project, what about the many other synthetic biology projects that could release organisms into the environment? What will happen when creating a genetically engineered plant or animal becomes something the ordinary person can do with a home computer (or a phone app)? 

And that’s not even getting into what will happen when common household equipment will allow people to alter their own DNA. (Posthumantheory  might have much to say about that!)

The fierce responses to the glowing plant debate reveal our tensions – about science, but also about creativity, control, individualism, the environment, and how we imagine the ethical and practical limits of human knowledge. That’s why I found the online discussions surrounding these glowing plants so fascinating – it’s not a debate over the ethics of genetic engineering per se, but a debate over how genetic engineering is marketed, sold, controlled or released, and by whom.  It speaks to our hopes and anxieties about the future, and to who we trust – and who we don’t.

 

A round-up of interesting responses to the debate:

 

The Daily Beast covers the backlash against the project, and also quotes scientists who argue that the glowing plants are unlikely to become invasive since there is no evolutionary advantage in glowing. The article also explains that glowing plants require a ton of energy and that often the glow is barely noticeable.

The San Jose Mercury News explains that these plants do not fall under Department of Agriculture regulations because they are made with a gene gun, and not more traditional means.

According to BetaBeat, “Futurists on Reddit are up in arms about a recent update to Kickstarter’s project guidelines that states that creators can’t offer “genetically modified organisms” to backers as a reward for donating to the project.”

GizMag goes a little bit into the science behind the process and also the future plans for the project.

PopSci asks “Is Kickstarter Hostile to Science?” and also mentions some science-specific crowdsourcing sites.

A Time Magazine writer argues that the Kickstarter controversy is actually about the competing values of humanists vs. scientists, and the rivalry over who will control Kickstarter and crowdsourcing.

Wired UK frames the project in terms of the potential of human imagination, and includes many quotes from those involved in the project.

 

Other coverage:

CNet

Nature

An editorial at Digital Journal

TechCrunch

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Pinker and Scientism

Steven Pinker’s recent article in the New Republic, “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, andtenure-less historians,” has stirred up old debates about the relationship between science and the humanities and especially about scientism. In arguing that the humanities would become more vital (and less pathetic) if they embraced scientific approaches, Pinker also says that while he is often accused of scientism, a usually pejorative term, he wants to reclaim the word “scientism” as a positive term.  

Responses to Pinker’s argument have been varied and revealing. A quick round-up of some interesting posts:

·         Ross Douthat at the New York Times responds here, arguing that Pinker’s claims are deeply flawed and lacking in self-awareness. For instance, he rather mocks the idea that if the universe has no inherent meaning, then everyone must adopt the liberal cosmopolitanism that Pinker himself embraces. Indeed, according to Douthat, Pinker’s argument is entirely based on a present-ism that posits recent improvements in quality of life as the fruit of science and secularism and ignores the long and troubled history of scientifically advanced nations. He also points out that Pinker “mistakes a real-but-complicated historical relationship between science and humanism for a necessary intellectual line in which the latter vindicates the former, or at least militates strongly in its favor. And his invocation of “the scientific facts” to justify what is, at bottom, a philosophical preference for Mill over Nietzsche is the pretty much the essence of what critics mean by scientism: Empirically overconfident, intellectually unsubtle, and deeply incurious about the ways in which human beings can rationally disagree.”

·         Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at New Republic, responded with this video, arguing that it is bad methodology to indiscriminately apply scientific methods to humanistic questions. In some ways, this response represents a common view that interdisciplinary inquiry between science and the humanities has little to offer.

·         The blog American Science responds by pointing out a number of oddities about Pinker’s argument and then analyzing the “toolkit” model of interdisciplinary engagement. For instance, they point out that humanists who integrate science into their work are often held in high status and have much better chances for grants, even though Pinker likes to portray science advocates as rebels fighting against the establishment. They also note that Pinker rails against postmodernism – which Pinker claims is the main cause of the humanities’ supposed “self-destruction” – but that Pinker’s understanding of what humanists do (close reading and thick description) come largely from postmodern thinkers. Additionally, they question the underlying assumption that science and other methods should be thought of as a “toolkit” used by individual agents, viewed as largely divorced from epistemic and historical contexts.

·         Jon Brock reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun, explaining how Jacob Bronowski's The Common Sense of Science gave us Pinker’s argument in1951. (Personally, from these quotes at least, I find Bronowski to be more reasonable in his assumptions than Pinker).

·         At Pharyngula, PZ Myers slams the assumptions, misinformation, and overall hubris of Pinker’sessay.  He argues that given the topic, he expected from the article “an explanation that science is one valid path to knowledge with wide applicability, so simply applying science is not the same as scientism; and an acknowledgment that other disciplines have made significant contributions to human well-being, and therefore we should not pretend to be all-encompassing.” Myers also comments: “that opening…could he possibly have been more arrogant, patronizing, and ahistorical? Not only is he appropriating philosophers into the fold of science, but worse, he’s placing them in his favored disciplines of cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology. Does the man ever step outside of his office building on the Harvard campus? Descartes and Hume were not evolutionary psychologists. He’s doing great violence to the intellectual contributions of those men — and further, he’s turning evolutionary psychology into an amorphous and meaningless grab-bag which can swallow up every thought in the world. The latter, at least, is a common practice within evo psych, but please. Hume was a philosopher. He was not a psychologist, a biologist, or a chemist. He was not doing science, even though he thought a lot about science….  He’s committing the fallacy of progress and scientism. There is no denying that we have better knowledge of science and engineering now, but that does not mean that we’re universally better, smarter, wiser, and more informed about everything. What I know would be utterly useless to a native hunter in New Guinea, or to an 18th century philosopher; it’s useful within a specific context, in a narrow subdomain of a 21st technological society. I think Pinker’s fantasy is not one of informing a knowledgeable person, but of imposing the imagined authority of a modern science on someone from a less technologically advanced culture.  It’s actually an encounter I’d love to see happen. I don’t think evolutionary psychology would hold up at all under the inquisitory scrutiny of Hume…. I tried to put myself in the place of one of my colleagues outside the sciences reading that essay, and when I did that, I choked on the title: “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians”. How condescending! ….  Just as biologists freely use the tools of physics, scholars in the humanities will use the tools of science where appropriate and helpful. They do not therefore bow down in fealty to the one true intellectual discipline, great Science. I have never known a one to reject rigor, analysis, data collection, or statistics and measurement…although they can get rather pissy if you try to tell them that the basic tools of the academic are copyright Science.”

 
So what’s at stake in all of these conversations about scientism, science, and the humanities? I’d argue a lot:

·         The relationship between the sciences and the humanities. Absolutely, Pinker is right that the humanities and sciences should not be viewed as enemies, and that there are many exciting possibilities when we think of new ways to integrate scientific and humanistic inquiry. But Pinker makes the classic mistake of thinking that this interaction should only go one way; he shows little interest in or knowledge of what the humanities or indeed even the social sciences has contributed to our understanding of what science is (one might assume that Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, or Andrew Pickering would be dismissed by Pinker for being polluted by postmodernism).  Earlier this summer, philosopher Mark Kingwell made an apt comment on this trend, in response to scientism and to the claim that  philosophy is useless and has not progressed in centuries because it has not kept up with science: “I will inform my colleagues of our demise. Meanwhile, let me say for the record that … assessing the vitality of Discipline A as a function of its ‘keeping up with’ Discipline B is a form of what we philosophers call begging the question, otherwise known as assuming the very thing you need to prove.” More generally, however, it’s hard to see how real interdisciplinary inquiry can come about if, as Pinker assumes, the influence only goes one way – inquiry is, after all, a conversation and not a monologue. 

·         The truth. Or rather, what we think of truth, knowledge, and of course postmodernism. Pinker rejects postmodernism (and all the many things the term can mean), and asserts that science is the only route to truth. The idea that there is only one form of inquiry that produces real knowledge is something that most forms of scientism share with religious fundamentalism. More interestingly, however, Pinker and many kinds of scientism share with other conservative philosophies a rather derisive dismissal of constructivism or any questioning of traditional narratives of progress.

·         The Western Intellectual Tradition. As many of the articles above note, Pinker makes a preposterous claim when he suggests that most of Western philosophy has been science, and would have been even better if these great thinkers had understood genetics and physics, thus implying that Western culture has always been leading to wonders such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and other fields that Pinker supports. Besides being a simply strange comment, this claim makes a rather common rhetorical move: re-telling history to make your own current state seem like the pinnacle and ultimate goal of all knowledge that came before you. Notice that this rhetorical move also subtly suggests that current philosophers and humanists are doing knowledge the way we used to, before we understood how the world really works. Also, claiming your own perspective as the true heir of an entire intellectual tradition pretty much always comes off as asshattery. 

·         Scientism and religion. Scientism is accused of being as blindly dogmatic and superior as religious fundamentalists, and while that may be a slight exaggeration, many responses to Pinker suggest that his argument is actually an example of the flaws of scientism. While scientism is strongly identified with secularism, Pinker might again do well to consider what humanists have found about science and religion.  Of course, there is the long and widespread assertion that religion and science are not incompatible worldviews, and that only overzealous purists think them to be. But I would like to focus on the ways that science draws on religious ideas, assumptions, and cultural values. For instance, Shapin and Schaffer famously found  that Puritan ideas about witnessing helped create modern notions of scientific reliability, and Donna Haraway has often noted how “Puritan storytelling” imbues both political and scientific storytelling. 

·         Scientism vs. skepticism. One of the key critiques of scientism, for instance, is a too-eager and unquestioning embrace of scientific methods to explore questions of meaning, beauty, value, and ethics. I agree actually that science has the potential to add to our knowledge of all these questions, but I would argue that there’s still a big problem here with scientism: its proponents often don’t distinguish between scientific fields where we know much and fields where we know little.  For instance, science has explained a great deal about how the human heart works -- this is a topic we understand comparatively well. Yes, there are always new discoveries – tweaks and additions to our knowledge, new diagnostic and treatment techniques for heart problems – but we have a relatively solid understanding of how the heart works. Our understanding of how the brain works, on the other hand, is rapidly increasing but is still unquestionably in the early burgeoning stages of discovery. The brain is far more complex than the heart, as are social organizations, cultures, and behavior patterns. It’s well known, for instance, that fields such as evolutionary psychology are highly susceptible to problematic and unexamined ideological biases but it is also a field whose knowledge base is very, very small compared with the overall complexity of the problems they tackle.  Fields like evo psych and behavioral genetics and indeed the sometimes tenuous science of economics have many critics -- especially those figures in the field who make the most outlandish claims – but proponents of scientism (not that many besides Pinker would name themselves as such) argue that such skepticism is an anti-science ideology.  But good science requires some skepticism.

·         How we understand what science is. In the view of scientism, mistrust of science is a rejection of reason itself, an inability to understand the necessity of rigorously testing hypotheses and results. But science is both a method of inquiry AND an institution, one with close and complex ties to other institutions such as government and business. Scientism adds little to the debate when it erases historical reasons for institutional mistrust and portrays all critiques of science as a form of anti-intellectualism. There are many cases where such institutional mistrust is justified, but I would argue that it is always important to understand the histories that shape belief and knowledge, especially when the mistrust is not justified or tenable. On this note, Eula Biss has an absolutely superb discussion of the social, psychological, and historical contexts of the anti-vaccination movement.   

·         Whether we can talk meaningfully about the ethics of science.  According to scientism, science is the only means to truth. An even more problematic assumption, however, is that scientism seems to assume that this is all science is. Consider, for example, Pinker’s claim that those who point out the negative consequences of science are being “obtuse” by claiming that these events are “the unavoidable dark side of scientific progress as opposed to a universally deplored breach,” characterizing abuses of scientific authority as a series of entirely anomalous and isolated incidents. Again, Haraway or any number of philosophers might be useful in explaining that knowledge is always politically “non-innocent” – that the consequences of knowledge do not, as a rule, affect everyone equally.  Pinker’s scientism, however, seems to suggest that science is only a force for good – counterexamples are derided as being irrelevant to the broader conversation, as if harmful science does not really count for science as all. 

Clearly, the debate around Pinker – and the debate around science, scientism, and the questions that help us give meaning and value to human experience and choices – is a complex one, tied with many more conversations. Here’s hoping that the debate includes as many approaches as possible, not just the ones that Pinker advocates, and that it leads somewhere interesting and new.

Awesome Science History: Emilie du Chatelet

Emilie du Chatelet was a scientist and philosopher of the French Enlightenment. Over the past decade, there has been a swell of interest in her life and work. Here are some reasons why:

1. Emilie du Chatelet transformed French science and mathematics. Most of her country’s scientists were still following Descartes’ ideas, but she was in correspondence with a number of scientists and mathematicians throughout Europe.  Through her influence with her friends and through her published articles (a rarity for a woman at the time), she dragged French science into modernity by spreading the ideas of Newton, later even translating – and extending the work of – Newton’s Principia. She promoted the importance of calculus and of Newton’s theories in general, and also drew on the ideas of Leibniz, despite the fact that most people chose one side or the other in the highly nationalistic Leibniz-Newton intellectual brawls.

2. She realized and proved experimentally that the impact of a falling object is proportional to the square of the velocity of the object.  This discovery also relates to the old Leibniz vs. Newton issue; Newton viewed force as proportional to velocity (a view called vis mortua, or dead force), while Leibniz thought force was proportional to velocity squared (vis viva, or living force). Now we know that Newton was describing momentum and Leibniz was describing kinetic energy and that actually both were right. Du Chatelet’s discoveries were a key step to understanding force, energy, and acceleration, and was part of the chain of the development in the ideas that led to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

3. She made many other important discoveries, including the fact that fire does not have mass (which went against the beliefs of the time), a finding she published in an award-winning article.

4. She promoted the values and achievements of the French Enlightenment, both through her own work and through her collaborations with others, including Voltaire, her colleague and lover. She explored philosophical and theological questions, and she questioned tradition and conventional attitudes toward morality and the pursuit of happiness. Most of all, she lived a life devoted to intellectual exploration and found it to be her highest calling.

5. She was an extraordinary thinker and human being who defied the conventions of the time period, especially the restrictive expectations of women, and led a fascinating life. She was openly in a relationship with Voltaire, and the two of them were at the intellectual forefront of the nation and much sought-after guests (when Voltaire wasn’t in political trouble yet again). She achieved institutional acknowledgement of her intellectual work through memberships and publications that was unheard of at that time and place for her gender. And she engaged in many of the most important questions of her time, and she lived the life that she wanted despite the enormous pressures to adhere to conventions.

6. Her amazing achievements trouble the traditional stories of the history of science and philosophy that portray only men as the intellectual leaders of their times.  Her scientific work also highlights the way that the history of science has been a history of debates and conflicts, not an always-upward march toward Knowledge and the secrets of the universe and all good things. For example, the French academy didn’t think much of calculus or of Newton; they wanted to believe a Frenchman (Descartes) still had all the answers. Du Chatelet changed that – but what if she hadn’t? The history of science is full of contingencies and cultural factors that shape what we know and how we know it, and du Chatelet’s engagements show that well.

Books and print articles on Emilie du Chatelet:

David Bodanis. Passionate Minds. I recently read this 2006 biography of Emilie du Chatelet, which focuses on her scientific achievements and on her relationship with Voltaire, and it is highly readable and entertaining. Bodanis takes some liberties in fleshing out the motives and feelings of his characters, but he characterizes her scientific and philosophical achievements with clarity and due respect. He also avoids overly worshipful treatment of Voltaire and other men in her life, which shouldn’t even be an issue in biographies of female intellectuals but so often is. Like most biographies, there is ample attention to affairs, political and sexual, but the book also portrays the way that both Emilie and her husband were clever strategists in negotiating the financial, social, sexual, and political networks that shaped the aristocratic sphere.  In general, Bodanis uses du Chatelet and Voltaire’s intellectual contributions and unconventional-for-the-time lifestyle as symbols of – and huge contributors to – the blessings of the Enlightenment.  The biggest flaw of the book is perhaps this portrayal of the Enlightenment as a purely beneficial endeavor, without much mention of the ways that Enlightenment thinking justified and institutionalized oppressions, introduced problematic assumptions about knowledge and reason, assumed that the perspectives of Western males of privilege represented a universal humanity, etc. When the deep moral failings of the time period are brought up, for example, the book invariably presents them as remnants of the old ways, i.e., as counter-Enlightenment forces.  This idealization of Enlightenment thought and science erases the moral complexity of the period's thoughts on peace, equality, and other issues. It also contributes to the fantasy that the Western philosophical-scientific way of thinking – which largely comes from the Enlightenment – has been only a force of good. The strengths of this book, however, include an eye for fascinating personal details and a clear sense of du Chatelet’s tremendous contributions to science.  Bodanis also wrote a book about Einstein’s equation   E = mc²  and it was discovering that Emilie du Chatelet played a key role in the science that led up to it that inspired this research project; he frames her work in terms of the long history of science, a choice that makes the details of her scientific explorations -- and her life -- all the more compelling.

Esther Ehrman. Mme. du Chatelet.

Mary Terrall."Vis Viva." History of Science 42 (2004): 189-209.

Judith Zinsser. Emilie du Chatelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment.  From one of the most cited experts on Du Chatelet.

Judith P. Zinsser and Julie Candler Hayes, eds. Emile Du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment.

Emilie du Chatelet, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, ed. Judith Zinsser.

Lauren Gunderson. Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight.  This play fictionalizes the last night of Emilie du Chatelet’s life as she looks back and defends her unconventional choices, especially the choice to live an intellectual life despite her gender, and expressing her deep personal need to make great scientific discoveries. The play also uses the debate over vis mortua vs. vis viva as a metaphor for her own life and death and her own philosophical understanding of the cosmos. Voltaire is not always portrayed kindly here, though biographies suggest that this depiction is not unfounded. Much of the play focuses on Emilie’s relationship with him, in flashback particularly, and while this is appropriate given how important their relationship and collaboration were to her, it would have been nice to see something else as the center of her life. The play also uses the conceit that at various points in reflecting back on her life, Emilie is keeping score on a large board that displays “Love” and “Philosophy,” marking points under the appropriate label when she makes a choice that benefits one over the other. This is an intriguing choice, although I was never really sure if this was an attempt to reinforce problematic Enlightenment dualisms (reason vs. emotion, mind vs. body) or to subvert them. Nevertheless, a fascinating play, eerie at times, provocative at others, and by the end, quite moving.

Online resources:

Emilie du Chatelet at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy

Emilie du Chatelet at Biographies of Women Mathematicians

Emilie du Chatelet at the American Physical Society  “This Month in Physics History” site

“Ancestors of E = mc^2” at Nova (also by David Bodanis)  

Emilie du Chatelet at The History of Mathematics Archive

Emilie du Chatelet at Women in Science

Emilie du Chatelet at MathPages

 

Links of interest: Human Nature and War, Solitary Confinement, Schroedinger's Cat, Garage Science, Caterpillars Being Awesome, and More

At The New York Times, Nicholas Cristakis argues that the social sciences need a radical overhaul to thrive intellectually and otherwise. He advocates new and more interdisciplinary fields within the social science and a willingness to explore new topics and declare certain findings as established fact. While the overall argument is a good one, it is a noticeable bias that he particularly favors fields that are as much in the natural sciences as in the social sciences. In addition, when arguing that social scientists should move past further explorations of established findings, he argues:

    "In contrast [to the natural sciences], the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. Such inertia reflects an unnecessary insecurity and conservatism, and helps explain why the social sciences don’t enjoy the same prestige as the natural sciences.

    One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers. Like natural scientists, they should be able to say, “We have figured this topic out to a reasonable degree of certainty, and we are now moving our attention to more exciting areas.” But they do not.

    I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them.

    So social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects and redeploy most of their forces to new fields like social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics, most of which, not coincidentally, lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. Behavioral economics, for example, has used psychology to radically reshape classical economics."

 

One might argue that no, not everyone knows or acknowledges these findings in classic topics, and moreover, further research might lend much more knowledge about the how and why that go beyond simply confirming that these distributions and effects are present. Nevertheless, the editorial makes a number of excellent points, including about the need to make social science lab experience a standard part of undergraduate education.

Also from The New York Times, a rather less compelling argument: Why Men Need Women. Essentially, men with sisters and daughters are more compassionate and generous. As the comments point out, the article seems ready to assume that women are biologically destined to be kind and nurturing and that their influence on men relates to this inherent trait, and not on social organization or a personal reason to identify with marginalized groups. For example, I have heard many commentators admit that they were passionately against Title IX (gender equality in school sports) right up until the moment they had a daughter. Is this shift, for example, really about becoming more nurturing when one has a daughter or about a sudden awareness that societal issues really can affect you personally?

At Nautilus, Stuart Firestein wrote Certainly Not!: Philosophy: Good science requires cultivating doubt and finding pleasure in mystery.  Interesting quote: "Negative Capability is just as important to the scientist, who should always find him- or herself in a state of 'uncertainty without irritability.'”

At io9, 10 Urban Legends about Famous Scientists.

At Wired, Human Nature May Not Be So Warlike After All.  Interesting quote: "The findings contradict the notion 'that humans have an evolved tendency to form coalitions to kill members of neighboring groups,' wrote anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg in their July 18 Science paper. 'The vast majority of us assume that war is ancient, that it’s part and parcel of human nature,' said Fry. 'These types of perceptions have very strong influences on what goes on in current-day society.'”

Also at Wired, The Horrible Psychology of Solitary Confinement, a look at the science advocating against the shockingly widespread use of solitary confinement in the U.S.

At Popular Science, a cool and cheap PCR machine. 

At nanowerk, progress toward's Schroedinger's cat: studying quantum superpositions for large objects, i.e., objects in two states at once (!).

And in the categories of Cool Animal Stuff and Cool Math, caterpillar swarms can move faster than any individual caterpillar in the swarm. Here's why.