I’ve always thought I’ll someday meet a celebrity if I visit Los Angeles often enough; I just didn’t expect it would be a plant.
Meet Amorphophallus titanum, or Titan Arum, or ‘Corpse Flower’, or simply ‘Big Stinky’ to it’s friends at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena.
The deal with Stinky, one of the largest and smelliest flowers you’re ever likely meet, is that most of the time it keeps that outer petal-like spathe tightly closed around its central spadix. Only on rare occasions, often with years between events, does the flower open up for a very short time, simultaneously attracting pollinating insects inside with a disgusting (to us) odour – hence ‘Corpse Flower’.
We’ve been following the plant’s progress on this Huntington blog, in a bid to time our visit to coincide with its opened, smelly, best. As it turned out, having heard on Saturday it was blooming, we drove over today, Sunday, only to find it had closed up again; job done apparently: bad smells, insects, the lot.
Luckily, while I enjoy a bit of botany now and then, I’m not obsessive about it, so won’t be falling on my trowel any time soon. But for some, I get the feeling it’s like an astronomer missing an eclipse or a transit of Venus.
You can see the plant wasn’t totally closed up (see the Huntington website for the plant in bloom) and we did get a sniff of a collected sample of it’s insect-attractant discharge; not pleasant, but I wouldn’t like to comment on its corpseiness.
So, an interesting diversion all the same. And a good job by the Huntington marketing team; I’m sure they give Stinky a big hug when no-one’s looking.
Moving on from smelly plants now. This was the first time I’d visited the Huntington since the Dibner Hall of the History of Science was opened in late 2008. The permanent exhibition, Beautiful Science, is wonderful, and you’ll find that doubly so if you like rare old books covering subjects ranging from astronomy to natural history to medicine and light.
Newton’s own copy of Optiks is here – how’d they get that? And I liked the accurate reproductions of Galileo’s telescope that visitors can use to spy a simulated moon across the hall – moving their eye around to find the exit pupil like Galileo must have done; and Hooke’s microscope, with a genuine flea like the one Hooke so painstakingly drew in Micrographia. There is even an original 18th century volume from Diderot’s Encyclopedie that the public can (carefully) leaf through. Nice trusting touch.
All in all, the Huntington: comprising library, art collections, and botanical gardens, is well worth a visit.
I’ve just taken a tour of the Gamble House – probably THE icon of American Arts & Crafts architecture.
Designed and built as David Gamble’s (of Proctor & Gamble fame) winter retreat, this 1908 Charles and Henry Greene designed house in Pasadena is well worth a visit, for both it’s artistic and technological appeal. No interior photography allowed, but here are some pics of the elegant joinery and fastening methods.
Construction is almost entirely in wood, with beautifully simple woodworking joints: lots of scarfs, laps, mortis and tenon (fingers), and pegs.
Our guide, however, put paid to the popular myth that the house is entirely without nails or screws. Brass screws are used in the staircase for example, but cleverly hidden behind mahogany plugs (the tasteful predecessor of those cheap plastic caps that come with IKEA self-assemble furniture).
You’d also never guess that inside the supporting pillars are steel inserts that extend into the foundations; one of the first implementations of anti-earthquake measures.
In 1908, the house cost $80,000 – roughly ten times the norm for a similar sized property – and took 20 people about a year to build. It looks it.
Aspects of the lives of famous people inevitably get magnified, diminished, distorted or simply lost with the passing years.
That’s why we need respected scholars with the learning and gravitas of Professor William Shea who, speaking recently at the Royal Geological Society, took us – somewhat teasingly but with due respect – beyond the accepted caricature of Galileo’s genius.
And Shea, who holds the Galileo Chair of the History of Science at the University of Padua (where Galileo himself taught for 18 years), did indeed illustrate Galileo’s discomfort with the optical theory behind his own telescope.
In the body of the talk, working through the popularly accepted seven great achievements of Galileo, Prof. Shea used a sequence of lunar drawings to illustrate the critical role of sci-art collaboration in marrying draughting skills with observational expertise – in the days before photography and Charge Coupled Devices.
In a Q&A that was as revealing as the main lecture, Shea explained how the early astronomer’s belief in the divine appointment of his scientific mission was a key driver for his intellectual ambition, as well as representing an important influence over his relationships with academic colleagues and the establishment.
Overall, this was an expertly and engagingly presented lecture which everyone with an interest in science, and for that matter art and history, should see. And they can; because the whole smash is available courtesy of the Royal Geological Society via this link to a videocast of the event , complete with slides and the candid Q&A. Check it out !
Friday 15th May saw the first get together of the UK Science Tweeps, that allowed a group of individuals who had previously met only via Twitter to share a drink in person. Karen James organised the evening, pulling us together under the Twitter tag #ukscitweetup. So now you can meet some of the science tweeps for yourself and get a flavour of the evening. And, if you like what you hear, join us next time!
Short note on my ‘Darwin Hat-Trick day’ last Wednesday. Nothing too profound – but some nice pics!
We set off at 5 a.m., and by the end of the day had visited: (a) the supposed final resting place of Darwin’s Beagle at Paglesham, (b)the newly refurbished former home of Darwin, ‘Down House’, in Kent, (c) the Geological Society in central London for a talk from Darwin biographer Janet Browne.
This sudden urge to drive around some of the more remote reaches of England’s green and pleasant land was triggered by a recent talk by Dr Robert Prescott at the Royal Society. A podcast or vidcast should be available here within the next few days.
Prescott, who is researching the Beagle’s fate post-Darwin, has shown that after her last sea voyage in 1843 the ship served as an anti-smuggling watch vessel, anchored amidst the twisting system of waterways north of the Thames estuary. He speculates, with evidence from contemporary charts, that the mastless hulk ended its days in a permanent mooring cut into the mud of Paglesham East End, near Rochford. With images from Prescott’s talks fresh in our minds, we successfully located the otherwise unremarkable stretch of grassy mud-bank shown in the first photo.
Ground radar has revealed something of the right size and shape for the Beagle about 6 meters down, but tests on core drill samples are ongoing. The team have identified wood and diatoms, and now hope to find evidence of life specific to the South Seas caught up in the timbers. There’s some evidence that the top half of the ship was salvaged, and wooden structures consistent with the naval architecture of the day have been found in this nearby boathouse.
According to Prescott, Darwin never visited the Beagle after his famous voyage, despite the relative proximity of the craft to his home at Downe and documentary evidence that the Beagle’s Captain – Fitzroy – had kept in contact with Darwin. While Darwin acknowledged the importance of the ship to his life and work, it appears any emotional attachment he had for the vessel did not extend to a need to be reunited.
Having driven 60 miles to walk over a (albeit important) stretch of mud, we continued our walk along the river bank to be rewarded with a watch post from another era – a World War II pillbox. Pillboxes like these can be found across the south of England, and originally formed a continuous defensive line against potential German invasion.
Leaving Paglesham around 9 a.m., and arriving at Down House half an hour before the house itself opened, gave us plenty of time to explore the grounds and gardens of the Darwin family home. There’s been some replanting and landscaping as part of the refurbishment, but the famous greenhouse and ‘sandwalk’ , where Darwin did some of his most inspired thinking, are rightly unchanged.
The house itself has benefited from a super exterior paint job and refurbishment, and a major re-modeling of the upper-floor exhibition space. The personal audio guides are now video guides, but retain a pleasant enough welcome from David Attenborough. But, photographers beware ! I’ve never been anywhere where the taking of pictures inside the house is so actively discouraged – quite a contrast to how things are managed in the USA. I’d also advise an early weekday visit, as parking is limited and the experience degrades when the house is crowded. All the same, it’s a beautiful location, the house is full of atmosphere, and it’s well worth the £8 entrance fee.
Down House is a stone’s throw from the village of Downe (with an ‘e’ this time) and the local church where Emma Darwin, Charles’s brother Erasmus, and Darwin’s servant Parslow are buried.
At 2 o’clock we were starting to feel the effects of the early start, so it was back to Kingston to drop off the car and consume some large coffees.
Phase three of our hat-trick required a train ride into the centre of London to see and hear Janet Browne speak at the Geological Society.
Browne, best known for her two Darwin biographies Voyaging and Power of Place, was over from Harvard to speak on the theme of ‘Two Hundred Years of Evolution: Celebrating Charles Darwin in 2009’ .
I guess the thrust of the talk was around how the various controversies surrounding Darwin and his theory have been accepted, challenged, and interpreted at different times and places. For my part I found Browne’s historical interpretation clear and entertaining. I was, however, at something of a loss to understand quite where she personally stood on more contemporary issues such as the compatibility of Darwinian evolutionary theory and religious belief. What I took from the early part of her talk as an accommodationist approach didn’t entirely jibe with her response during questions when, for example, she credited Dawkins’s stance as ‘brave’. Anyhow, you can listen to the podcast here at the Geological Society website and draw your own conclusions.
The sun is shining, the outside doors are open, and from the window of the Royal Society library I can see the tops of trees along the Mall.
Today, at this first in a season of lunchtime talks at the RS, I’m learning from Michael Lemonick some things I never knew about William and Caroline Herschel.
You can hear the audio and video (slides) yourself on the RS podcast page. Lemonick’s book ‘The Georgian Star’ is published by W.W.Norton.Co. In the meantime, this short commentary.
Sir William Herschel is best known as the discoverer of Uranus, a planet that did indeed in the days of William’s sponsor George III go by the popular name of George or ‘Georgium Sidus’ to be precise. But discovering light blue planets that spin at a funny angle is only part of William’s and his sister Caroline’s story.
Having moved to London from Germany, William Herschel the music teacher was enthralled by the stars he saw overhead whilst travelling between clients. Disappointed with the telescopes of the day, he started to build a whole series of his own that would culminate in a 4ft mirrored, 40 ft long giant sponsored by the King himself.
Joined by his sister in Bath, both Herschel’s were professional astronomers in the pay of the King, making Caroline the first ever professional female astronomer (he on £200pa, she as ‘assistant’ on £50pa).
Between them they discovered 3000 galaxies, and Caroline alone identified 8 comets. Uranus was mistakenly declared a comet on its discovery in 1781. Impressively, the Herschel star charts were still in practical use into the 1950s and 60s.
The Herschel’s were amongst the first astronomers to take an interest in the structure and evolution of the universe, rather than following the more practical motivations of the time – like enabling better navigation at sea. William tried to measure stellar distance by the parallax method, but failed due to equipment sensitivity. He was more successful at plotting out the shape of our galaxy – the Milky Way.
William Herschel is in some ways the father of infra-red astronomy, having discovered the infra-red region of the spectrum from its warming effect on bottles of liquid; he called them ‘calorific rays’. As Lemonick pointed out, there seems some injustice in the naming of the James Webb space telescope due to launch in 2013, which will work predominantly in the IR spectral range (there is a William Herschel telescope already on the Canary Islands) .
And lastly – I never knew this. It was the common belief of the time, shared by Herschel, that all the planets were inhabited, with the sun just another planet – albeit a particularly bright golden one.
The logic extended to a belief that the luminescent surface of the sun was the visible top side of clouds and, charmingly, that sunspots were holes in the cloud through which – presumably with a powerful enough telescope – one could view ‘sun people’. Those were the days…..
I kind of expect to see demonstrations at the Royal Institution, an association with the Christmas Lectures I guess.
So it was nice to see a few props at Lewis Dartnell’s talk on astro-biology yesterday evening: a Geiger counter, a jar of fluorescent quinine, a piece of Mars. A piece of Mars !!! That got a reaction from the audience – along with an intelligent question – “how do you know it’s from Mars?” As it happens, matching isotopes between the 1911 meteorite sample and material tested in-situ by the Viking lander on Mars leave little doubt about its origins. Whether it contains signs of former Martian life, as some claim, is another matter.
The evening’s bottom line was that no extra-terrestrial life has yet been found; but there is particular hope for Mars and/or Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Dartnell structured his lecture from the Earth outwards: Earth, solar system, galaxy, etc. With ‘Earth’ came a definition of life, and what an excuse that was to show some clips from this amazing Harvard Biovisions simulation of how a cell works; fast forward to 4:00mins for the best bit with vesicles being dragged along by ‘motor proteins’.
Moving out from the Earth, we find that the combination of salinity, pH, and temperature on which earth’s more ‘extremophile’ lifeforms thrive: thermophiles, acidophiles, psycrophiles in the lingo, are the exact same as those prevailing on Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s moons. Further out in the galaxy, there are candidate stars with Jupiter-sized planets at the right sort of solar distance for Earth-like temperature conditions to exist at their supposed moons (HD28185 and Gliese581 were the examples given). So there’s hope. Information, metabolism, blueprint = Life.
Dartnell could see Martian material being brought back to earth for analysis at some point, but not for another ten years or so. In the meantime, the European ExoMars probe, due for launch in 2011, will drive around the surface, drilling holes and taking samples. It will also illuminate the landscape with ultraviolet light, organic molecules betraying themselves with their fluorescence.
No discussion on extra-terrestrial life is complete without some sort of Saganish ‘Billions’ illustration of how many stars – and presumably planets – there are in the universe: the implication being that we have a large sample size even if the odds are thin (which they aren’t necessarily). Lewis Dartnell showed it last night. Astronomer Stephen Warren showed it at his inaugural lecture at Imperial College tonight. This is the now iconic Hubble deep field image showing a section of sky equivalent to only 1/30th the moon’s diameter (Warren reckoned a 1mm square at the end of your arm – sounds about right). And most of the objects here are galaxies.
The insufficiently humbled can check out higher resolution versions at Hubblesite.org.
“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
“Life, don’t talk to me about life….”
🙂
Postscript
As a quick aside. Before Lewis Dartnell kicked off, the organisers called for a show of hands of any first time visitors to the Royal Institution, and that turned out to be a fair chunk of audience; less than 50% I reckon, but a good number. With my SciCom hat on, that’s really encouraging – folk taking an interest in science and technology (and they didn’t look like the UFO squad either).
Are you a scientist, or more of an artistic person? Or maybe you’re a bit of both? Do you care? And does it matter?
It mattered to CP Snow in 1959, when he wrote the essay ‘The Two Cultures’. Snow saw society split into two groups, or cultures: the artistic intellectuals and the natural scientists (natural because they study the natural world). Each misunderstood the others language, ideas, and contribution. The relationship was often one of unproductive hostility.
Fifty years on, towards the end of last month, I joined the London Consortium’s ‘Art and Science Now’ programme, to see how Snow’s ideas are standing up in the eyes of leading figures from the world of arts, science, public policy, science communication and philosophy.
This post is part summary, part observation, and part photo gallery (thanks largely to Sven Klinge, whom I met at the conference and who provided most of the pictures here). Not all the speakers from the Dana event are reported here. Don’t read any significance into that – its just a time issue. Also, plenty of additional ideas came through in the final panel session and Q&A, which are likely to inspire future posts – but there’s more than enough to be going on with here. The full event ran for three days, 22nd-24th January; I joined on 23rd and 24th.
NOTE: now includes a summary of Gillian Beer’s paper not included in the original post
First Day – 23rd January, Science Museum’s Dana Centre
The session kicked off with Steve Connor, Director of the London Consortium, introducing keynote speaker George Rousseau.
Reading a prepared text, Rousseau’s talk majored on the virtues and challenges of cultural collaboration framed as inter-disciplinary working, including the concept of ‘bridging’.
Today, multi-disciplinary working is needs-driven by otherwise insoluble complex problems, yet we attack and treat with suspicion those who move between disciplines – “we rush to shoot them down”. Acknowledging that the best minds have always worked in multiple fields (Rousseau made the standard reference to Lunar Men here) doesn’t seem to help us.
Moving on to ideas of responsibility, can those on each side of the science / humanities divide understand each other sufficiently to be conscious of their respective responsibilities in the world? Scientists might understand the arts better than artists understand science, but so what if they can’t sort out their responsibilities? Can we not work with a unified sense of knowledge to achieve that?
Rousseau’s vision is for a world in which we all work across boundaries and know what we have to do (this is what academics call a crude summary). Rousseau went on to discuss at length what that vision might mean within academia, such as the emergence of multi-disciplinary selection committees filling leading academic appointments with multi-skilled candidates.
Rousseau’s Q&A was short and disappointing. A question on unified knowledge – asking how the different ways in which artists and scientists define the word knowledge might prevent sensible commune, was not engaged with. I took the question to mean knowledge derived from ‘feeling’ – acceptable and embraced by the artist, as opposed to the scientists’ equivalent based on the ‘rational’. But Rousseau simply declared the word knowledge to be a lexical term and that he didn’t really know what knowledge was. Considering the forum, I found that answer surprising and unfulfilling.
The Science Museum’s Robert Bud opened the afternoon session with his keynote speech. Opening his talk with a photo of Dawkins’s atheist bus, Bud quickly took us back a hundred years, to the split between the ‘two sides of the road’ in South Kensington – close enough to what we call the V&A and the Science Museum today. The ‘arts side’ was painted as a backward looking centre for the maintenance of elitist taste; the science side more practical and forward looking, representing progressive materialism and a rejection of the spiritual. The tension between these, Bud argued, formed the roots of Snow’s cultural divide.
Bud set his mission to the clarification of Snow’s real meaning. In developing the story, he pointed to the iconic importance of Francis Crick’s DNA double helix, not only as the basis for life and replacement for the soul, but as the basis for Crick’s, and later Snow’s, fundamental beliefs.
Referencing an essay by Jacob Bronowski, Bud linked Snow to Crick. With a letter from Snow to Bronowski as evidence, he showed that the content of Bronowski’s essay, ‘the abacus and the rose – a dialogue concerning the two world systems‘, was aligned with the real intent behind Snow’s essay. Bronowski couched his text as a dialogue between Potts, a Cricks-type scientific stereotype, and Harping, a Kingsley Amis-type reader in English. In the fictional debate, the artistic protagonist sees no beauty in life unless there is some subjectivity or element of human judgment associated with it. Potts on the other hand, the scientist, has no need of that. In other aspects too, the Harping character generally meets our modern stereotype of an anti-technology, anti-progress, luddite. This is starting to remind me of the themes in Dawkins’s ‘Unweaving the rainbow‘.
Sure enough, having implicated Crick with Bronowski’s Potts character, and aligned Bronowski’s views with the intent of Snow’s essay, Bud now linked Crick to Richard Dawkins. Not only through their shared activity on genetic themes, but also through Dawkins’s atheism, expressed so recently on the sides of another British cultural icon – the London Bus.
Through this elegant, methodical, approach with use of evidence, Bud had boxed down Snow’s intended meaning to the sort of black and white intellectual stand-off that is unfashionable in some quarters. Alan Sokal would later show a similar level of attention to the content and bounding of his argument.
Bud concluded, for the avoidance of any doubt, with this reference to the two cultures debate: [it has] “not been primarily about the conflict between academic disciplines, between whether history or physics is more important, it’s been about materialism against the reality of non-material entities; about god and life. Thank you”
Second Day – 23rd January, Tate Modern Art Gallery
This was the first time I’d seen Marcus du Sautoy in the flesh.
With an appearance and demeanor somewhere between a children’s TV presenter and a younger Jasper Carrott, wearing a tee-shirt emblazoned with the phrase ‘i are scientists‘, I can see how he’ll fit well into Dawkins’s old job, but definitely not his shoes.
Full of energy and wit, there is also something of the diplomat about du Sautoy. The recurring theme of ‘bridging’ came up, with maths as the unlikely bridge between science and the arts. Du Sautoy explained the mathematical structure of music; he is involved in a range of projects that link the two. He was sympathetic and supportive of the ‘artist in residence’ type of cross-rift exchange that one audience member was involved with.
Sad as it might seem, I’ve often pondered on behalf of Anthony Grayling, as to the wisdom of a book-branding philosophy that entails the title ending with the words “…of things”: ‘The Mystery of Things’, ‘The Reason of Things’, ‘The Meaning of Things’, ‘The Heart of Things’, ‘The Form of Things’ , for one tract of his extensive range of popular philosophy books. Maybe it’s just me, but agonising over a purchasing decision in a bookstore, I can never remember which of these ‘things’ editions I already own, and invariably end up leaving the store empty handed.
Yet Grayling remains the philosopher I feel I could most comfortably engage with in chat over a beer. His ability, without patronising, to transpose complex ideas into the common tongue, combined with an unforced sense of humour, is appealing.
Grayling approached Snow from historical and educational perspectives. Again, as Bud had stressed earlier, Snow was late to the debate. In the early decades of the 20th century, Wittgenstein , whose texts Grayling reminded us would be familiar from our previous night’s bath time reading, had defended the ‘feeling’ world of morality and religion from the reductive encroachments of the empirical scientists’ world view.
In 1880, at a time when the so-called Civic Universities, like my alma-mater Birmingham, were for the first time concentrating on scientific and practical subjects, Thomas Huxley addressed the issues perceived around the arts and sciences, spelling out the importance of a scientific education for all in understanding the world. In retort, Huxley’s friend Matthew Arnold, while agreeing with much of his colleague’s argument for science, strongly defended a complementary role for the humanities as a vehicle for human reflectivity – amongst other virtues.
Yet class was to override any happy balance that the Huxley-Arnold discourse might have anticipated. The wealthy and influential social elite, trained in the classics from school through to Oxbridge, were empowered and equipped to exercise a disproportionate influence over society, compared that is to the growing, parallel yet separate, class of technically proficient industrialists.
Key developments in the twentieth century, Grayling argued, were a change in status for science in recognition of its indispensability to modern infrastructure and the exercise of war, and the increase in complexity and requirement for specialism in scientific pursuits.
Specialism led to streaming in the schools system, separating the population at an early age into classicists and scientists. It was this galvanisation through specialisation of an already divisive educational system that, Grayling argued, had prompted Snow’s commentary. The powerful elite saw the importance of science, but without understanding. It prompted the pithy rationale of keeping the “expert on tap, not on top”. Efforts by the ‘new’ universities to introduce reciprocal training for arts and science students enjoyed abject failure.
In summing up the position today, Grayling considered that in important respects, and specifically with regard to the scientific literacy of the general public and elected officials, Snow’s gap is very much wider fifty years on. Further, this condition is damagingly influential on how scientific issues are being read. Grayling pointed to how the public debate on evolution could only persist through ignorance of biology, causing a mistaken belief that there is any substance at all in the contrary argument. The tradition of thinking in the humanities is, Grayling believes, more towards the need for neat answers and closure to issues and debates, representing the antithesis of the scientific acceptability of open ended questions.
Grayling closed with an appeal for scientific literacy, achieved in part through a change in attitude towards, and engagement as adults with, life-long learning.
The relevance of Charles Darwin to a debate on Snow might not be obvious; yet Gillian Beer made it so.
Before developing her main theme around extinction and Darwin, Beer informed us that Snow’s main reason for wanting to see science and technology working effectively in the world was so it could be used to combat global poverty. Maybe that is a less well known, more human, driver in the debate around Snow’s motivations?
As it turns out, as illustration, Darwin’s attitude to extinction, and the various interplays of scientific, social, and personal experience that influenced that attitude, have much to inform our thinking. When human beings are involved, thoughts and actions are rarely down to science alone.
For Darwin, said Beer, extinction was an ordinary necessity in the process of natural selection. Without extinction there would be no new animals, no improvement. And anyhow, the whole process dovetailed nicely with the Victorian cultural values of progress and hierarchy.
There was some sadness attached to species loss, yet the world remained full and in balance. Why react? Extinction is a gradual process; Darwin scoffed at the idea of cataclysm. And there was every reason to believe the animal kingdom could continue to look after itself well into the distant future.
The very far future was different though. A cooling sun and dying earth played on Darwin’s mind. The religious had their afterlife, but for Darwin the finality of an extinction of man was an intolerable prospect.
How different things are today.
Extinctions are more simultaneous and widespread; we contemplate E.O.Wilson’s ominous forecast of 50% species loss over 50 years. And we feel guilt. We can place five historical mass extinctions, and further cataclysm is a real prospect on a warming earth.
More positively, stuffed animals in glass cases have made way for movie films of living, moving, animals. And, while like Darwin, we might not see a personal eternity, our understanding of genes at least gives us some intellectual compensation that something continues.
In her close, Beer came back to the theme of the interaction of science and culture over time, [concluding that while]:
different elements of Darwin’s theory point in different directions, and have been pressed into service by opposed ideologies; that does not undermine his experimental evidence or his theoretical reach, but it does I think demonstrate how the cultures of scientific enquiry, social assumption, and bodily experience all interact, over time, to change ideas. Thankyou.
This was my second serving of Ben Goldacre in a week; having heard him speak at a Centre For Inquiry event reported here.
Today, less spontaneous and the better for it, Goldacre’s rant was unambiguously focused on the evils of the ‘humanities graduate editors’ of mainstream news media.He really hates these guys, whom for Goldacre most closely resemble the Snowian (Snowic?, Snowoid?) stereotype of artist as scientific philistine – ignorant, and dangerously active with it.
Goldacre’s thesis is that we have moved beyond a condition of mere disconnect in which arts graduates are dismissive of science, to one in which the same group feel entitled to make comment in areas and on subjects they know nothing about. He resents the lack of in-depth science reporting in the mainstream media and, as a mantra now, champions the non-specialist but educated reader – the people who “did bio-chemistry at Leicester, and now work in senior management at Marks & Spencers“. He went on to illustrate his talk with slides covering a whole range of mercilessly crass and inaccurate reports extracted from his beloved tabloids and equally unsafe broadsheets. For more, see Ben’s book Bad Science for an enjoyable read.
Goldacre gets his important points across with a sense of fun. That said, today’s comic highlight was at his own expense when, during the final panel session, a deferential compliment back-fired. Having answered a string of audience questions specifically addressed to him, Ben now paused to announce that as a mere ‘D-list’ public intellectual he should defer to the ‘B-list’ public intellectuals – Grayling and Sokal – seated either side of him.Ben’s categorisation was arguably correct for a small population that counts Dawkins in its number, but that didn’t stop Ben changing colour in response to Grayling’s playful objection to his grade.
Jonathan Miller doesn’t like to be called a polymath.
But what do you call a writer, performer, neurologist, and internationally distinguished director of theatre and opera? Perhaps Steven Connor’s introduction of Miller as an intellectual amphibian was more acceptable; it got a smile.
Sitting across from his interviewer, Associate Director of the London Consortium Colin McCabe, Miller played upon his intimidating status to the full, a status that has earnt him the right, and the expectation from others, to speak plainly. He did so with a vengeance.
The idea of ‘Two Cultures’ would be first a mystery, and second anathema, in the household of Miller’s formative years. Engaged equally and variously as artists and scientists, the family were simply doing what intelligent people did; they flitted effortlessly between interests.
Schooling had played a part, but only in the form of an unruly master who ignored the formal curriculum, a reference that put me in mind of Richard Dawkins’s reminiscing about his happy days at Oundle School. But how far would those examples get, elitist at best by current fashion, as educational models today?
With his neurologist cap on, Miller shared his fascination with the mind’s learning and skills capabilities. For example, taking three days off from a failed activity can result in a skill magically appearing, subconscious processing having kicked in unbeknown.
Miller’s latest interest is to form shapes and assemblies out of metal, just structures that interest him and which, again, he resists to label as art. Art and science are very different things to Miller. Most art is “to do with people doodling“, while science is “quite clearly directed enquiry prompted by a context which determines what is going to count as an interesting problem“. He sees the “rightness” of what constitutes a satisfactory artistic endeavour is totally different to the “rightness” of what can be concluded from science.
Miller took a similar line to Bud, in so far as he saw the important differences between art and science as quite fundamental. As for the two helping each other out, Miller has “deep suspicion of this notion of being artist in residence‘, a reference to an earlier audience point, and what he saw as an unnecessary formalisation given that art and science are ‘in residence’ within each of us all the time. He pointed to a nine year period between 1905 and 1914, when interesting developments ranging from relativity to cubism, to the de-construction of music, appeared as the products of a natural cross-fertilisation of interests. The first cubist artists, responsible for the development of military camouflage, were not “artists in residence“, but “artists in uniform“, their input naturally falling into place.
Miller’s point, that the propensity for the arts and natural sciences to unconsciously intermingle is a product of the time we are living in, may well be valid. Yet do we live in such a golden age today? Maybe we need to make some clunky ‘artist in residence’ type gestures to kick the right-thinking along. Miller conceded that the very complexity of science today made polymathism [my word!] a challenge; there are too few hours in the day. Indeed, to expand on a recurring theme, it is problematic enough today for scientists in the same subject area to understand each others’ work. In my experience, it is the same complexity and associated promise of narrowness that drives potential candidates away from a training or career in science.
In a forgivable ploy to avoid final-session empty seat syndrome, Alan Sokal was held back till the 4.00pm slot.
Sokal is something of an icon for followers of the arts-science debate. In 1996, he wrote a spoof academic paper parodying the pseudo-intellectual content and style then being used by an academic group known as the cultural relativists – signatories to a particularly strong flavour of post-modernism. Their thesis as it applies to science is that science is made up – constructed – by people to meet their political wants. Any cultural relativist could write a ten thousand word essay on how over-simplistic that definition is; but that’s partly the point. There is a socio-cultural angle to the most astringent definitions of science, but in the 80s and 90s it all got out of hand. Meanwhile, Sokal’s meaningless paper was accepted and published by the journal ‘Social Text’. His own revelation that the paper was meaningless did much to expose the low standards of evidence and understanding in the prevailing discourse of the cultural relativists. It also precipitated what became known as ‘the science wars’.
Speaking on his birthday, Sokal immediately set out a field he could play on. That meant focusing on the relationship of science and scientific inquiry with society as a whole, rather than the Snow question per-se, and defining exactly which definition of science he would be talking about.
Sokal’s was an appeal for a scientific world view in which we are all scientists, some better than others perhaps, but all working to the same rules. The corner stones of this vision would be clear thinking and a respect for evidence.
Clear thinking meant also the clear writing that Sokal, and earlier Grayling, had demanded. But what is science? It suits some academic commentators not to bolt down definitions in this way, they see it as restrictive and narrowing of debate, but Sokal is firmly out of that camp. It’s worth pondering Sokal’s four definitions of science:
It denotes an intellectual endeavour aimed at a rational understanding of the natural and social world
It denotes a corpus of currently accepted substantive knowledge
It denotes the community of scientists with its mores and social and economic structure
It denotes applied science and technology
Again, there are those who would argue the first two cannot be discussed outside of the second two, and would attach especial dependency of 1,2,and 4 on 3 – the social aspect. Not so Sokal.
As if nothing had changed in the thirteen years since his ‘exposure’ publication, he launched a scathing attack on those who would deny that scientific knowledge constitutes objective knowledge of a reality external to ourselves. In these moments, in that lecture hall, it felt like Snow’s rift had evaporated – ‘science’ had won. There was no robust response from the floor as Sokal ridiculed one sociologist after another by relaying quotes from his book Beyond The Hoax. For example:
the validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence – Kenneth Gergen
the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge – Harry Collins
for the relativists such as ourselves, there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such – Barry Barnes & David Bloor.
For Sokal, this type of writing, and the thought behind it, aims to confuse truth with claims of truth. Of course, any post-modernist worth his salt would head that one off at the pass with a denial of there being any absolute truth. Sokal conceded that the more extreme forms of post-modernist thinking were now in retreat, in part due to his own efforts, but mostly due to the example provided by George Bush of where “science bashing” can worryingly lead.
A diversion into pseudoscience complemented Goldacre’s talk and led into the real point Sokal wanted to address – the universal applicability of the scientific method across all areas of human activity. Why do we use one set of standards for evidence in physics, chemistry and biology, and then relax the standard for religion, medicine or politics? Sokal interestingly framed his argument for a unified approach as the “inverse of scientific imperialism“, whereby science should be seen as just one instance of the application of a rational world view in which empirical claims are supported by empirical evidence (the antithesis of dogma).
So at the end of the conference we had returned to a dichotomy of rational and dogmatic world views that Bud, the day before, had used to characterise and clarify as Snow’s true intent, and which Grayling had reinforced as the real issue. And in conclusion to his talk, Sokal stated his belief that the transition from the dogmatic to an evidence-based world view is very far from being complete.
Notes
Gillian Beer was King Edward VII Professor at the University of Cambridge
Ben Goldacre is a writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor. He has a weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian newspaper
Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Marcus du Sautoy is Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford
Jonathan Miller is a neurologist, writer, TV presenter, director of plays, and many other things!
Alan Sokal is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London
Mainstream Press on this topic
‘The crossing of the intellectual divide‘ – Steve Connor, The Indpendent (newspaper) 6th Feb 2009. Connor’s article makes mention of events at the day of the conference I did not attend at Birkbeck College, so worth a read.
Contrary to popular belief, dogs are in fact spies from Venus. So maintained University of London philosopher Steven Law at today’s Centre for Inquiry London ‘Weird Science’ event at Conway Hall.
In doing so, he applied the same faultless logic and interpretation of evidence used by young earth creationists, defending their belief that the universe is only 6000 years old. Say no more. And that was pretty much the tone for a day of talks on the science of the weird, wacky, and flaky variety, from Ben Goldacre (”Bad Science” in the Guardian), Professors of anomolous psychology Richard Wiseman and Chris French, and philosopher Stephen Law.
Before sharing what a great show this was, let me digress for a bit on CFI London itself. CFI London are at pains to explain in their FAQ that they don’t see science and reason as the be all and end all, but their positioning, and the topics they choose to discuss, for me at least force the issue of the incompatibility of science and religion. Once you engage in a discussion on human psychology and the concept of what it means to be rational, the polite separation of science and religion becomes difficult to maintain. It will be interesting to see how CFI’s event programme and various potential allegiances with secular interests develop.
Anyhow – it was a great show. Richard Wiseman, hotfoot from an evening debunking mediums with his mate Derren Brown, illustrated how easily our perceptions can be fooled and our attention directed. Familiar gestalt switch examples, like the rabbit-duck picture, made an appearance, along with excerpts from Richard’s various TV appearances, including a hilarious debunking of firewalkers, and these clips: the amazing floating cork, and the colour changing card trick.
You might remember Chris French, a psychology professor from Goldsmiths, as the guy who organised the dowsing trials on Richard Dawkins’ ‘Enemies of Reason’ TV show. French re-lived with us that demonstration of the refractoriness of dowsers’ belief in the face of out and out debunking, and shared the results of a study that aligned personality traits with the likelihood of belief in conspiracy theories. Those more prone to belief tend to (a) have low trust in people, (b) feel alienated from society, (c) are quick to make assumptions from partial evidence.
Writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor Ben Goldacre, while outspoken and opinionated, sticks to subject areas he knows something about. That’s why he doesn’t address environmental issues and such like in his column and blog; their complexity not lending itself to case-based, winnable on evidence, 650 word analyses.
Ben shared his trademark disgust at alternative medicine and quackery, but majored on the rise and demise of medicine – through the Golden Age from the 30’s to the 70’s – after which the low hanging fruit dried up and major breakthroughs fizzled out. His point – we should all get real that our level of understanding of much desease and suffering is still pretty minimal and (my words) – shit happens. Although Ben’s book ‘Bad Science’ is still hot off the presses, his words reminded me of another honest text with a medical flavour – ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine’ by doctor and Telegraph columnist James Le Fanu; check it out.
Mainstream newspapers, and particularly their ‘humanities graduate’ editors (I’m sure he’s not talking about scientifically trained SciComs Grads here) got it in the neck big time, as did the various PR and press agencies that feed them. Why, when literary criticism of the highest intellectual level gets column space, do we not see science coverage of the same professional calibre? Goldacre also, admirably, subscribes to the BBC Horizon dumb down theory. (There are still Horizon dumb down deniers out there – believe it or not.)
Ben’s closing comments were encouraging – but not for mainstream conventional print journalism. He saw no solution to the dire journalistic picture he’d painted – it’s simply what the market wants. But the rise of the blog is changing everything, cutting out a middle man who is adding less and less value. And if we doubt a blog’s content? – check the source references; all good blogs provide the links.
(Update 4th November 2011.We were very sorry to hear of Alan’s death earlier today. A fantastic guy and unmatched friend of gibbons. Rest in peace Alan.)
What better way to spend Christmas than in the company of your favourite gibbons? That’s exactly what my wife Erin and I did on the 26th December 2008, on our second visit to the Gibbon Conservation Center at Santa Clarita, California – home to some of the world’s rarest gibbons.
As well as catching up with gibbon families first met in September and described in this earlier post, I recorded the gibbons singing, and an extended interview with the Founder and Director of the Center, Alan Mootnick.
Much of what Alan has to say about working in gibbon conservation with various institutes, authorities, and peoples around the world, and particularly in Asia, is also relevant to other species.
Each recording lasts between 3 and 10 minutes, with the entire interview as one edit included at the end.
Part 1 – Arrival
An early morning tour ends in a noisy chorus.
Part 2 – Introduction
Alan introduces the aims of the Center, the various gibbon genera and species, and gives a disturbing account of the threats facing wild gibbons.
Part 3 – Breeding Program
Alan describes the breeding program for the Javan gibbon – of which only 4000 remain in the wild, the Center’s collaboration with zoos – including in the UK, and the challenges of finding gibbons for study in the wild.
Part 4 – Taxonomy
Gibbon genomics, taxonomy, and a showcase of mistaken identity. The challenges of moving gibbons and their DNA around the world, and the role of faeces in working out bloodlines.
Part 5 – Behaviour
Including apparent similarities with man, and discussion around gibbon song and brachiation (swinging arm to arm). The highlight is Alan’s empirically supported theory of hostile genital or anal presenting – ‘gibbon mooning’ in other words.
Part 6 – Volunteer Program
Including the possibility of joining the Center from the UK.
Part 7 – Threats
Discusses issues around land management and deforestation in Indonesia, the illegal trade in gibbons, and the impact that’s having on the gibbon population. Also some tips on how to work to best effect when dealing with zoos in Asia.
And this is the entire interview as a single edit:
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60Mb. Approx. 1 hour. Copyright, all rights reserved, 2009, Tim Jones communicatescience.com
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If you enjoyed hearing about – and hearing ! – the gibbons of Santa Clarita, and would like to make a donation, you can do so here.
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