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The Sweet Mystery of Science
Hugh Pickens writes "Biologist David P. Barash writes in the LA Times that as a scientist he has been participating in a deception for more than four decades — a benevolent and well intentioned deception — but a deception nonetheless. 'When scientists speak to the public or to students, we talk about what we know, what science has discovered,' writes Barash. 'After all, we work hard deciphering nature's secrets and we're proud whenever we succeed. But it gives the false impression that we know pretty much everything, whereas the reality is that there's a whole lot more that we don't know.' Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts, suggesting that 'knowing' science is a matter of memorizing says Barash. 'It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.' Barash isn't talking about the obvious unknowns, such as 'Is there life on other planets?' Looking just at his field, evolutionary biology, the unknowns are immense: How widespread are nonadaptive traits? To what extent does evolution proceed by very small, gradual steps versus larger, quantum jumps? What is the purpose of all that 'junk DNA"? Did human beings evolve from a single lineage, or many times, independently? Why does homosexuality persist? According to Barash scientists need to keep celebrating and transmitting what they know but also need to keep their eyes on what science doesn't know if the scientific enterprise is to continue attracting new adherents who will keep pushing the envelope of our knowledge rather than resting satisfied within its cozy boundaries."
And that sort of makes sense to me because what are you going to publish about if your field is dead? What is going to drive you to keep studying your field if it's a dead field. I will say I don't remember many exciting things coming out of my advanced math courses. I know that field isn't dead but my instructors were abysmal in that field. Even the statistics professor had more fire. And I think the reason behind that is that math is a very deep field with so many before us that have pushed that field so far. In order to make original progress in that field, it appears to me that you almost have to become a hermit. You've got to become some sort of phantasmal waif like the great Grigori Perelman.
And I think that's the essence of where this article becomes misaligned. The author is complaining about learning by rote but there's few other ways to accelerate young minds quickly up to the point of modern positions of each field. I feel polymaths become much more rare as each field deepens in knowledge and that's because they are all rapidly becoming very deep rabbit holes (like mathematics). For me, grade school and high school contained the teachers that this guy is complaining about and that's because they had no choice. I wasn't ready for the real questions that remain when I was learning about derivatives and integrals in high school. I probably would not have comprehended P=NP very well at that time let alone the proof to the Poincaré conjecture.
It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
I think there's a healthy balance, if you're teaching about what you don't know about then what could the students possibly be learning? Instead, I think teaching by rote and example of what we do know while using what we don't know as a carrot is the best methodology. If you can make your students excited about the unknown possibilities while at the same time conveying the boring and known but pragmatic information then you hit that sweet spot of teaching at a college level.
As to the particular field discussed in the article: Yeah, evolutionary biology is a relatively young field with a lot to be learned yet. I realized only a fraction of what I don't know when I read and reviewed The Logic of Chance.
My work here is dung.
Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts,
Science is about explaining things, not cataloging facts. If the guy thinks that the facts are the important bit, he's lost his way somewhere. Facts are the questions, theories are their answer and "science" is really the process of creating theories and disproving them. Hopefully replacing old theories with better or more refined ones. It's not about being able to recite the properties of a given thing, person or animal (those can be looked up).
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This was largely my experience up through high school. Science was taught as a body of facts, and less so taught as a process. When process was mentioned, it was taught as THE scientific method...which is not exactly how research is done! The whole body-of-facts approach makes it boring to most people.
Beginning in undergraduate courses, it was somewhat better. Mainly the beginning undergraduate courses were all about getting one up to date on a few centuries of research, and there just wasn't time to discuss the frontiers of the field. Really good teachers made time for it, and stressed that there is much more to be learned. I don't think any graduate school science course, at least among the physics ones I've taken, have treated the field that way. The underlying assumption was that there is much more to be learned. But that's why there is graduate school.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
Regarding the article, science would be more honest about research if we emphasized what we don't know and what we're doing to learn new things in the field. Also, I might emphasize how science has changed, so students can see that the taxonomy charts they are filling out had less useful predecessors (kind of like making your C++ class learn how to type "Hello World" in Assembly or Fortran halfway through the year).
It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
Woo-hoo! When can I start? It'd be a job for life, because you could fill a library with the things I don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
Personally I love Andrew Wiles' description of the process of scientific research in the first minute or 2 of this science show.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
I believe (although I'm not an etymologist) that the source of your frustration is the irksome fact that Scott Bakula is better known in American households than Max Planck.
Regarding the article, science would be more honest about research if we emphasized what we don't know and what we're doing to learn new things in the field. Also, I might emphasize how science has changed, so students can see that the taxonomy charts they are filling out had less useful predecessors (kind of like making your C++ class learn how to type "Hello World" in Assembly or Fortran halfway through the year).
I think the key problem is that there's only so much time. Why did you pick Assembly or Fortran? Why not force computer science students to start out on punch cards or a PDP-6? In physics better models have been developed and while I learned of the less correct models (like combining the Rutherford and Bohr models) we never truly delved into their original states or why their failings drove them to something better. I think that's great stuff to preserve but ultimately when you're teaching high school physics there's just not enough time and students only retain so much. So I think sometimes we're forced to teach it by rote rather than as a process or journey that the student embarks upon.
My work here is dung.
The "unanswered questions" are critical for stimulating interest, but from the standpoint of accurate portrayal of science (the author's main point), what is more important is portraying the evolution of knowledge discovered thus far.
The most glaring example is the periodic table. Bam! There it is. It is knowledge in its most reductionist form. How were the elements separated and identified? Heck, how would you even go about separting elements today? (This would lead into the beginnings of material science, a subject important for everyday and political life but which much less than 1% of college students touch on, let alone grade school and high school students.)
I was really confused in all my science classes, because I was a Math/CS major. I would have been a lot less confused if someone had explained the philosophy of science -- not just the "scientific method" (and I don't think I even got that explicitly -- labs seemed to be more about showing how bad we were at taking measurements than about the process of discovery), but that the "laws" of physics were merely the best known model of observed phenomena, and that furthermore the models tended to break down at the extremes. I.e., it was never explained to me that science works backwards of math and computer science.
That's one reason I favor classical education for schools. Classical education cover the "great books" from the beginning of recorded human history to the modern era, in chronological order. Mortimer Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World, called it the "Great Conversation".
A conversation that reveals the evolution of human knowledge is comprehensible, interesting in the way drama is, cross-disciplinary, and leads to holistic and lasting knowledge.
I definitely agree with the article, it's not so much what we know about the universe, but what we don't know that is really interesting.
My biggest wonder is consciousness. What is it? How does it work? If I am conscious, does this mean the universe is conscious? Am I conscious? Is consciousness only available in higher order complex physical structures (like higher order mammals), or is it possible in lower order structure too, like rocks? I have to say that this there is not a big effort to solve this question. For me it's the most important question to answer, and most interesting. Where do you start to answer such a question? Of course many great thinkers have tried to answer the question, but at the moment it's little more than just philosophy.
Another interesting question is: How the heck does the universe exist?
Yes, but many of them are the worst of both worlds. Speculative and unproven whilst being presented as dogmatic fact. This increases the public perception that science is both certain/absolute and changes its mind frequently/frivolously, and makes it even harder to explain how it really works.
I guess I must have gone to a fundamentally different kind of college. Nearly every single professor I encountered wasn't excited about what was already known in their respective field but got disturbingly excited about untestable theories, suspected areas of interest and tantalizingly unknowable facts. My computer science professors would treat P=NP in an almost religious fashion -- treating that solution like the face of god. Sometimes it was just a numbers game like natural language parsing and parts of speech tagging. Here's the best-to-date accuracy, can you beat it? Ask my physics professors about entropy in space or, worse, string theory and they'd shortly be speaking in tongues. My philosophy instructors, even, loved to ask questions that had no clear answer: would you murder one person to save thousands? Why did Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner of 3,000 lives in Paris, survive the revolution and what moral implications entailed him executing his former boss the king?
The tasks of most professors I met were reduced to management stuff. They only appear as authors on papers because of things they did while being a postdoc, or because they want to be added to a student's paper (in order to get their references up). They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
It seems like the examples given of things we don't know are somewhat misleading. There is a great deal we don't know, but we have well researched theories on a lot of what is mentioned by the editor.
Looking just at his field, evolutionary biology, the unknowns are immense: How widespread are nonadaptive traits?
Obviously this is different by species, but we can quantify it within a range for many species.
What is the purpose of all that 'junk DNA"?
This is the implicit question fallacy. Why would junk DNA need a purpose? We understand where much of it originates and how it is inserted.
Did human beings evolve from a single lineage, or many times, independently?
Originally, all the research points to one line for life on earth. As for where we draw the distinction of the homo sapiens species, there seems to have been multiple lines of progenitors evolving in parallel sometimes isolated sometimes interbreeding. There have been quite a few articles on this in recent years.
Why does homosexuality persist?
Kin selection. What did you learn biology in the 20's or something?
The author is complaining about learning by rote but there's few other ways to accelerate young minds quickly up to the point of modern positions of each field.
But that's just it: you've done nothing for them if all they have done is learn by rote. They won't understand a thing, and everything you taught them will be easily forgettable. You do a disservice to people by making everything boring and assuming that they can't truly understand it.
Okay well somebody modded you up so let's take the example from the article:
In my first college-level biology course, I was required to memorize all of the digestive enzymes and what they do. Even today, I can't stomach those darned chemicals, and I fear the situation is scarcely much better at most universities today.
I'm not a biologist but here's how I'd teach this: 1) here's the methodology and a brief history of how they found these enzymes 2) here are the list of the all the known enzymes and their functions 3) this is why we suspect there might be more we don't know about or why we suspect we have discovered all of them. (keep in mind I have no idea which of those is reality)
So you teach that to the class and you tell them that they will be expected to know the full list of enzymes from number two. Okay so how do you propose we teach them that? Give them a cow's stomach and tell them to get to work? I mean, at the end of the day you only have so much time and you cannot give the students the opportunity to discover in a class period what took some well funded researchers many man months. You're best off to give them these enzymes "by rote" and, should they want more information, be able to approach you about this outside of class.
I'm more comfortable speaking about computer science so a comparison of this might be telling students about the evolution of memory management systems in operating systems "by rote" instead of forcing them to code each iteration of what Unix, Minix, Solaris, Linux, Windows 1, etc did to manage memory or schedule threads. There's only so much time and while this information is valuable in some context, it's not as valuable as being able to move forward to get to more pragmatic fronts of the field in question.
I'm totally open to hear how you think biology is supposed to teach enzymes. A lot of memorizing and teaching by rote in biology has to do with just coming to agreement on what you're going to call the bones of the body or tissues in the body or fragments of the skull or whatever you want to agree on with your area of focus. How do you make naming the bones of the human body fun and then expect them to read a paper on metatarsals and expect the students to have come up with a better name from metatarsals and know that that's what the paper is talking about?
My work here is dung.
I'm a HS science teacher [bio and chem] and he seems out of touch. Sure, he's right about there is a tonne of shit we don't know. Great. We also know there is a tonne of stuff we DO know. I constantly attempt to draw attention to BOTH. My students are regularly attempting to verify the 'what we know' and investigate the 'what we don't'. The latter is always a challenge at the HS level. A constant difficulty is that science 'stands on the shoulders of giants' and therefore to move forward we need to appreciate the past. Again, there is nothing new here. Lastly, I attempt to focus on concepts I HOPE my students move towards mastering. The fact is, many concepts require years of scaffolding, spiraling and application to truly understand. You really think you knew Newton's laws in grade 8 or 9? Memorizing the statements is fine but applying the concepts to authentic scenarios is challenging. I don't only teach facts, I ATTEMPT to teach a way of thinking and problem solving and wondering and all the other more interesting stuff.
They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
Oh I don't know if its that bad. To the best of my knowledge I'm the only person I've ever met who always asked any post-secondary educator about their PHd dissertation. Two observations:
1) On topic, virtually all of them spent the last 10% of their discussion talking about very recent work in that field. Apparently my favorite calc teacher tells people he takes credit for inventing how pretty much every kid learned algebraic equation multiplication in the 80s based on an enormous number of teaching experiments and lots of early computer based statistical analysis, but that was superseded by a more recent fad / trend / research around 1990 blah blah blah. I never fact checked these people, but even in something irrelevant to them now, they pretty much all keep up with old times.
2) Off topic, at least a small percentage of phd's are achieved on a non-dissertation track. Maybe 5% of my phd level instructors talked about submitting a large quantity of research papers with their name on it. Maybe luck, donno, but this seemed more prevalent outside the hard sciences. My pre-civil war history prof got his PHD based on lots and lots of published research papers some fairly interesting sounding historical economic analysis of England or something very similar to this story, but he claimed to never write "a" dissertation just turned in stacks of research papers and did his written and oral exams.
TLDR if you think your prof is clueless about modern research, motivate your prof by asking about their PHD dissertation and you'll probably get a pretty interesting speech about modern developments in the field both during and since the prof's dissertation.
I don't think this is all that surprising... J random luser walks up to me and asks whats new in the modern world of computing and I probably tell them to F off I'm busy, but if they have a good conversation starter about something from my past, maybe we'll have an interesting discussion instead.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
I think there's a healthy balance, if you're teaching about what you don't know about then what could the students possibly be learning? Instead, I think teaching by rote and example of what we do know while using what we don't know as a carrot is the best methodology.
I think problem solving and deductive reasoning should be the primary things taught in school. In Japan many lessons start with a question to answer or problem to solve, that the student is not yet knowledgeable of. Then the students are put to the task of coming up with a solution or finding an answer in whatever way they think best. Then the teacher presents the established known answer or solution, and discusses how the students own attempts compare and contrast with the known method. Doing so reveals things such as mathematic principals as obvious, not mysterious, and gives young minds the tools to go forth and explore.
I wish my schooling was like that in the USA. When I was 10 I was creating a 2D vector graphics space game in BASIC (moveto, lineto, rotate). I only understood linear equations, but I needed to find the angle from one ship to the other ship for the CPU player to turn towards the player's ship. I understood slopes, and made a drawing of line slopes and their corresponding angles. For the rest of the summer I spent inventing Trigonometry. There was a sin() and cos() function, but their documentation didn't explain what they were used for -- I ended up making my own slopeAngle() program.
The next school year was more long division, and ratios... When I presented my 3D distance equations and what I would soon learn were proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem to my mathematics teacher, she was unimpressed. "You'll learn about Trigonometry in high school", she said. That was the key word I needed to continue my education, I soon discovered calculus at my local library. When we did start learning Trig, I was just as unimpressed with the "Geniuses" of old as my math teacher had been of me. I found it odd that these old dead bastards were so highly praised for what would be obvious to any 10 year old.
I dropped out of Highschool as soon as was legally possible and started a career in software development. "School" was utterly useless to me, and college remains even moreso: It would cost so much for me just to be able to prove that I know what I know, and would waste so much time in the proving... I would be forever in debt. My customers like results, they could care less of my mental upbringing, only my experience and accomplishments. We should do away with "final exams" and instead place "entrance exams" at job entry points, thus freeing our minds to learn however we think best without punishing us for doing so.
YOU may not have been ready for P != NP or the Poincaré conjecture, but why should your slower development be a limiting factor to others?! I've been using Unit-Sphere Quaternions and Integration for NEAR Polynomial time Inverse Kinematics since Junior High School -- I'm not bragging, I don't feel superior at all. I'm just trying to drill it in that everyone develops at different rates, and the current establishment completely ignores this to the detriment of our race.
I think the unknown is far more fascinating than the known.
Indeed. Aristotle wrote a book 2400 years ago called, appropriately enough, "Questions". It's 400 pages of questions without answers, things he'd like to know but didn't, most if not all of them biology-related. As of today we have about 25% of them answered. At this rate in 7000 years we'll get answers for the remaining one (much less if things proceed exponentially, but a noticeable amount of time nonetheless). And that not taking into account the tons upon tons of additional unanswered questions added since...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
You can't participate in the discussion unless you do the reading.
The Socratic Method actually requires a good bit of that "lowly rote learning" that people like to be so dismissive of around here. It's a necessary prerequisite so that you know what everyone is talking about.
It's not glamorous but you can't skip lifting your head, rolling over, learning how to crawl and then how to walk.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
about what you don't know?
It's all "what we don't know" which is why it's so neat. I remember the following quote, I just don't remember the source:
"The difference between an old scientific theory and a new one is that the old theory is wrong in more subtle ways."
Science is the process by which we work together to collectively improve our explanations and predictions about the world over time. It's how we develop, test, and explain/record our best guesses. Our current best guesses are likely to be improved in the future (i.e. they are "wrong"), we just don't yet know how.
Teaching science in this spirit means teaching humility as part of the lesson. I suspect the author (and many others involved in learning science, and too many on the teaching side) miss this entirely. They experience "Science" as a body of techniques, terminology, and content-specific knowledge that they struggled to master, when science is more correctly described as the process that got us there.
Compared to other systems of "truth", Science does indeed change it's mind frequently and frivolously. That's not a bad thing. It's nothing to fear. It's also not something to gloss over just because half of the population is going to get a panic attack over it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
While that's true, I think there's a scientific question in there; it's just difficult to word the question in a non-teleological way. I suppose you could say, "Does 'junk DNA' have a practical function (to either the individual organism or to the species) and if so, what is it?"
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
It is obvious that in the daily news feed no one is ever going to say "Hey by the way did you know that today no one discovered a solution to - Frankl's union-closed sets conjecture." What we never hear is the foundation on which new discovers stand. Today there are many fundamentalist or just uninformed people who don't "believe" in evolution and geology. If the press included in the discovery of say a new medicine for cancer the fact that evolutionary theory underlies our understanding of the what and why of genetics that led to the discovery, maybe people would see that biology today is the study of the evolutionary process.
People have strange notions of what the quantum uncertainty principal means. I have heard people say that "anything can happen" and "scientists can't say for certain that gravity will work". The truth that should be told when we smash particles to find the Higgs Boson or like is that quantum physics for all of it's uncertainty makes better predictions than any mathematical scientific framework ever previously invented. It may rely on probability but, it is still very exact.
I guess I mean that if we are talking about informing the uninformed about science I think telling them how much we know and how we got there is more important than saying what exactly we still don't know.
Yeah I know. I didn't RTFA.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Why would you expect your students to know a list of of arbitrary names ascribed to chemicals used in digestion? How could memorizing such a list possibly be important or useful to students? Requiring that makes no sense at all. People can look up trivial details like that on their own, should they need them. The vast majority (dare I say all if it!) is immediately forgotten by students after the test. If people use a particular set of information in their field of study/work a lot they will naturally memorize it on their own in order to save time! Theres no need to torture students by requiring them to memorize lists of trivial details that are meaningless to them aren't likely to be useful later on.
Those of us who do things that might benefit actual humans need to come up with more answers than questions.
I'll be sure to mention at my next lab meeting that the work we're doing on sequence conservation in embryonic development can't possibly "benefit actual humans," then.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
..except there were many centuries of 'anti-science' in there as well
Not really. This is a popular misconception, popularized by some authors in the 16th century and then again in the 18th, which entered the public consciousness and stuck. If you actually go and study the history of ideas over the period you'll see lots of quite interesting stuff happening all over the place during the whole period, specially in math and logic, but also in engineering, chemistry, metallurgy and many other fields, all of which became quite useful down the line and without which post-Galilean stuff wouldn't have been possible. On the other hand, it is quite accurate that a few decades, spread over the last 500 years or so, were difficult for scientists, but those periods were by far the exception, not the rule.
As for recent developments in the US, looking from afar (I'm in Brazil) it doesn't seem that bad. You guys still do most of the important research around. What happens in a few schools around is hardly enough to cause major impacts. Besides, these things come and go following the generations. If the current one moves one direction, the next one moves the other, if for no other reason than being rebellious. Provided the net result is positive, and so far it's been, the risk of things coming full stop is quite low.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
The Socratic method also requires that we learn numerous fields of study. This is something else often complained about by many. In my ever so humble (hah!) opinion, the real meaning of that requirement is lost today. For example few in college study Philosophy, Logic, Symbolic Logic, Rhetoric, and Ethics. Most people take "Humanities" as their Liberal Arts objective, which teaches no real skills but is glorified "Social Studies". People whine about taking Communications and Algebra if it's not related to their degree, ignoring the far reaching implications of the learned skills.
In my opinion, the more you learn the better off you are. It's interesting to me how much knowledge begins to correlate to other knowledge as you learn more and more. Having basics like Rhetoric and Logic mean you can convey thoughts and usually make sound decisions. Math is required for just about everything, Physics helps you make sense of the world.
Even back when I was in College most of those things were not required, now even less are required. I took lots of extra classes because I enjoyed learning, and still do, not because I had to. Since I could afford it, it made it easier to do. Someone on a tight budget in College would not have the same luxury, and would still get a degree.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
As my geology prof exclaimed when the class complained about the amount of memorization required: "welcome to college."
Memorization is probably 50% of the work. The other 50% is knowing how to learn. I never learned to do homework until my third year in college. I learned it because of Dr. Tripp's analytical mechanics class: "Lambert, problem 4, up on the board".
One of the worst things about most educational formalism is the unwritten rules that let smart people get away without having to learn how to learn, or at least work to a schedule. The one thing that was the same for all my classes up to that point was that you turned in your homework at the end of class, which meant I did my homework in class and had it done by the time it was due. It got me through 5 AP classes (the school record, at the time) with college credit in all of them, and straight A's in everything but one P.E..class. To this day, I occasionally pause to thank Dr. Tripp.
If you are a teacher reading this, I'd really advise assigning homework at the end of class, and requiring it be turned in at the beginning of class. And to keep people honest, take a day a week to get random people up to the chalkboard/whiteboard to do a problem from the homework assignment.
As far as epistemology is concerned, no, the Chinese did not.
Science was an anti-rationalist movement (Before I'm flooded with nonsense: Not irrational, a reaction to rationalism. History, people!) that was indeed unique to Europe. No where else in the world at the time do we find anything like the process of science. (See Whitehead for a nice history.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
I sure as hell expect to see large portions modern science overturned in a generation or two
I don't, I expect fantastic technologies and new science, but well established science will remain well established. Mankind's knowledge has evolved and grown enormously in the last few centuries, in the beginning of the modern scientific era there were huge leaps as people grabbed the "low hanging fruit" using simple tools, those leaps have become less frequent but have enabled us to build new and better tools (such as the LHC and Hubble) that allow us to try and find things we think are there (Higgs), or don't even know about (Dark Matter). The second category is where today's fruit is hiding and it's a hell of a lot more expensive to get at than Newton's prisms and marbles.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.