Chad Orzel, one of my favorite science bloggers, is trying to answer the question, What should everyone know about science? He suggests these three themes:
- Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts
- Science is an essential human activity.
- Anyone can do science.
While #1 and #3 both seem sound, I think #2 defines science far too broadly. To blockquote:
2) Science is an essential human activity. You’ll often hear people who study art and literature wax rhapsodic about how the arts are the core of what makes us human– Harold Bloom attributes it all to Shakespeare, but you can find similar arguments for every field of art. Great paintings, famous sculptures, great works of music (classical only, mind– none of that noise you kids listen to)– all of these are held to capture the essence of humanity.
You don’t hear that said about science, but you should. Science is essential to our nature, because at its most basic, science consists of looking at the world and saying “Huh. I wonder why that happened?” Science is applied curiosity, and there’s no more human quality than that. (“Bloody-mindedness” is a close second.)
I know #2 sounds good. First, it’s flattering, particularly for those of us who were trained in a scientific field or who simply just like science a lot. Second, it’s a good hard stab at all those nasty tweedy humanities professors who preen about how scientists don’t know anything about literature and art, but who can’t themselves even be bothered to learn the frickin’ Second Law of Thermodynamics. Sheesh!
But — science isn’t “applied curiosity.” Most things with vertebrae have applied curiosity (balanced by applied cowardice).
When I think about the nature of science, I’m reminded of something Brad DeLong said about the The Law of Large Numbers: “This is the principal insight of the science of statistics. It is an important insight. It is a powerful insight. It is also not an obvious insight — that’s what makes it powerful and important.” The Law of Large Numbers (and related insights) are powerful, important, and non-obvious precisely because our minds do not naturally think in these terms. It takes training.
Greek logic is less than 3000 years old. Modern science is about 400 years old. Modern statistical methods are even younger than that. Meanwhile, storytelling has been with us, oh, ever since we had language. Singing possibly longer.
Or another way of putting this is: tell the average citizen, “All studies indicate that wearing a bicycle helmet drastically reduce incidence of head injuries,” and at best you’ll get a vague nod. If you want that same person to actually wear a helmet, you need to tell them something like this: “Dude, I just saw this bike messenger flip over his handlebars, slamming his head into the curb — and the guy simply got up and walked off, with a big old chunk out of his helmet.” Whoa.
Perhaps what makes this confusing is that you can harness science’s power without being all that scientifically inclined. I mean, John Hagee drives a car and flies in airplanes and everything. In fact, science is so powerful that “it works, bitches” despite the fact that it’s so new and so shallowly rooted in our primate skulls. Of the entire spectrum of human behavior — all the appalling things and all the wonderful things too — science might well be one of the least “intrinsic” behaviors we have.
As for what all this says about us as a species, that’s well above my pay grade.
I think Orzel is clearly using the word science to mean curiosity-driven activity. In that sense, I agree that it is “an essential human activity.” Modern science is cearly more than that, but isn’t modern literature more than guys sitting around the fire telling stories?
I wonder if we shouldn’t highlight the curiosity aspect more in science education and outreach. More people might be interested in and care about the results of science (and perhaps its funding). Science education now tends to highlight exactly the things that distinguish modern science from applied curiosity. Unfortunately that part is extremely uninteresting to many people.
Thanks for introducing me to xkcd; somehow I had missed it. [Today’s comic](http://xkcd.com/393/) made me laugh out loud despite not being in the applicable crowd. Then I started reading some old ones and the bastard RickRoll’d me!
I can’t believe you didn’t know about xkcd, I thought young Mr. Munroe had hit *everybody* in his target demographic by now!
Agreed, curiosity is an essential human activity, as is making art. Science and modern literature are two tiny little circles within those vast ones. Clearly modern literature is no more an “essential” human activity than science. (You have to know how to read *and* have lived in the 20th century or later!)
| Science education now tends to highlight exactly
| the things that distinguish modern science from
| applied curiosity. Unfortunately that part is
| extremely uninteresting to many people.
This is a really excellent insight.
From my year in grad school, I remember our outreach program, the Physics Circus. We went around to local elementary schools and demonstrated various principles of physics to gaggles of fourth and fifth graders. We would ask them, “How do *you* think this worked?” and the kids would be leaping up to offer different theories, some very clever. These kids were all little proto-scientists! And then all that enthusiasm and curiosity gets crushed over the next two or three years.
Actually I just noticed something about Orzel’s piece: he says “Science *is* an essential human activity,” which is incorrect. But then goes on to say that humanities professor types claim that great works “*capture* the essence of humanity.” I’m not sure whether Orzel elided this difference on accident or on purpose. But anyway, the humanities professors are right, these works *do* “capture” the essence of humanity. As do articles in Phys Rev B.
XKCD does look vaguely familiar, but somehow I never latched onto it before. I’ve got the feed now!
The distinction you discuss in you last comment is a good one. Science and literature help us express essential human characteristics, but we need neither to survive. At least we didn’t until recently. It would be pretty hard to feed 6 gigamouths without science, and maybe the arts help us survive in such unnaturally high population densities.
I’d say Science is definitely our defining characteristic and one thats underwritten our survival and our ability to thrive anywhere. We are naked, clawless, slow, and pound for pound weaker and slower that just about anything in the top third of the food pyramid. And somehow we’ve managed to get to the top of that pyramid and exist from pole to pole, thriving in any environment. Discovering how the world works, retaining that knowledge, and passing it to future generations is pretty essential to what it means to be human. Without it we are not much more than your run of the mill simian.
| Discovering how the world works, retaining that knowledge, and passing it to future generations is pretty essential to what it means to be human.
All well and good, but that encompasses a HUGE body of human behaviors, not just science.
Also, just to pick a nit, we don’t “thrive” in any environment. There are no vast settlements in Antarctica or the Gobi Desert, let alone colonies on Mars. To thrive, we need very specific, very fragile conditions found almost nowhere else in the universe. So let’s not pat ourselves on the back too much.
Well in those environments nothing thrives. Hell, penguins don’t even need wings down in antartica and they get by because nothing else does. And if science isn’t an essential human activity, what would qualify?