The Sweet Mystery of Science 259
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."
Something I Don't Know (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:I can relate (Score:5, Informative)
This was largely my experience up through high school. Science was taught as a body of facts, and less so taught as a process.
I'd agree with you but give it a different spin, in that all education begins with little kids being taught the virtues of authoritarianism and a class-based society (the classes being educational achievement which equals authoritarianism of course). Eventually branching out.
It doesn't help that an education major probably doesn't know much about science, anyway. Odd how you can separate our educational system along the lines of "this group has teachers with education majors" and they're almost universally failing, and "this group has teachers with a major in the field they're teaching" and they're almost universally the shining jewel of the entire world's educational system. I don't know anything about the the french language; I'm sure I could study educational techniques and eventually do an awful job of teaching to the test; but my students would probably end up with some pretty bizarre ideas about the french language by the time I'm done with them. /. has a subculture of science-types but the mainstream /.er is a comp sci-type. So who out there started on their comp sci path with a learned debate about the virtues of functional vs object vs procedural programming, or the virtues of ye olde waterfall vs agile strategies, or the beauty of the codd-normal forms of database design, vs the vast majority who probably started their comp sci educational adventure with "don't copy that floppy" and "I shall teach you the one true language, because its the only one I know"
I'll go out on a limb where I don't really know anything (as you can see by my writing), and make the wild bet that english majors started their educational path with hyper-authoritarian vocabulary lists, weekly spelling lists, and those PITA grammer flow charts (what is the technical term for where you break a single line of prose into a very strictly formatted flowchart / graph thing? I hated drawing those Fing things so I'm blanking it out). Then after 15 to 20 years of indoctrination / training to get a job / or even god forbid education to teach them how to think, the students are allowed to debate the relative ranking of metaphors in beowulf or whatever it is english lit majors do all day?
If a silo of hard science geeks only hang out with other hard science geeks and try to reverse engineer the 1800s era educational system they grew up in thru observation and analysis, they're going to come up with whoppers like this such as thinking only evolutionary biologists are taught this way, and surely the english lit majors are taught some other way.
Re:Something I Don't Know (Score:5, Informative)
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.
When used properly - as in the evolution example - it refers to a sudden change between two states, without any intermediate steps. like an electron that can only jump between two "orbits" rather than gradually change energy. It may look small to you, buster, but that's one hell of a jump for an electron.
When used in an advert for dishwasher tablets (sad but true) it has the same meaning as "fantastic", "incredible", "ultimate" - i.e. "hey! sucker!"