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."
My College Experience Was Completely the Opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org].
Quest for the Grail (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I love Andrew Wiles' [wikipedia.org] description of the process of scientific research in the first minute or 2 of this science show [youtube.com].
Bakula Versus Planck (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Evolution of knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What is consciousness and what is its mechanism? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Bakula Versus Planck (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
I think the GP gave a bad example, because C++, Assembly, or Fortran are engineering products, not discoveries. The focus shouldn't be the language, but the paradigms (like functional, procedural, or object orientated). And yes, all of these should be taught.
I also have a bone to pick with your punch card comparison. You are implying that since we have modern technology that we shouldn't look at the basics. No, I don't think we need to learn punch cards anymore. But I do think that anyone with a CS degree that hasn't studied electronics and built and programmed a rudimentary computer in machine code (not assembly) has failed in their education, even if they never use it.
Re:My College Experience Was Completely the Opposi (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sounds like he's doing it wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the big one, right there.
People think science tells them what is "true" or "false" or "real" or "unreal". This is my biggest beef with pop skeptics.
The notion that science can "prove" something is an 18th century conceit that does not have much currency among scientists today. We have models that seem to be supported by observation and we find them useful and we have models that are not supported by observation and we (hopefully) discard those to a shoebox which someone will someday open to write a book about the ridiculous things scientists once said.
I get this all the time regarding what pop skeptics would call "woo", such as Qi Gong or the concept of Qi. I try to explain that it's just a model, a way of describing something, and one that has held up pretty well to observation (yin and yang, the way a diagram of the channels and vessels of Qi is amazingly similar to the nervous and circulatory system). OK, it's a philosophical model, rather than an engineering model, but a model all the same.
Models have different purposes. For the purposes of neurosurgery, the model of the circulation of Qi in the body is insufficient. For the purpose of maintaining and promoting health, martial arts, etc, the model of circulation of Qi is appropriate, precise, extremely useful.
Science is a funny thing. I occasionally play music with a guy who's been part of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Univ of Chicago and he's a bona fide scientist. His view of "science" is very surprising, very...mutable. I find that the further up the food chain in Physics, in Math, you go, the less you'll find pop skeptics. The less you'll find the concept of "real".
Re:The unknown (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:And Your Suggestion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just an aside.
My dad used to to teach college level general chem to students including medical students.
Every year he would get at least one med student (soon to be former med student) who could not balance a redox equation to save his/her life. Each of these students had somehow gotten an A in high school chemistry (or they would not be in this medical school).
Each of these morons would demand they get an A. They never got one. They were all very good at memorizing. Hence: MD = Memorized Degree.
He is quite proud that these idiots are not physicians. One absolute, concrete product of his years of work.