I found it interesting that what many of you considered "classics" were not works by scientists who had died many, many, many years ago, but came from those still living or recently deceased. This made me wonder what defines a "classic" scientific text? And is what we define as "classic" constrained by the surrounding cultural, psychological and social context?
Also this question partly arose because, I had just read about Francis Bacon in Gould's Lying Stones of Marrakech, where he discussed Francis Bacon's Great Instauration. Bacon believed that how we process knowledge about the empirical world was by "passing sensory data through the biased processing machinery of the brain." He identified three different idols that held us back from knowing the truth about the natural world. These "idols" - deceived and created fallacies in our minds that blinded us to the Truth. Idols of the tribe, idols of the theatre, and idols of the marketplace.
Idols of the tribe include our strong tendency to measure all things against ourselves and to order nature by creating opposites (black and white, etc.) I definitely don't disagree with this.
Idols of the theatre are what limit our ability to interpret and think about empirical data because we are stuck in the muck of others. This means that our ideas, questions, patterns that we see are limited because we view them through the scientific context in which we were raised. Gould cites the example of the vulva stone/hysteroliths (a brachiopod fossil that many in the 17th century thought had an inorganic origin and looked coincidentally like female genitalia). It made me think do we have anything that in 200 years future scientists will think, "what idiots." And I wondered if model organisms have become the idols of the theatre for the 21st century.
A lovely example of this was recently pointed out to me by HippieHusband. You can read about this in detail here. The short story is that bacteria excrete redox-active compounds to act like antibiotics so that they can limit their competitors. It turns out that the pigment pycocyanin (in Pseudomonas aeruginosa) activates a transcription factor called SoxR, which was thought to only be involved in a superoxide stress response. Pigments that are excreted by bacteria have historically been thought to be "secondary" metabolites or waste. In Ecoli, SoxR activates SoxS, a transcription factor which controls genes that function to protect the bacteria from antibiotics and superoxides, presumably the ones excreted by other bacteria. But in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Sox R doesn't control any of genes that would normally be involved in detoxification. Instead in this bacteria it upregulates the expression of other genes and mutants with defects in SoxR don't show any decrease in resistance to superxoxide unlike Ecoli mutants. This led Dietrich et al (2008) to do a little investigation. But they had to work against a well-accepted SoxR-SoxS paradigm established on a model organism Ecoli. What they found was that SoxS actually is only found in enterics (E.coli and Salmonella). I think what's even more interesting is how they demonstrated that these excreted pigments have an impact on the structural organization of cellular communities and aren't just waste.
I could see the arguement that well, model organisms are a place to start. A reference. Yep, that might be true if we don't let them become our idols and simply accept patterns generated by the data collected on them as the ultimate paradigm.
The last idol was the idol of the marketplace - "reordering the language of classification to potentiate the correct answer." In other words, we are doomed because all we have is our limited language. Our ability to define, identify, and categorize the natural world, like fossils, develops slowly because of the limitations of language. This is where I think both Gould and Bacon are both wrong.
Yeah maybe it took them 200 years to turn a vulva stone into a brachiopod fossil but that was because of several factors. First, this was a time when only a privileged few involved in science. And the scientific voice that was actively heard was well, small and truly restricted. Today, we have many more scientists involved in discovery, from very diverse backgrounds and I don't just mean cultural, I'm talking cross-disciplinary. I know PhD students who have backgrounds in physics, math, arts, all coming to do biology. And it isn't limited to just students. Although we are definitely becoming more specialized, there is some fluidity to the disciplines.
Secondly, as I have previously talked about - today's scientists are all about exchange and collaboration. To exchange ideas and expertise, collaborators have to learn to talk to each other. This means that language must be flexible. In my previous postdoc, I interacted primarily with a mathematician (Dr. Add'EmUp) and our lab meetings included statisticans, physicists, biochemists, and molecular biologists. Whenever anyone presented, we needed to be able to communicate to all of these people in a way that would elicit feedback.
Thirdly, the exchange of ideas happens at a much faster pace today, than it did when scientists could only use, well what the heck did they do back then? Horses? Geez Louise. No wonder they thought a vulva stone if pulverized and consumed could fix sexual disorders. I guess it was the 18th century solution to the little blue pill.
A very good example of how today's world is so very different than the scientific world is the rigorous scientific debate surrounding NASA's Science paper, which suggests that bacteria living in Mono Lake can incorporate arsenate into the DNA backbone. Thankfully, because of both the diversity and number of scientists and the presence of immediate communication via the bloggosphere we have access to critical voices like that of Rosie Redfield, Athena Andreadis , and Alex Bradley. These scientists both do an incredible job of showing that the NASA study is fundamentally flawed. Where else could you get an immediate conversation between a microbiologist, molecular biologist, and a geochemist?
And that brings me back to this idea of what is a "classic?" What biased processing machinery of the brain has led us to decide what is a classic?
4 comments:
I think the idea of a classic is hard to pin down or substantiate so I ignored it all together and recommended books might belong in my personal anthology of science texts.
btw., The Great Instauration comes highly recommended. Not many people have read it, scientists and Eng. Lit alike.
A good example of the "idol of the theatre" blocking progress is the difficulty physicists had developing quantum mechanics. Planck introduced the quantization of energy as an act of desperation to find an acurate model for the spectrum of black body radiation.
In the book "Braindance", which I mentioned in my previous comment, the auther discusses the long struggle she faced to have her ideas about human brain evolution listened to by her colleagues.
@gillt
Well one of the characteristics of a classic is that it is timeless. So if Gould writes timeless books, then it fits the characteristic of a classic.
I would like to read The Great Instauration - I'll add it to the list!
@Edward
That sounds really interesting. Thanks for describing the example.
"Well one of the characteristics of a classic is that it is timeless."
I'm not saying Paradise Lost or Moby Dick aren't timeless.
However, the Western canon is historically contingent and susceptible to the old proverb "Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” Hunter being typically males in the ethnic and religious majority, historically speaking.
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