On Science

In the wake of Mr. Obama's attention to scientific matters (see video below), I thought I would post an article I wrote last summer. It was originally written for a contest hosted by Seed Magazine, the topic of which was "What is most significant force working against science today?" The article apparently got lost in hyperspace, and so was never considered for the contest. This is too bad, from my point of view, but does mean that I can publish it here, as there is no danger of duplicate publication! For the science lovers among you: enjoy!


On Yucca Moths and Noah’s Flood

Last year, my husband and I toured a cave in Alabama. During the tour, the guide, Kerri, confidently announced that “Our cave will tell you the truth that other caves will not tell you: other caves say that caves are millions of years old, but the truth is all caves were formed 4,000 years ago by Noah’s Flood.” Her statement epitomizes what many would readily identify as the most significant force acting against science in society today: fundamentalist religious fervor; however, the real enemy to science is not the noisy clamor over the truth of the creation of the earth or Kerri the Cave-Girl’s championing of Noah in head-to-head competition with Geology, but rather in the unheeded and unchecked decay of rigorous intellectual investigation, of which religious fanaticism is only one symptom.

Science requires the antithesis of unreasoning acceptance: in 1970, my father, an entomologist, collected some Yucca pods in Nevada and took them back to his lab in Berkeley where he proceeded to monitor them for the emergence of Prodoxus Y-inversus, moths with a parasitic relationship to Yucca plants. There were about a dozen pods, and when only about a dozen moths emerged during the first half-dozen years, most entomologists would have discarded the pods, having reached the known limit of diapause. Instead, my father continued to monitor the pods until a mass emergence of yucca moths occurred in 1985. By then, of course, the fact that they emerged at all, sixteen years after the larvae entered diapause, was a paradigm-shattering event that led to a hypothesis about the relationship between winter-spring temperature differential and the disruption of diapause. Dad spent the next decade and a half demonstrating that his hypothesis was viable by controlling the temperatures to which the pods were subjected and, thereby, orchestrating mass emergences at 20, 25 and 30 years (Powell). My sister was seven when Dad collected the Yucca pods; her youngest son was eight when the last moths emerged, in 2000.

My father’s Yucca Moth experiment was quintessentially scientific. Science requires patience. It requires flexibility. In science, the willingness to “flip-flop” is not a sign of weakness; rather, scientific endeavor mandates “flip-flopping” whenever a new fact throws previous understanding into question. Above all, science requires as a starting point the basic assumption that what we think we know (“Yucca moths will emerge from diapause by the end of six years or not at all”) could be wrong. My father believes that his yucca pods are now empty of larvae and that, therefore, no more yucca moths will ever emerge, but he continues to monitor them this year, the 38th, just in case.

Science requires humility.

By contrast, we live in a sound-byte world whose most insistent message is that definitive answers are possible in a few minutes, sentences, or keystrokes. Network news gives us the Presidential election in one-minute snippets. “In-depth coverage” lasts ten minutes. News consists of facts and speculation both presented as unassailable truth. Mit Romney pronounced, during a recent television interview, that had Barack Obama been President a year ago, Al-Qeada would now be launching attacks at the U.S. from inside Iraq (Bell). His assertion was not challenged. He was not requested to identify his assumptions, verify the validity or relevance of his facts, elucidate the reasoning behind his allegation, or adhere to standards of clarity, relevance, or fairness. Collectively, we are content to accept as fact an endless series of ill-formed and premature ideas. We do not, collectively, look for substantive truth to emerge from the diapause of ignorance and uncertainty about our presumptive Presidential candidates, their views, their intentions, or their characters.

The confident assertion of unsubstantiated alternate political realities is quintessentially unscientific. The soulless discourse surrounding the upcoming Presidential election is the inevitable product of a culture in which both rigorous evaluation of facts and imaginative positing of potential implications have withered nearly away. We point fingers and say that politicians won’t tell the truth or that the press engages in a conspiracy to throw the election, but the simpler truth is that, especially in a world in which news is paid for by profit-making conglomerates, we get what we pay for. If the public demanded intellectual investigation of issues, detailed reporting, and vigorous debate of real ideas, and if that same public flatly refused to watch news programs that offered anything less, we’d get what we wanted; instead, we throw away the yucca pods of every learning situation without waiting for larvae to develop and emerge.

We are, as a culture, content with sound-bytes. We shoe-horn our current events education between 50-hour-a-week jobs, a complicated logistical choreography of getting children to school, soccer games, piano lessons, and doctor’s appointments, and our three-hours-a-week Pilates class. We live gerbil-wheel lives that don’t allow time for the discomfort that results from struggling doggedly with complex ideas. In a world in which relationships can be reduced to five-keystroke text messages— “I<3u2”—science is simply far too much trouble.

There are no sound-byte solutions to this problem. Science—like all intellectual endeavor—flourishes in an age of enlightenment, and it requires, therefore, a cultural medium in which patience, doubt, and persistence, rather than haste, complacency, and blind acceptance direct the pursuit of knowledge.

One strategy for creating such a cultural medium would be to free our public school system from the stultifying bonds of No Child Left Behind, which rests on the presumption that education can be sorted, filtered, reduced, and compacted into the passing of a limited number of tests. In Virginia, for instance, the contemporary mark of a “standard” high school education is that students can pass six tests, all but one of which is multiple-choice. An “advanced” education requires that students pass nine of those tests. To ensure those goals, teachers are now required to engage in lock-step lesson delivery, administering identical tests every few days to track progress. Such a system can ensure that “no child is left behind” in the sense that every extraordinary—even foolhardy—effort is expended to ensure that every child knows an identically narrow set of factual information, but such a system limits knowledge, opportunity, and creativity. Such a system suggests not only that it is possible to know with certainty what everyone needs to know, but also that the only important questions have certain answers.

Despite this reductionism, science perseveres. A significant number of people still inquire, investigate, challenge, elucidate, question, and revise their thinking; those same people demand the same of others. We can reinvigorate science by expanding the pool of skeptics, increasing the number of people who would rather assume that the emergence of Prodoxus Y-inversus from a yucca pod is possible even 38 years after diapause began and be wrong than assume that no further emergence is possible and be right. We have, in our school system, a structure which ensures that every person in America experiences a systematic effort to shape knowledge, so we have in place a structure capable of enacting the change in cultural attitude toward knowledge that we need. For that to happen, however, we need a national standard for education that demands a much higher expectation for learning than federal law currently requires.

Works Cited

Bell, Jim (Producer), and Matt Lauer (Co-Anchor). 2008. Today. July 18, 2008. KNTV San Francisco: TV 11.

Powell, J.A. “Longest insect dormancy: Yucca moth larvae (Lepidoptera: Prodoxidae) metamorphose after 20, 25, and 30 years in diapause.” (2001). Annual of the Entomological Society of America, Vol. 94, 2001. 677-680.