Category Archives: Science-general

Origin Not Originally Original

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On the Origin of a Theory

Darwin’s treatise on evolution wasn’t the first and wasn’t the only attempt to explain the diversity of life.

“The only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain how species become modified,” Darwin later wrote. He did not mean to belittle his achievement. The how, backed up by an abundance of evidence, was crucial: nature throws up endless biological variations, and they either flourish or fade away in the face of disease, hunger, predation and other factors. Darwin’s term for it was “natural selection”; Wallace called it the “struggle for existence.” But we often act today as if Darwin invented the idea of evolution itself, including the theory that human beings developed from an ape ancestor. And Wallace we forget altogether.
[…]
[O]n November 22, 1859, Darwin published his great work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and the unthinkable—that man was descended from beasts—became more than thinkable. Darwin didn’t just supply the how of evolution; his painstaking work on barnacles and other species made the idea plausible.

It’s important to understand that last bit, and it applies in all of science. Saying, “I can explain that” isn’t sufficient. You need to amass scientific evidence in support of your claim — data that supports you and eliminates other explanations, along with predictions that would falsify your theory if they fail to come true.

The Necessity of Mathematics

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Awesome megapost over at Science after Sunclipse, covering many overlapping issues on the topic.

To use mathematics in the natural sciences, we first decide how we wish to represent some aspect of the world in mathematical form. We then take the diagrams and equations we’ve written and manipulate them according to logical rules, and in so doing, we try to make predictions about Nature, to anticipate what we’ll see in places we have not yet looked. If additional observations corroborate our expectations, then we’re on the right track. (It’s rarely so clean-cut as that — the process can spread across thousands of people and multiple generations of activity — but that’s the gist of it.) Several skill sets are involved: one must know how to idealize the world, and then how to work with that idealization. Remarkably enough, our schools fail to teach either skill.

Science Education for Everyone: Why and What?

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Science Education for Everyone: Why and What? over at physics and physicists. A commentary on an article at redOrbit.

The original article makes several good points but, unfortunately, also build a strawman or two.

A common response to the notion of teaching all of the sciences is the claim that the standard type of courses really teach something called the “scientific method,” and that this will magically give students the background they need to read the newspaper on the day they graduate. This argument is so silly that I scarcely know where to start commenting on it. If it were applied to any other field, its vacuity would be obvious; after all, no one argues that someone who wants to learn Chinese should study French, acquire the “language method,” and learn Chinese on his or her own. If we expect our students to understand the basic principles of ecology or geology, we should teach those principles explicitly. To do otherwise is to indulge in what I call the “teach them relativity and they’ll work out molecular biology on the way home” school of thought. Incidentally, the notion that there is a magical “scientific method” explains a bizarre feature of the modern scientific community. I am referring to the fact that, outside of their fields of specialty, professional scientists, as a group, are probably the most scientifically illiterate group in the United States. The reason is simpie: scientists are never required to study science outside of their own fields. The last time a working physicist saw a biology textbook, for example, was probably in high school. If you do not believe me, ask one of your scientific colleagues how he or she deals with public issues outside of his or her field. Chances are you’ll get an answer like “I call a friend,” a technique I refer to as having recourse to the Golden Rolodex.

Zapperz critiques this, and I’ll add my two cents. That there is no single “scientific method” is one of the things that we should be teaching. One does not learn French to learn Chinese, but one can develop an appreciation of language by recognizing that there are differences (and similarities) in the structures of different languages. Likewise, a teacher can point out the was that the scientific method manifests itself in their particular discipline when teaching a physics/biology/geology for poets class. Expose them to the fact that “theory” does not mean “guess.” Make them recognize the interconnectedness of science so that when someone makes a statement that is too far advanced for their level of expertise, they understand that it’s not a scientist just making stuff up. Teach them some analytical thinking. Develop their bullshit detector a little bit. Make them learn something. This isn’t an either/or situation.

In the Finest Tradition

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Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake discovers (among other things) a fine tradition: volunteering in absentia.

Do not oversleep and miss a meeting because the meeting announcement was sent to the e-mail address you don’t use because it’s continually broken, or else you too may draw the short straw in absentia and find yourself in charge of assembling a volume of conference proceedings.

Decisions are made by those who show up. Unpleasant tasks go to those who were conveniently out of the room.

Cut! Print! That's a Wrap!

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The science of scriptwriting

McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.
[. . .]
Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, with scripts of six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), a classic post-Mckee production, and find numerous similarities.

That’s hardly surprising since McKee learnt his trade analysing films such as Casablanca, so anything written using his rules should have these similarities.

I also note that one of the producers for CSI has a PhD in applied physics. Chicken? Egg? Common cause?

(Not to name drop, but I went to high school with this person, and actually helped, in some small way, with the first script he wrote)

Maybe They'll Ask for Seconds

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Brian Greene Op-Ed in the NY Times, on science and science education. Put a Little Science in Your Life

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.