Understanding Science
Jun 1st, 2008 by Eats Wombats
Here’s a fine article in the New York Times on the importance of understanding science. That heavyweight publication should be rolled up and used to whack Andrew Clover for this in the Sunday Times
At school, I did eight years of science, and I’m proud to say I didn’t take in a single word, even though I was always made to sit on the front bench.
I’ve enjoyed some of the “trophy husband’s” earlier writing, but is this really something to boast about? Pah!
Being ignorant of science is sufficiently ok that people confess it publicly without hesitation, even attempt to make a virtue of it.
Nassim Taleb of The Black Swan whose Fooled By Randomness I enjoyed a while ago, hates pseudoscience. He’s an entertaining iconoclast who riffs on pseudoscience, especially the Nobel prize winning sort (Economics). He comes across as rather humane and humble in his writing, with an admirable, curmudgeonly streak of stubbornness, skepticism and wit. He’s possibly the last person you’d expect to be doing celebrity videos.
It’s hard not to laugh then at the first comments for this article that appeared in the last Sunday Times colour supplement. Interesting too how much better things look in a magazine with nice color photographs. It works for food. Swan on a stick Professor?
Taleb doesn’t read newspapers–but he doesn’t mind writing for them.
It’s an odd business, scientific celebrity. Look how many more copies of Hawking’s unintelligible book on time were sold, compared to About Time, by Paul Davies, one of the most lucid bits of writing about science you could ever read.
The whole swan metaphor is geting out of hand. After reading an article entitled Some Swans Are Grey in New Scientist recently I Googled for some swan knowledge, as you do when you wonder “Why swan song?”, and was amused by this couplet from Coleridge
Swans sing before they die; ’twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing.”
I probably won’t remember it next time I am pressed to sing at a karaoke session. It’s unlikely to happen in London!
I’ve been reading Taleb’s book The Black Swan and enjoying it greatly.
The thinking fits well with much of Earth Science, although interestingly it challenges one of the key tenets of the subject, The Principle of Uniformitarianism - which may be summarised as ‘The Present is The Key to The Past’.
This mantra, developed by James Hutton and popularised by Charles Lyell, educates much of classical geological thinking, since it enables us to interpret geological history in terms of modern-day processes. For example, if we find symmetrical ripples within a sandstone, by analogy with the similar structures we see on modern beaches, we can reason that the rock was deposited in a wave-influenced environment. This kind of reasoning is the entire foundation of sedimentology, and of a myriad other branches of Earth Science, too.
But what is most fascinating here is that this thinking is fundamentally flawed, because it systematically denies the role of catastrophic events. Thus if we are really to understand fluvial sedimentary systems, we shouldn’t just focus on day to day flow.
We really need to look much more closely at the flood stage, and especially at the erosive and depositional potential of the hundred, thousand or ten thousand year flood events, because it is these events which are much more likely to dominate the rock record.
This is because thin layers of sediment steadily laid down over thousands of years can be stripped away by the erosive power storm events, which in turn leave relatively thick and much more geologically preservable sediment layers behind them. This means that a 10 m wide meandering river may actually (and perhaps rather surprisingly) characterised in the rock record not as a stable and predictable gentle flow but as a 2 km wide boiling torrent carrying trees, parts of hillsides and boulders along in its path.
Likewise the process of evolution turns out to be characterised not by gentle, gradualistic shifts of the gene pool over time, but by rapid speciation as a result of geographical isolation, followed by geologically instantaenous extinction and significant jumps in morphology.
The Earth history of tens of thousands of years is therefore subservient in the rock record to one-off storm events lasting just a few hours or days, whilst the fossil record tells the story not of slow development over millions of years, but rather of rapid evolutionary jumps within populations, with little or no evidence of intermediate forms.
These initially unexpected (but entirely rational) realities find themselves completely at home within Taleb’s thinking. Geology and evolution, like history, economics, and so many other things that we believe to be linear and predictable, turn out to be dominated more or less entirely by fractal and not Gaussian distributions.
This kind of thinking, which we might loosely call ‘catastrophism’, has played an increasing part in our geological interpretations over the past few decades. What I find so utterly compelling about Taleb’s insights is how they seamlessly link this approach to reasoning with the interpretation of everyday events which affect us all on a human timescale.
Taleb makes clear that his thinking is neither unique or original (most of the important advances in understanding he puts down to the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot). But the beauty in Taleb’s work is that this is very simple science, which is superbly explained, and so elegantly applicable towards unifying different kinds of problems not just in science but in so much of the world around us, too.
Interesting. I know uniformitarianism was an alternative to catastrophism but I never assumed it that meant ONLY gradualism. My reading was this: the principles that operate today, including the laws of physics, have always operated in the same way.
Therefore if we discover something happening today and we have evidence that it happened in the past, then a parsimonious assumption is that it happened in the same way.
Surely, in geological time, black swans are ten a penny? Up to a point I suppose!
I agree the fossil record is imperfect but it’s far from bad. I was reading about therapsids the other day and the record is quite good and getting better.
What’s interesting is the complete absence of a black swan for the creationists… such as fossil rabbit in the precambrian (as Haldane said)!
Yes, you’re right that the laws of physics and genetics have remained the same over time - it’s really just the way that we interpret them to have acted which has often been faulty.
It’s not the case then that uniformitarianism isn’t valid, but rather that historically it has been applied far too narrowly.
Looking more broadly, the dominance in modern sedimentary environments s of catastrophic storm events is likely to have been exactly the same as it was in the past, so that uniformitarianism still applies.
It’s not just that Black Swans are ten a penny in geology, then - it’s exactly that geological history may be the result only of a series of Black Swan events.
On another interesting and important point, yes - the fossil record has gaps. But those gaps can be critically significant, because they may sometimes actually tell us more about the processes of evolution than the continuous and unbroken sequences ever can.
Earth history - it’s a marvellous detective story, which yields more wonders with every year that passes.