Had the five-year-old Gee been able to write a paper on his first ever experiment, it would have been entitled something like The Effect of Total Immersion on Small Garden Invertebrates.
A while ago I ran a series of features in Nature called Lifelines in which scientists were invited to fill in a (mainly) light-hearted questionnaire. Among the impertinent questions about their bedtime reading and what they kept in their fridge was a request to describe their earliest experiments as children. The answers ranged from the dangerous (inadvertent arson) to the ingenious (working out the distance of a car journey from the movements of the speedometer as seen from the back seat.)
My elder daughter, now aged 10 (she of the ambivalence towards unicycling giraffes) is a chip off the old block, and attempted her own experiment in the garden this Sunday. Being, as she is, interested in the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, she wanted to understand the details of the flight stroke of the primeval bird, and to this end, took Hermione the Polish Bantam, perched her on a branch of the apple tree – and pushed her off. Apparently all was revealed in the pattern of flapping as the complaisant bird made its inevitable way to the ground. I had to congratulate her (my daughter, not the chicken) on her empirical approach, though I am not sure what hypothesis she was testing, nor whether the experiment validated it (she was somewhat vague about such things – the chicken, vaguer still).
Indeed, the rigors of the scientific method take some time to catch up with native curiosity. I remember a physics class in which a classmate and I – then in our mid-teens – discovered that the background radioactivity of a lead-shielded jam jar was more than that of the same jar with an earthworm in it. Imagine, if you will, the thrill of discovery! The world would be rid of dangerous nuclear waste by the simple expedient of feeding it to earthworms. It took us a while to catch on to the errors inherent in our approach (which I needn’t spell out … need I?)
At around the same time, a new chemistry teacher stood before us spotty youths on the first day of a new term and said something which I now realize was extremely courageous. He was going to stand at the front and say a lot of things, he said, but we pupils should never, ever take his word for it, just because he was the teacher. He encouraged us, always, to test things for ourselves.
In my view, science should (and must) be animated by that spirit of untrammelled free enquiry: people will be surer about a conclusion if they have discovered it for themselves, than if they are told by an authority that it is so, and that’s that. It occurs to me that peer-review fulfils this function – the reviewer is there to pick holes in the authority of the experimenter, so you don’t have to, time being limited. In the esoteric field of phylogenetic systematics, the cladists were motivated by an urge to make science democratic, to allow anyone to test hypotheses of evolutionary relationship, rather than bowing to the authority of old-fashioned evolutionary storytelling (I explore this in my book Deep Time). In short, science is the ultimate democracy – it belongs to everyone, whether they are a Nobel laureate or the merest schoolchild. Nobody should be afraid to ask a silly question.
I have a feeling, however, that the pressures of time and resources have been squeezing free enquiry out of the teaching of science, turning it into a list of facts, as if presented on mosaic tablets (that’s ‘mosaic’ in the Biblical sense, of course) that we, the unlettered, should know. In an article in the Independent in 1998, John Durant denounced the movie version of the X-Files as pseudoscience (when to have denounced it as a bad movie would have had him on surer ground), urging the public to cleave instead to a set of approved facts that he and his colleagues would obligingly provide for us. This stance reveals two things. First, a sense in which ordinary people are assumed to be unable to work out, all by themselves, the difference between truth and illusion – that they might be perfectly aware that the X-Files was fiction but nevertheless enjoy wondering, in that childlike way, what the world might be like if there were such things as flying saucers. Second, that scientists sometimes forget that inquiry is stifled by authority.
At this point I shall discuss a point raised by God’s Avatar on Earth. I refer, of course, to J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Holy Writings touch on this very thing. There’s a famous passage in which the wizard Gandalf realises that his superior, Saruman, has gone over to the Dark Side. Gandalf’s comments on Saruman’s fondness for machinery and technology are usually read as a castigation of reductionism. Less often appreciated is that Saruman’s motivation is well-meant if fatally misguided – his orderly mind wants to arrange matters, he says, because their ‘friends’ are too idle or too dim to work things out for themselves, so they (the wizards) should assume their natural authority, and act in what they think are everyone else’s best interests.
This blog was inspired by Cath Ennis’ discourse about tolerance in all spheres – religious, political and social – and her (tangential) question about whether scientists who are politically right-of-centre might choose to remain quiet in a left-of-centre scientific milieu. It made me think about political correctness (PC) and whether one thing goes with the other. In an essay collection, Boris Johnson – whom history will show will have been the greatest statesman of this or any other age [now, there’s a hostage to fortune – Ed], wrote that the Left, having realized that socialism doesn’t work as a system of government, has invented PC as a kind of revenge. PC has acted to moderate the language we are allowed to use in public discourse, on the assumption, I guess, that changing our language will change our brains so that, like Newspeak in 1984, we will be incapable of articulating a subversive thought (neuroscientists reading this will be able to opine on the credibility of this thesis). Second, PC has acted to enforce a conformity on society and make it acceptable for governments to impose a top-down, nanny-knows-best approach. Cath’s description of anti-smoking regulation is just one example of this.
Needless to say, such micromanagement is the enemy of science. And so I shall proclaim a doctrine of free and untrammelled tolerance. Believe, if you want, in the healing power of crystals; believe in creationism; in intelligent design; believe in homeopathy, anthroposophy, theosophy, telekinesis, arithmancy, astrology, transfiguration, occlumency, legilimency, potions, divination, herbology, ancient runes, quidditch and the supremacy of Ipswich Town FC.
Believe that the Earth is expanding, contracting or flat; believe in cold fusion, N-rays, polywater, Hans the Talking Horse, the bloke on the grassy knoll, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the idea that DNA barcoding will ever replace traditional taxonomic practice [oooh, bit close to the mark there, don’t you think? – Ed]. Believe that Princess Diana was bumped off by a regal conspiracy. As the aformentioned Boris Johnson put it in the Daily Telegraph
“I will reveal how the Duke of Edinburgh secretly trained the Loch Ness Monster to swim up the Seine until it reached the Pont d’Alma and then I will explain how Philip then gave a kind of ghillie’s whistle and Nessie reared out of the water and so startled Henri Paul that he swerved into the path of Elvis Presley in the white Fiat Uno, at which point Prince Charles – hovering overhead in a Luftwaffe helicopter – switched on the supermagnet installed by MI6 in the concrete pillar of the tunnel and sucked the Merc to its doom. That is the story I will tell. I got it from the horse’s mouth – Shergar, that is.”
Believe in whatever half-baked philosophy floats across your transom. Go on, make my day. I won’t stop you. And why not?
—Because shouting at you that you’re wrong won’t change your mind;
—Because the truth will out;
—Because you won’t believe me until you have discovered the truth for yourself.
Science means taking nobody’s word for it.
I don’t believe you.
Oh, hang on, owl post has arrived. What’s this?. It’s a howler, that’s what it is! Open it now before it explodes!
Thanks Henry! I would modify your sentiment to “believe in whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t affect your analysis of your data”. So that rules out most creationists I’ve come across ;)
Henry, I often feel obliged to add a few tags to your posts – it’s good form to have everything tagged, like. But your writing bounces eruditely around so many subjects that it is untagable – the web 2.0 version of uncatagorisable.
Sorry Matt. I have added a few words. They are vibraphone, wombat, ontologically, Merthyr Tydfil and plinth. I hope that’ll suffice.
Hear, hear! Truth will out – just not in our lifetime and/or not in all domains. Sit back and enjoy the perspective, I suppose. Shouting at people that they are wrong won’t change their minds, but occasionally, rational discourse has been known to do so.
I hope no chickens were harmed in the making of this blog post.
Ahh . . . test it for yourself. The basis of all subversion. :-D
Hermione the chicken lived to lay another egg. The problem is that Heidi the dog ate it (the egg, that is, not the chicken).
Hermione! That’s excellent. I want to get a ginger cat and call it Weasley, but my husband has banned me from using any overly geeky names.
The other Polish bantam is called Luna.
We also have two Peking bantams, Charlie and Lola. The picture above shows (from left to right), Charlie (I think), Hermione and Luna. I love the Polish bantams’ mad hairdos – I think they look like Essex Girls out on a spree and tend to call them Kelly and Shelly. They are, in fact, quite bright (for chickens) and rather tame and inquisitive. The Peking bantams, on the other hand, have round fluffy bustles and feathery feet, and tend to resemble elderly ladies going round a stately home.
Don’t remember my first experiment, but I remember my elder brother’s. He’d have been about 5years old. We happened to be away from home on Christmas Day, and (as was his wont), Father Christmas left us a sock full of presents. In the toe of each, as per the usual custom, there was a walnut.
When we got home a few days later, my brother marches over to the bowl of nuts on the sideboard, counts the walnuts and triumphantly proclaims the non-existence of the beardy philanthropist.
I maintain my right, nonetheless, to believe that Father Christmas exists. So there.
Not sure whether this counts as a scientific experiment, but…..I used to give ants swimming lessons in a bucket of water. If you leave them in there long enough, a bubble appears in their middle, and they split in half. Fascinating. Very few survived these lessons, I’m afraid to say, although it doesn’t seem to have affected the survival of the species much.
Henry – reindeer do exist. I’ve seen them stood around Korkeasaari zoo looking very bored.
Rebecca – one of the former vice-chancellors of the university who’s space I’m wasting now did similar experiments with carabid beetles and Baltic sea water. Apparently they can float for a couple of days, which is useful to know if you want to work out how the wingless species got onto the islands. One day I should blog about our attempted follow-up study, using V-traps.
Bob – did your experiment in which you submerged your laptop in the Baltic turn out OK in the end?
I’m still waiting for the expert to get back to me.
I’m ashamed to admit that many a tadpole met an untimely death in the care of my sister and me. Not intentional, we just weren’t very good at keeping them alive. Our annual crop of hundreds of tadpoles yielded a solitary frog one year, which was most unexpected. We called it Sarah and kept it for a few weeks, until it went missing (death by neighbourhood cat was suspected). Not before it totally freaked out a friend of my Dad’s, who it turned out had a strange phobia of frogs and toads.
Our annual crop of hundreds of tadpoles yielded a solitary frog one year. Don’t fret, Cath. And most of all, don’t beat yourself up about it. That’s like, you know, natural selection at work (I have to say that or The Machine will get me).
PLEASE STOP LINKING THAT VIDEO! The disturbing dreams will never go away now!
Catchy tune, though, don’t you think? Dick to the Doc he’s got a PhD, dah de dah de dah de dah… MWAH! HAH HAH! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!!! IA-SHUB NIGGURATH, GOAT WITH A THOUSAND YOUNG! &^%$£!!!!
Yeah, that’s the problem!