Introduction
Horace"s summary of the purpose of literature, "to delight
and instruct," is also not a bad summary of the purpose of science
and nature writing. The difference is not so much that a science essay
gives more weight to the second infinitive as that it unites the
two. The best science writing delights by instructing. A good science
essay, like any good essay, must be written with structure and
style, but the best science essays accomplish something else. They
give readers the blissful click, the satisfying aha!, of seeing a puzzling
phenomenon explained.
A good example of what I have in mind comes from my days as a
graduate student. Not from an experience in graduate school but
from an experience living in the kind of apartment that graduate
students can afford. One day its antiquated plumbing sprang a
leak, and an articulate plumber (perhaps an underemployed
Ph.D., I feared) explained what caused it. Water obeys Newton"s
second law.Water is dense.Water is incompressible. When you shut
off a tap, a large incompressible mass moving at high speed has to
decelerate very quickly. This imparts a substantial force to the
pipes, like a car slamming into a wall, which eventually damages
the threads and causes a leak. To deal with this problem, plumbers
used to install a closed vertical section of pipe, a "pipe riser," near
each faucet. When the faucet is shut, the water compresses the column
of air in the riser, which acts like a shock absorber. Unfortunately,
Henry"s Law applies: Gas under pressure is absorbed by a
liquid. Over time, the air in the column dissolves into the water,
which fills the pipe riser, rendering it useless. So every now and
then a plumber has to bleed the system and let air back into the risers,
a bit of preventive maintenance the landlord had neglected. It
may not be the harmony of the spheres or the grandeur in this view
of life, but the plumber"s disquisition captured what I treasure
most in science writing: the ability to show how a seemingly capricious
occurrence falls out of laws of greater generality.
Good science writing has to be good writing, and another graduate
school experience led me to appreciate its first priority, clarity.
The great Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport had died years before
I entered the program, but he had written an "Epistle to Thesis
Writers" that was still being handed down from generation to
generation of doctoral candidates. Allport tried to steer students
away from the clutter and fog of professional science prose and offered
as a model an essay by a ten-year-old girl, who, he wrote, merited
a higher degree "if not for the accuracy of her knowledge,
then at least for the clarity of her diction":
The bird that I am going to write about is the Owl. The Owl cannot see
at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.
I do not know much about the Owl, so I will go on to the beast I am
going to choose. It is the Cow. The Cow is a mammal. It has six sides —
right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a
brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the
milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the
mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is
to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking.
When people milk, the milk comes through and there is never any end
to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realized, but it makes
more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far
away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.
The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat
much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry
it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up
with grass.
In assembling this collection I looked for essays that combined
the explanatory depth of the plumber with the limpid prose of the
young zoologist. Explanatory depth, surprisingly, is not that easy to
find. The most common specimen is the science news story. A jour-
nalist flips through the contents of Science, Nature, and the New England
Journal of Medicine, finds the article with the weirdest or most
alarming or most bite-sized finding, gets a quote from an author, a
supporter, and a critic, and reports that the discovery has overturned
everything that scientists had always believed. I understand
the pressures that shape this formula: the drama of iconoclasm, the
demand by editors for news rather than pedagogy, a desire to show
that science is a human activity among spirited antagonists rather
than a revelation of the truth by white-coated priests.
But just as presidential campaigns can be distorted by the press"s
obsession with minute-by-minute changes in popularity polls, an
understanding of science can be poorly served by news from the
front about continual revolution. Conclusions from individual experiments,
especially the most surprising ones, are more ephemeral
than conclusions from the reviews and syntheses that can"t be
squeezed into a brief report in Science. The discovery-du-jour approach
can whipsaw readers between contradictory claims of uneven
worth or leave them with lasting misimpressions, such as that
everything that is pleasurable is deadly for one reason or another.
And contrary to the idea (commonly associated with Karl Popper)
that science is a kind of skeet shooting whose goal is to put a bullet
through one hypothesis after another, the best science weaves observations
into an explanatory narrative. "All the Old Sciences
Have Starring Roles" by Chet Raymo (whose weekly science column
graced the Boston Globe until his retirement this year) makes
the point succinctly. Max Tegmark"s mind-expanding "Parallel
Universes" shows, by example and argument, how a powerful theory
can not only organize sundry data but also lead to an exhilarating
new conception of reality itself. Horace Judson"s "The Stuff of
Genes" reflects on the far-flung implications — for science and life
— of the discovery of the structure of DNA, whose golden jubilee
was marked in the year these essays appeared.
Clarity and style, happily, are not in short supply in today"s science
writing (though in professional journals their frequency is
commensurate with galliformes" dentition). The genre continues
to attract fine writers of all ages, belying the plaint that the younger
generation no longer cares about language. Of all the things that
go into good science writing, I am fondest of prose that airs out a
stuffy hall of scholarship and conveys its insights (or its absurdities)
with irreverent wit, like Gregg Easterbrook"s "We"re All Gonna
Die!," Jonathan Rauch"s "Caring for Your Introvert," Ron Rosenbaum"s
"Sex Week at Yale," and Robert Sapolsky"s "Bugs in the
Brain." But pride of place goes to the Bird Folks (the nom de
plume of Mike O"Connor) at the Bird Watcher"s General Store in
Orleans, Massachusetts, whose informative weekly column strikes a
tone that is opposite to the worshipful sonorities found in much
nature writing (parodied by Mark Twain as "Far in the empty sky a
solitary esophagus slept upon motionless wing").
"Ask the Bird Folks" could have seen the light of day only in
a quirky rural tabloid, and I think the proliferation of other unconventional
outlets will be a boon to unorthodox styles, formats,
and, most important, opinions. Conventional wisdom can jell prematurely
when a few commentators stake out the cramped real estate
in national publications, and I actually believe the old cliché
that the Internet is changing intellectual life by providing limitless
outlets for unconventional ideas. As it happens, most of the Web
pieces on my short list were dropped at the last minute because
of various exigencies (wrong year, wrong country, too much
overlap). I suspect that more and more of our best science writing
will be found on sites like www.edge.org, scitechdaily.com (and its
sister site artsandlettersdaily.com), www.spiked-online.com, butter
fliesandwheels.com, techcentralstation.com, human-nature.com,
and the many blogs by science-oriented journalists.
Science is a human activity, of course, and its rewards are not just
discovery and explanation. Most scientists enjoy the mundane activity
of gathering their kind of data, and in "Captivated" Meredith
Small shares with her readers the pleasures of primatology (while
making me understand for the first time why primates groom).
And the passionate eccentrics who call themselves scientists are
good grist for gossip and character studies, such as Jennet Conant"s
profile, which presents yet another consequence of the DNA revolution:
the appearance on the scientific stage of the inimitable
James Watson.
Perhaps more than is usual in these collections, my choices are
slanted toward human behavior, and their methods shade into the
social sciences. In part this reflects my own interests in psychology,
linguistics, neuroscience, and evolution. It may also show that human
interest makes for the most compelling writing. But most of
all, it reflects the fact that the study of the mind will be among the
liveliest frontiers of science in the coming century.
One of these frontiers is the application of genomic analyses to
the mind and its products, often in highly unpredictable ways.
Judson alludes to the recent finding that the normal version of a
gene for a speech and language disorder bears the statistical
fingerprints of natural selection acting in our lineage after it split
off from the lineage leading to chimpanzees. In one stroke this discovery
obliterates the suspicion that the evolution of language and
mind is permanently beyond the reach of rigorous science. The
duo by Nicholas Wade, "In Click Languages, an Echo of the
Tongues of the Ancients" and "A Prolific Genghis Khan, It Seems,
Helped People the World," explain two other remarkable applications
of genomics to human evolution. One confirms the idea that
aggressive polygyny could have affected human evolution by altering
our species" genetic makeup (with a surprise appearance by
one of the great villains of history). The other may shed light on
what was thought to be forever unknowable: the first language spoken
by our species.
In anticipating a steady turning of science to the mind and its
products I am thinking not just of fancy technologies but of an extension
to human affairs of the scientific mindset itself. This does
not mean reducing the human condition to genes or neurons or
primate behavior, but rather seeking to ascertain whether a claim
about human affairs is consistent with the facts and with everything
else we know about how the world works. Today this attitude is far
from universal. What would happen if newspapers imposed the following
rule: any pundit who comments on a trend and blames it on
some factor must adduce evidence that (a) the trend is real, (b) the
factor preceded the trend, and (c) that kind of factor causes that
kind of trend? On many days the op-ed page would consist of a vast
empty space op the ed.
Many of my choices upend some bit of conventional wisdom
about human life. In "The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics,"
Geoffrey Nunberg uses a smidgen of linguistics to expose a
bit of nonsense about "correct grammar" and the decline of standards
that had been latched on to by writers from David Skinner in
the Weekly Standard to Louis Menand in The New Yorker. In "Where
Have All the Lisas Gone?" Peggy Orenstein shows that trends in
baby names are not inspired by the latest celebrities, the popularity
of religion, or just about any other external cause. Virginia
Postrel"s "The Design of Your Life" presents a sample of the many
myths about aesthetics that she dispatches in her 2003 book The
Substance of Style, such as the notion that people seek beauty only
when their other needs are met, that styles are foisted upon a passive
public by manipulative advertisers, and that economic value resides
in practical goods and services. Jeffrey Friedman"s "A War on
Obesity, Not the Obese" shows that we are not getting as fat as obesity
statistics would suggest and that the solution to this health
problem does not consist of finding the right people to blame.
"Sex Week at Yale" shows that being an academic is no protection
against holding ludicrous beliefs about human motives, such as the
dogmas about love and sex that are common in the humanities and
helping professions.
Many misconceptions about behavior are harmless, but in these
dangerous times some could lead to catastrophe. Steve Sailer"s
"The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" correctly predicts that it
would be unwise to try to graft a political system onto a society without
understanding how the psychology of kinship and ethnic identi-
fication plays out in the local environment. Scott Atran"s "Genesis
of Suicide Terrorism" debunks the bromide, endorsed by impressive
lists of Nobel Prize winners and other right-thinking people in
countless signed statements, that the root causes of terrorism are
poverty and ignorance. The article is no more comforting to those
who analyze suicide terrorism only in moralistic terms and insist
that terrorists are crazed fanatics or callous psychopaths. Moral
outrage is certainly an appropriate response to any slaying of innocents,
and it is worth considering the possibility that the retaliation
or preemption inspired by outrage is an effective countermeasure.
But moral condemnation is just one technique of behavior modi-
fication, and the fact that it feels right is no guarantee that it will
work. If our goal is to minimize innocent deaths, we may have to set
aside our moral intuitions long enough to try to understand the behavior
in terms of cause and effect, and that means studying the beliefs,
desires, and social dynamics of terrorist groups. I suspect that
people from all over the political spectrum may be disturbed by
Atran"s amoral analysis, but it is a mode of thought that we may
have to get used to if we want to improve human affairs.
The interface between science and morals also motivates my remaining
choices. Much science journalism today is hostile to scientists
in much the same way that much political journalism in the
post-Watergate era is hostile to politicians. Scientists are often depicted
as arrogant Fausts or cruel Mengeles or greedy profiteers.
One article I rejected, for instance, denounced a research program
that succeeded in modifying corn to synthesize pharmaceuticals
cheaply despite its promise of vast enhancements to human health
and a demonstrably trivial risk to the environment. Halos are
awarded only to whistleblowers in ecology or climate science who
warn us about the wages of our technological lifestyle. In Europe,
left-leaning greens call for a Precautionary Principle in which applications
of science should be banned or restricted if there is some
chance they will have harmful effects, even in the absence of scienti-
fic evidence that they do. If the policy, aptly satirized as "Never do
anything for the first time," had been applied in the past, it would
have ruled out every new technology from fire to fertilizers to malaria
control to oral contraception. In the United States, right-leaning
bioethicists see research to improve health and well-being as a
promethean grab at immortality and a soul-deadening quest to rob
us of the nobility of suffering.
This hostility is a big change from the reception that scientists
enjoyed a generation ago. When I was a child, my favorite literary
genre was the hagiography of a famous scientist; I was taught that
Sabin and Salk were the pride of the Jewish people and Banting
and Best the pride of Canada. No doubt we are all better off today
with a more skeptical treatment of science, but we have swung
too far in the direction of timidity about the applications of science
and cynicism about the motives of scientists. Austin Bunn"s "The
Bittersweet Science" and Atul Gawande"s "Desperate Measures"
put a human face on uncured illness and remind us why aggressive
medical pioneers were once revered: they lessened pain, infirmity,
and needless death, the most noble goal of human striving. There
is a story waiting to be told on how the moral coloring of science
(and other endeavors) in different periods can be distorted by
quirks of the human moral sense (a fertile new research topic in
psychology). Our neural circuits for morality are overly receptive to
the trappings of purity, naturalness, and custom, and they are too
easily impressed by gravitas, indignation, conspicuous asceticism,
and other advertisements of saintliness that may have scant correlation
with actions that make people better off.
Genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology will call into
question other moral intuitions. Reams of nonsense have been
written about cloning, genes linked with personality, and
pharmaceuticals that may enhance mood, concentration, and
memory. Some of the non sequiturs are so bizarre that they make
me wonder whether the authors have fully assimilated what Francis
Crick calls "the astonishing hypothesis" — the idea that all thought
and feeling consist of physiological activity in the brain — and instead
tacitly believe that human choice and individuality reside in
an autonomous soul. Philip Boffey"s "Fearing the Worst Should
Anyone Produce a Cloned Baby," Daniel Dennett"s "The Mythical
Threat of Genetic Determinism," and Ronald Bailey"s "The Battle
for Your Brain" are breaths of cool thinking in these overheated
arenas.
I end with an indulgence. One article that particularly drew me
in was, of all things, "Through the Eye of an Octopus." What could
a cognitive scientist find so interesting about the secret life of
cephalopods? It is not just that the piece reveals an astonishing
spectacle in the natural world, and it"s not just that the protagonist
is named Steve. The reasons are twofold, and it is not too much of a
stretch to say that they illustrate another of my favorite themes in
science writing: the interconnectedness of all knowledge, no matter
how remote the disciplines.
My first reason for liking the article is linguistic. In one of Gary
Larson"s Far Side cartoons, a bespectacled octopus at a podium addresses
his conspecifics: "Fellow octopi, or octopuses . . . octopi?
Dang, it"s hard to start a speech with this crowd." Judging from an
Internet search, human scientists also go both ways on this issue.
But Eric Scigliano consistently refers to his subjects as octopuses, and
he has the logic of language on his side. The -us in octopus is not
the Latin masculine noun ending of alumnus and fungus, which is
replaced by -i in the plural. No, it is part of the Greek word pous
meaning foot, and turning it into -pi makes no sense. Nor could
English have imported the Greek plural as an irregular form, as
it did with criterion-criteria and stigma-stigmata, giving us octopodes.
An octopus is the creature that owns the enumerated feet, not the
assembly of feet itself. The elegant algorithm that computes the
properties of complex words (described in my book Words and
Rules) ensures that these synecdochic compounds have regular plurals,
even when they are built around irregular nouns. Hence we
refer to several members of the extinct family of cats as saber-tooths
(not saber-teeth). We similarly talk about lowlifes, still lifes, tenderfoots,
flatfoots, and, in The Lord of the Rings, Proudfoots. And by this linguistic
logic, we should identify more than one octopus as octopuses.
The other reason I liked the article has to do with human evolution.
It"s lonely to be one of the few species with advanced powers
of problem solving, and it"s scientifically frustrating too. How can
we test ideas about the evolution of intelligence if it happened only
once? One way is to find smarter-than-average species from widely
separated branches of the tree of life and see what else distinguishes
them from their duller cousins. Studies of other smart creatures
like dolphins and wolves suggest that group living is one of
the traits that sets the stage for the evolution of higher intelligence.
But this does not explain why humans are so much smarter than
other social species. I have always suspected that the ancestral ape
that spawned our lineage must have been dealt a number of traits
that made higher intelligence worth its metabolic cost. And I speculated
in How the Mind Works that one of those traits is the possession
of hands. Evolution does not reward cerebration for its own
sake but only thoughts that can be put to use in adaptive ways, such
as manipulating the world to one"s advantage. If this idea is right,
intelligence increased in our ancestors partly because they were
equipped with levers of influence on the world, namely the grippers
found at the ends of their two arms. How pleasing to learn
that intelligence also evolved in a species that has eight of them.
Steven Pinker
Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin. Introduction copyright © 2004 by
Steven Pinker. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 by Tim Folger Copyright © 2004 by Tim Folger. Excerpted by permission.
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