How today’s science journalism treats science

Hannon sent me an article from Discovery News, “Single-Celled Giant Upends Early Evolution,” about a newly discovered one-celled organism called G. Sphaerica, which is very large (up to 1.2 inch in diameter) and leaves a trace behind it as rolls across the ocean floor. I wrote back to him:

Generally I have pretty good reading comprehension. But I seem to be less skilled when it comes to understanding various specimens of contemporary journalism. The writing is so incompetent that I often find myself tearing my hair out trying to understand what a simple news article is saying. This article is an example. I simply do not follow the reasoning in the below paragraph, the key paragraph of the article, and particularly the causal link between the first and second halves of the sentence beginning, “The Precambrian trace fossils … “:

Charles Darwin first noticed the Cambrian Explosion and thought it was an artifact of a poorly preserved fossil record. The Precambrian trace fossils were left by multicellular animals, he reasoned, so there must be some gap in fossils between the nearly empty Precambrian and the teeming world that quickly followed. But if the first traces were instead made by G. sphaerica, it would mean the Explosion was real; it must have been a diversification of life on a scale never before seen.

I don’t understand how the discovery of the large one-celled animal that leaves a trace, leads to the conclusion that there was a Cambrian explosion. And besides, the Cambrian explosion has been known about for a couple of hundred years. So what exactly is the new insight into evolution that is announced with such fanfare in this article, and what is the evidence and reasoning that leads to this new insight? Can you explain this to me?

Hannon replies:

My take on this story is that we have almost no evidence that explains a gradual, “evolutionary” progress up to the time of the Cambrian explosion and that what little evidence we do have, apparently, consists of little other than those fossilized traces or tracks. These were attributed, putatively, to multicellular organisms by Darwin himself. But with the discovery of this new thing they are, again, speculating about what it means, only this time it means that it is very possible that those early traces were made by a unicellular organism like G. sphaerica. So—the Cambrian explosion is even more mysterious and amazing than before! [LA replies: Meaning that instead of the Cambrian explosion starting from a base of multicellular organisms, it started or could have started from a base of unicellular organisms, which makes the appearance of complex phyla within a few million years or less even harder to explain.]

What gets my attention here, and this is perhaps due in part to the influence of some of your writing on the subject, is that there are simply huge gaping holes where our concrete knowledge and even rigorous theories are thin to non-existent. But instead of saying this, today’s science publications always have to sound intelligent and knowing and so they manage to come up with something compelling whenever there is a gain or shift in knowledge. Which happens about once every nanosecond. I believe you speak of this as a type of arrogant insecurity and I would have to agree.

To me, this weird creature is very interesting in its own right and regardless of any guesses as to what it means in evolutionary terms, especially terms concerning vast and complex eras like the Cambrian and Precambrian. What the article shockingly did not stress is that here we have an animal that consists of ONE CELL and is over one inch in diameter!! Surely that is worth a paragraph of contextual revelation? [LA replies: Yes, it’s amazing. Who imagined that there could be a one-celled organism that large? But the article doesn’t bother explaining it at all. They’re not really interested in this organism. They’re interested in telling us of the latest (in this nano-second), greatest discovery that revolutionizes everything that science has ever known since five minutes ago.]

I am not a biologist by schooling but have some training in botany and I believe there has been undue emphasis placed on the phylogeny of plants and animals in recent years, mainly because that is where the money flows (NSF, etc.). What we call “organismal biology” has taken a back seat to molecular work, though some investigators emphasize a marriage of these two essential approaches. It is a thinly veiled joke that some of the students who are more excited about gene sequences and mathematical modeling are unable to recognize the organism itself when they see it.

This is a little bit of a digression, but someday I would like to work up an essay that better explores this idea—the value and meaning of living creatures and plants, what they have meant to us as a species, including scientific interest, and what they mean to science and the reporting media in the modern age. The latter forces are conditioning the rest of us in these subjects and I believe this has everything to do with the creep of morbid ideas like looking at nature, God’s creation, and telling people “It’s all just DNA, totally rearrangeable and manipulable. Just think what science can do with it.”

So if someday purple pigs with wings are running the EU, who cares? It’s just DNA. Talk about reductionism.

LA replies:

Thanks, you’ve laid it all out and I’ve got it.

As for your final point, I agree. But this is not recent. By around 1980, high school biology had already gone molecular, so that there was very little emphasis on the form and structure of animals, which of course is what is most interesting about them from an ordinary human point of view. I had loved high school biology, and so I was shocked and disturbed to learn that biology was only being taught on the chemical, molecular level. I found this out from a biology teacher at a New York City private high school where I was working at that time as an administrator. When I expressed my surprise that organisms as organisms were no longer being studied, his response was very cold. He was cold toward the very idea of studying organisms. He made it clear that that wasn’t where it was at. There was a ruthless quality to him, almost, I felt, a hatred. I also think he was on the left and a hard-core atheist. He didn’t want any focus on organisms, because that would mean a world that is meaningful in ordinary human terms, a world to which people could relate intellectually and spiritually. That was actually what I thought about him at the time and the way I understood him.

So, as you can see, I’ve always had this strong reaction against reductionists and their project to strip of world of meaning.

LA continues:

The problem is not science. Science is great. The problem is scientism, or, as it used to be called, positivism, the ideology which says that only that which can be measured materially is real.

It’s the positivist mentality that Yeats is talking about in his very early (1889) poem: “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”:

Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass—
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs—the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.

To me, those last three lines describe many contemporary people.

- end of initial entry -

Gintas writes:

I saw this point made somewhere (it may even have been you): how can so many discoveries upend evolutionary theory, yet evolutionary theory always remains intact? If the theory had any value, it would predict things reasonably well, yet it so often predicts incorrectly. All the noise is about how to keep evolutionary theory intact, and as Hannon said, the interesting organism itself is ignored.

LA replies:

“… how can so many discoveries upend evolutionary theory, yet evolutionary theory always remains intact?”

It happens the same way that so many advances in equality topple the barriers of discrimination, yet the barriers of discrimination somehow seem to remain intact. Just as liberals cannot relate positively to any phenomenon unless they can fit it into a liberal script in which the liberals are shattering the reign of invidious discrimination and repression under which the world has weltered in misery until this moment, today’s liberal scientists cannot relate positively to any discovery unless they can conceive of it as a REVOLUTIONARY BREAK FROM EVERYTHING EVER KNOWN! And these revolutions seem to occur, like, every two weeks.

Hannon writes:

Funny you should mention school, as I was going to say something about the inexorable and rather tragic university-level merger of zoology, botany, ecology, etc., into a grand Biology of cells, chemicals and DNA. I’ve lamented this for years and often bring it up with any systematist I meet who seems to enjoy thinking about things. I’ve known many PhDs over the years (dozens) and I think mostly they are interested in their work without being overly philosophical.

I got out of high school about the time you indicate and I don’t recall the shift having occurred by that time. In fact, my high school biology teacher let me take home his personal copy of a fantastic book on nudibranchs. He was definitely interested in the organismal aspect of life.

LA replies:

Perhaps the teacher I spoke to (who was the chairman of the science department in the school where I worked) was at the cutting edge.

Kristor writes:

You quote Gintas: “… how can so many discoveries upend evolutionary theory, yet evolutionary theory always remains intact?” And you reply: “It happens the same way that so many advances in equality topple the barriers of discrimination, yet the barriers of discrimination somehow seem to remain intact.”

Say you are a liberal, and you have devoted your life to a policy goal, and then you achieve it. What do you then do with your life? You must either reinvent your life, go get a new and far less meaningful job, or else you must move the goalposts to keep yourself meaningfully employed in your old job. This dynamic applies to everything: the struggle for civil rights, the war on poverty, the environmental movement, the charities that fight diseases, you name it. There will always be “much work to be done” in these fields, because the people who devote themselves to the “work” (which is mostly fundraising) are gnostic pelagians: they cannot be satisfied with anything other than perfection, and they think that we humans can attain it (for the whole planet!) by our own efforts.

Obama raised the chiliastic hope of that demographic to a pitch it has seldom reached. His election was the realization of their policy objective. It will be interesting to watch their reactions when it is discovered that, like almost all presidents, he doesn’t get much done; that the New Age has not begun.

Ben W. writes:

“My high school biology teacher let me take home his personal copy of a fantastic book on nudibranchs.”

And that teacher hasn’t been arrested for giving such material to students…nudibranchs?

LA replies:

I never heard of nudibranchs before. But Wikipedia comes to the rescue:

A nudibranch is a member of one suborder of soft-bodied, shell-less marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusks, which are noted for their often extraordinary colors and striking forms. The suborder Nudibranchia is the largest suborder of heterobranchs, with more than 3,000 described species.

The word “nudibranch” comes from the Latin nudus, naked, and the Greek brankhia, gills.

Not only are they nude, but they’re hetero.

Ben W. writes:

Yes, but I see a problem here. Science seems to be incomplete in this case. Can a judgment be made that the nudibranch is in fact completely hetero? Is it possible that science has not yet found the gay nudibranch (possibly off the coast of California close to San Francisco)?

Before resorting to Wikipedia, LA had written to Hannon:

What is a nudibranch?

Hannon replies:

Sea slugs! There is an article in a recent National Geographic on these beautiful animals, some of the most colorful and startlingly patterned on the planet. Humans who design anything with color aesthetics in mind have nothing on the nudibranchs. Googling and the Nat’l Geo. piece give you a small glimpse; there are hundreds of species. There are also some similarly very attractive flatworms (!), etc. The orchids are another case in point (point made below): people appreciate them based on seeing a handful of hybrids, little realizing that there are well over 25,000 species known.

It is little wonder that so few high school and even university graduates have little appreciation for nature, for they are exposed to only a minuscule and non-representative sampling of the depth and breadth of known diversity. Helping those students gain an appreciation of the staggering scope of diversity would be a good start. Such a task is impossible without some degree of familiarization.

LA replies:

“Such a task is impossible without some degree of familiarization.”

Just to be picky here, but with what precisely does one actually familiarize oneself? With “diversity”? Or with some particular species? In fact, it’s a particular species that interests us at any one point in time. Then another particular species. Then another. The diversity that is constantly lauded is but the sum of many particularities. But our modern (liberal) way of thinking and speaking always puts the diversity—which by itself is only an empty placeholder, an abstraction—before the concrete particularities that actually constitute the diversity.

This is another way in which liberalism empties the world of content, replacing it with meaningless abstractions to which everyone constantly bows the knee. .

Hannon writes:

You wrote:

“Just to be picky here, but with what precisely does one actually familiarize oneself? With “diversity”? Or with some particular species?”

This gets to the heart of what I believe is the literally backward methodology of teaching in general, at least the teaching of facts. We know that the brain works by incrementally gaining knowledge and experience and weaving it together, eventually arriving at a synthesis or viewpoint. My recollection of learning in the classroom is of something almost opposite this concept: memorizing timelines and generalities devoid of particular and specific context or meaning for any particular point. The message, as you indicate, is that it is the generality that matters, while the details that must be used to arrive at these bland abstractions are not explored or may be ignored altogether.

If I were teaching a general class on mammals I would make sure that students had, in addition to the basics, a good overview of the subject using specific examples that together exemplify the diversity of this group. There are some weird and poorly known mammals, but how can a student learn this by simply reading it in a sentence or two? What meaning do we assign to those strange creatures in a biological or scientific sense? Indeed, is there any meaning at all?

Students need to be exposed to the particularities, at least by photos and reading, to arrive at an understanding that is worthy of the name. Emphasizing the extremes as well as the “typical” exemplars can be an effective way to help memorization, too. Secondly, I would focus on one or two specific taxonomic groups to demonstrate how diversity is represented within the parent group, e.g., rats or antelopes or cats. At this level it makes sense to look at individual species (not all of them, of course) and use each as a reference for the others. This approach could be called a simultaneous generalization and specialization and can work well to reinforce class content if the instruction is well-thought out.

Mammals are relatively easy because they are comparatively well-known and not such a large group. Poorly known or gargantuan groups, like beetles, ants or nudibranchs, are given very little attention in terms of understanding their diversity unless one can take specialized courses after high school.

I would apply the same argument to learning about history or any other subject, depending on the goals of the curriculum. The idea of referring to specific facts as a way to build relative knowledge and understanding seems elementary. We know that all knowledge is relative. Why do many educators seem to make the least of this fact?

LA replies:

To know history, the most important thing is having in one’s head a chronological framework. Then each new thing you learn you fit into that framework, and your knowledge hangs together meaningfully and also stays in memory because each fact is linked and associated with other facts. Without a chronological framework, there’s no structure to your knowledge and the parts can’t be related meaningfully to each other or even hold together at all. Whatever framework I have, I acquired very little of it school, I acquired it on my own in adulthood. And of course it’s gotten much worse since I was in high school. The thing that is most important in history teaching is the very thing that has been deliberately junked in post-Sixties education: chronology and dates. But just dates by themselves are not good, what is needed is a meaningful narrative structure of which those dates are a part, the rise and fall of empires, that kind of thing. But of course historical narrative is another thing the “educators” have deliberately junked.

November 26

Ken Hechtman writes:

You wrote:

Just to be picky here, but with what precisely does one actually familiarize oneself? With “diversity”? Or with some particular species? In fact, it’s a particular species that interests us at any one point in time. Then another particular species. Then another. The diversity that is constantly lauded is but the sum of many particularities. But our modern (liberal) way of thinking and speaking always puts the diversity—which by itself is only an empty placeholder, an abstraction—before the concrete particularities that actually constitute the diversity.

This is another way in which liberalism empties the world of content, replacing it with meaningless abstractions to which everyone constantly bows the knee.

Well said. This is the same problem I have with the way we teach multiculturalism. We could be teaching the specifics of particular cultures other than our own, how this or that particular people live and what particular assumptions, values and practices make them live the way they do. But that would be a huge amount of work. Think of the workload of an Ivy League Great Books By Dead White European Males course. Then multiply by several dozen if not several hundred. The world is a big place. It’s so much easier to summarize it all as “there are other cultures, they’re all different and they’re all better than us in some vague unspecified way”.

That’s why I don’t even like the word “diversity”. When I hear it, I usually know all I need to about the person saying it and nothing at all about the range of difference they’re talking about. Generally they mean the Dinesh D’Souza definition: “Everybody looks different but thinks the same”. If I need to talk about people who think differently I’ll say “variety” just so nobody gets the wrong idea.

LA replies:

Many years ago, when one of my nieces was applying to college, she showed me the college admissions essay she was working on and asked me for help on it. Among other things, I noted that she had spoken of her interest in the “diversity” of the people she would encounter at the university, a large prestigious university in California. I advised her to change “diversity” to “variety,” since diversity is a cliché used automatically by everyone today. I don’t know if she took my advice, but she was admitted to the school.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 25, 2008 12:26 PM | Send