Occam's Trowel

Darwin in Hungary

2009-04-14T11:31:00.011-05:00

It's a good indication of how this year has gone, that I've not posted here in almost a year. The combination of teaching and writing my Master's paper (in addition to my two other part-time jobs) has been completely overwhelming. Much as I did when I was working with congregations, I have to remind myself that the goal is not to do the best I possibly can, but to do the best I can under the circumstances. This year, there have been circumstances in full supply.

Near the end of the second year of our program, we are expected to produce a research paper of about 40 pages, something that acknowledges the work that has already been done in our area and contributes significantly to that body of literature. Because I have continued to hold out hope that I could contribute something of value to research involving Eastern Europe, my adviser and I settled on something related to the reception of Darwin's work in Hungary. Although my Hungarian language skills have been better, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to put them to use, and perhaps sharpen them a bit for my dissertation. The reality has been that having to read everything in an especially difficult foreign language slowed my progress enormously, a fact that was not surprising to anyone but me.

As challenging intellectually as the research was, I was also surprised to find that the hardest part was actually the emotional challenge of it. After years of feeling very competent as a writer and preacher in my ministries, I have had to face the insecurity of being a beginner once again. My approach to research was unfocused. My note-taking was disorganized. My writing was completely different from what was expected of me by other historians. One classmate reassured me that the process was going to push every one of my insecurity buttons, and she was right. It turns out that I have more buttons than an airplane cockpit.

The good news (and one of the lessons we're supposed learn, I suppose) is that we don't really go through the process alone, although it's easy to feel that way. The faculty and my classmates have been very helpful and supportive and, although there's so much that I wish were better about the paper itself, it has been an intense and amazing educational experience. If I were to start researching that same paper today, my approach would be quite different, based on all that I've learned about the conventions of historical writing.

Since other duties are calling, I'll just post a link to the paper itself, in case anyone else is interested in seeing what the work of a new historian looks like. It's not pretty, but hey -- doesn't everything start out a little rough around the edges?

The Reception of Darwin’s Work in Hungary’s Nineteenth-Century Popular Press

Beginner's Mind in Transylvania

2008-07-03T01:58:00.016-05:00

It's always challenging on many levels to be back in my spiritual homeland, and this latest visit is no exception. I'm halfway through a month-long visit to Hungary and Transylvania to root through the archives of the Unitarian Headquarters in Kolozsvár and also in the Library of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, where enormous amounts of historical documents are now stored after being seized decades ago by the Romanian state. My graduate research is about the Rev. János Körmöczi, who was a physicist (like me) and became the Bishop of the Unitarian Church (not like me). I lived in this city for two years (1996-98) as English teacher at the Protestant Theological Seminary, and I have a lot of amazing memories from that time and the several visits that have followed.

Culture clashes are always good for a laugh or two when I'm in Eastern Europe, and I have my share of embarrassing moments as well. Perhaps because this visit is longer than usual and I've been mostly left to my own devices, I'm feeling very aware of having to struggle through this month mostly alone. I learned years ago that, even when my Hungarian was flawless, people knew from my coloring that I wasn't one of them, and often simply spoke right back to me in English. As tempting as the thought of "going native" is (sorry about that choice of wording), I have to accept that I won't simply be able to melt into the crowd, and that I will likely always inspire those kinds of behaviors that arise when people know that an outsider is watching them.

I learn a lot about the United States, for example, when I see people in other countries behaving the way they think we want them to behave. Hungarians are incredibly generous when it comes to hospitality, and sometimes try to extend "American-style" hospitality to us... that is, what they think it means to be an American.

So what do they think it means to be an American? As far as I can tell, my friends seem to believe that it means being able to spend large amounts on money on a whim. To be able to just pull out our wallets and fork over the cash for an iPod, or buy expensive clothes without saving up for them or really even thinking about it. And it embarrasses me to think that this what people think we're about or, even worse, that it actually is what we're really about.

I mentioned that this trip has been harder than most. I've had a couple difficult run-ins with people that required me to navigate angry situations in a foreign language -- the first one in Hungarian, the second in Romanian. Neither of them were fun, and both left me feeling depressed and a little ashamed of not having handled them better. I pride myself on being a good diplomat, but functioning in a foreign language, especially one like Romanian in which my abilities are still pretty basic, inevitably leads to misunderstandings... practically every day, in fact. As innocent as these encounters were, my handling of them just made me wish I was back home, where I can navigate confidently and comfortably.

This is going to sound like a change of subject, but it's not: Hungarians and Romanians are the world champions when it comes to gorgeous, decadent desserts and strong coffee. (My love for this place isn't only academic, after all.) When I was teaching here, I was a regular in a swank coffeeshop right in front of the seminary, and I've found an equally decadent one very near where I'm staying. One of my greatest pleasures is to sit down with a beautiful pastry and a big cup of coffee, and read while I dose my anxieties with sugar and caffeine.

I had to acknowledge that, in truth, I can do this anytime I want; I can plop down the money for a treat like this, or a couple of beers, or a nice dinner, without really having to worry, even with the dollar as weak as it is. And that this ability is a comforting bit of home. I don't enjoy spending when I'm back in the States, can't even stand to walk through a mall, but I admit how much comfort I find in this when I'm discouraged with my language skills or tired of being reminded that I'm an outsider. It's one of the few ways I can be in control here when I'm feeling like an alien.

And, if you were hoping that I'd get back to the subject of history of science, here you go. I was reading a feminist critique of science by theorist Donna Haraway, who is apparently brilliant but really hard to understand, who spoke about just these issues in the world of science. The perspective of science has historically been that we can look at the world from a neutral perspective, seeing nature just "as it is" without our identity or opinions getting in the way. This way, science could be the same for everyone -- each of us would see the same thing and report it in the same way. Scientific knowledge has become what we call "privileged" knowledge in this way -- more powerful than other kinds of knowing, we believe, because of this "objectivity", and practically the same thing as truth.

Haraway's critique of this is what philosophers of science and historians of science have also come to see: that there really is no such thing as being a neutral observer, and it has in fact been destructive to assume that science and technology offer such an objective perspective. Instead, she urges us to consider "situated knowledges", ways of knowing that acknowledge that we each have identities and histories which affect how we see and understand things. True, they differ from person to person, but they are at least honest that it isn't possible to just melt into the background and "consume" nature and other cultures without being touched by them. Haraway's paper was a big help for me this week in realizing that I won't be able to navigate Transylvania, or its amazing history, without the tensions and vulnerability of engaging with another culture, no matter how good my language skills are. Encounters like these don't come without risk, and there's no escaping being touched by this experience, but the saving grace for me is that every unpleasant encounter is always balanced out by several gracious and kind encounters with the people here. These moments of big-heartedness and open-mindedness are ultimately why I keep coming back, despite the challenges; as hard as it's been, it's always worth it.

A Long Tradition of Heresy

2008-04-03T09:51:00.017-05:00

I've never identified very strongly with Unitarian Universalism's self-image of a community of heretics, partly because I felt like I got most of my rebellion out of my system years ago, and there are so many other things to think about these days. But it's not surprising that my studies are dredging up important voices who challenged the church's authority, and that I've been revisiting that heritage.

Our word "heretic" comes from the Greek word hairein, which means "to choose". Rather than simply inheriting belief from their family, culture or religious tradition, heretics shape their own conclusions or choose another source of guidance. One of the papers I'm writing this semester is about Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno, and Menocchio, a 16th century Italian miller featured in Carlo Ginzburg's history The Cheese and the Worms. I'm exploring how heresy trials proceeded differently (and how we make them into history differently) for different figures. Each of these men were ultimately silenced -- Galileo professionally muzzled, and Bruno and Menocchio killed -- for daring to challenge the official religious doctrines of their time. We'll see how this research goes... I have a lot of reading to do in the next two weeks, and not just for this paper.

I'm also facilitating a conference call this evening about the Unitarian traditions of communion and catechism in Transylvania. It's been good to revisit these theological questions, because school has really pulled me away from thinking about religion as much as I did when I was doing it full time. Part of the heretic's struggle is about listening to our discernment when it contradicts our traditions, or goes against the current of all the people around us. I've heard so many painful stories in my ministry from people who have had to learn to trust the voice inside them, and work to keep that voice honest and courageous. Because our religious identities are also so tied into our families and our ethnic identities and ideas about what it means to be a good person, it's not just like quitting one club and joining another -- it's like pulling up all your roots and transplanting yourself into new ground, which may or not sustain you.

See? This is why I love studying science and religion together -- I get pulled into such amazing topics.

I'm also realizing that I haven't blogged about my amazing trip to Transylvania over winter break... that's going to have to wait until I get more of my homework done!

Timing is Everything...

2007-12-05T12:55:00.001-06:00

…even more so in blogging than in comedy, not that the two don’t overlap somewhat. (So says the guy who hasn't posted an entry in almost three months... that's irony, folks.)

The Nobel-winning co-discoverer of DNA Dr. James Watson drew fire about six weeks ago for his controversial claims that people of African descent have lower intelligence. After that story had hit the papers, I began a blog entry about Watson, wanting to explore how society responds when our scientific celebrities are caught with their foot in their mouth.

When it became clear that my post would be late enough not to be a very fresh perspective, I gave up on it and paid attention to my mounting load of homework instead. This past weekend, however, I was in Boston at the annual conference of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R), the organization of Institutional Review Boards, who provide protective oversight to human subjects research. I’ve been serving on a Madison hospital’s IRB for the past year, and this was my first exposure to the international network joining all of these local IRBs.

I was struck during one keynote lecture, though, that Watson’s remarks may actually be worth another look, now that we’ve had some time to absorb the controversy. I was interested in the conference lecturer’s use of another quote by Watson: “We used to think that our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.” After reading this quote, the speaker laughed at how not only was the content of the quote discredited, but implied also that Watson had discredited himself even as a potential source of scientific wisdom. Not only had his remarks on race revealed him to a fool, but they also apparently disqualified him to speak even on the subject of his scientific expertise.

The last morning’s keynote speaker, another excellent lecturer, explored the history of racial and ethnic issues in diseases like Tay-Sachs disease and sickle-cell anemia. Because Tay-Sachs disease, for example, was so strongly identified with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, Jewish communities found ways to engineer the matchmaking process to reduce the number of babies born with this usually-fatal condition. In more liberal Jewish families, abortion was considered an option when it was possible, but Orthodox Jews instead took part in a fascinating project with the organization Dor Yeshorim to conduct blood tests on Jewish teens and prevent genetic carriers from marrying one another. The success of this project, however, led it into some controversial waters of its own –- it was later suggested that Jewish youth should also be tested for common (but less fatal) heritable diseases like Gaucher’s disease and cystic fibrosis. Despite the success of Dor Yeshorim’s work, it suddenly became clearer to the general public how risky this social engineering could be.

I recall this keynote lecture because the speaker quoted another brilliant Nobel laureate, Dr. Linus Pauling. Back in 1968, Pauling suggested another approach to reduce the incidence of disease: carriers of the sickle-cell mutation should be tattooed on their foreheads with some symbol of their genetic status to prevent them from falling in love with one another.

Well, not surprisingly, I was disappointed to read such a draconian suggestion from a respected scientist and humanitarian. It has started me thinking once again of this category of scientific celebrity: why is it that we come to see respected scientists as infallible sources, and why is it that we also give them a blank check to broadcast opinions on subjects unrelated to their field of study?

"The Lives of Others"

2007-09-20T14:48:00.000-05:00

Since I've been remiss in sharing my interests about Eastern Europe lately, I wanted to share that I saw a powerful movie on this topic a couple of weeks ago, on a rare evening with no more homework to do. Or perhaps I was neglecting to do the homework I had.

Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) is set in 1984 East Berlin, and follows the moral trajectory of Gerd Wiesler, a idealistic member of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. As Wiesler follows the lives of a celebrated playwright and a successful actress and their social circle, he begins to see the petty personal motives behind their surveillance, and finds himself feeling understanding and sympathy for them. He begins to intervene in subtle ways, covering his tracks so that he continues to appear the model spy to his supervisors.

This is not an easy film to watch, and it's hard not to be overwhelmed by the dehumanizing work of the Stasi, perhaps even more painful because we see that everyday people, capable of sympathy and little acts of kindness, filled its ranks. It's also hard not to come away with a sense of dread for our own time, and the recognition of how easily this history repeats itself. I agree with the most damning criticism of the film, that a Stasi agent could almost certainly not get away with Wiesler's fabrications, because agents always had other agents spying on them. If the film could have successfully portrayed this complex level of oppressiveness and still tell a credible story, it would have been brilliant.

But I highly recommend the movie, nonetheless. It's extremely well-made and acted, and the moral journey of its characters is expressed in the subtlest ways. And it doesn't sugarcoat how demoralizing and dehumanizing the police state is... an important reminder for those of us willing to sell everything for the promise of security.

The Privileged Place of Religious Thought

2007-09-14T06:37:00.000-05:00

Whew, I've had a full month. Before the semester started, I made some time for a drive back to the St. Louis area to see my family and help take care of business there. The trip was not helped by the fact that I had fallen down a flight of stairs the day before while doing my laundry, but all in all it was nice to visit, and nice to be reminded how much I appreciate living in Madison.

My family has a complicated religious identity. Both sides are Catholic -- one Irish and French, the other Irish and German. Many of us, especially my parents' generation and younger, have left Catholicism for something else. Most of my apostates-in-arms haven't chosen another identity to replace it, although a few of us have ended up in various flavors of Protestantism. Except for one notable family member, this religious diversity has never really been a problem for us -- the one statement I hear again and again is, "I'm just glad they've found something that works for them." Church is understood to be a mostly positive force in people's lives, and loyalty to family trumps loyalty to a particular religion. I've been very lucky to have such a loyal family, and I'm sure that my affirmation of religious diversity started with my their respectful treatment of one another and of me.

During this most recent visit back to the nest, I had a conversation that reminded me of how high a value my family places on respecting one another's various beliefs. Aside from reminding me how fortunate I am, it also got me to thinking about the special status religious thought holds.

If someone held a mistaken scientific perspective, like "I've heard that you can open your electronic car door lock with your cellphone," we wouldn't likely be reluctant to correct them. But religious beliefs seem to be beyond reproach for many of us.

Female genital mutilation is perhaps a more concrete example. I know that some people have been hesitant to give this ancient practice the criticism it deserves, partly because of its (false) association with Islam. It's not actually advocated by Muslim teachings, but is a tribal practice that pre-dates Islam. I'd like to think that, if it were admitted that it's based in men's fear of female sexuality, we'd be quick to censure it. But cultural relativism, buttressed by the special power that religious belief holds, actually kept many people from criticizing this crippling practice.

I'm guessing that this "hands-off" approach has been how our nation has tried to make peace with its own religious diversity, by placing religion in a special category. The new visibility of atheism in our culture may threaten this privileged place, though, and I'm waiting to see what the result is.

In the meantime, I'm taking some amazing courses and expect that I'll have a lot to write about once I've gotten my bearings. I'm going to be starting my research on the influence of Soviet ideology on science in Eastern Europe, and hopefully also looking at the spread of Enlightenment ideals in this same region two centuries earlier. And the quote for the day is from my Latin class, Sapere aude! -- Dare to know!

Not All History Is Grim

2007-08-08T18:08:00.002-05:00

Some very cool anthropology reported today in the New York Times: the origins of modern humanity are not as simple as many of us have thought.

For more than a century, futurists have been predicting that science has essentially already uncovered everything interesting. Even before the work of Einstein turned our understanding of the universe on its ear, people were lamenting the end of significant discovery. A big, wet raspberry to all of them!

Today's story raises a challenge to the popular assumption that Homo sapiens (the ironic description of modern humanity) descended in a relatively neat lineage from our distant ancestors. Rather than Homo erectus emerging from Homo habilis almost 2 million years ago, a fossil discovery in Kenya suggests instead that the two species co-existed in the same lake basin for around half a million years. And, for some reason, apparently remained separate species. Our ancestry is more complex than we laypeople have generally realized.

Incidentally, there's a post over at Ed Brayton's blog about the oversimplifications and misunderstandings we find in news reports about this finding. Good, articulate stuff from Ed, as usual.

Anytime we feel bored by the universe, when we feel smug about our mastery of the world within us and around us, creation reminds us just how messy and deeply cool all of this is.

Thoughtcrime

2007-08-08T12:53:00.000-05:00

While we're deciding whether to care about Barry Bonds' record-breaking home run, I thought I'd look forward with some anticipation of learning more about the role of fraud in science. I'm going to be taking a course this fall in the history of the Soviet Union and Central Europe, and I'm especially interested in using that opportunity to explore how science and ideology have interacted in that context.

One of the most notorious examples from the history of science is the practice of science in the Soviet Union. And perhaps the most infamous story of Soviet ideology perverting science is that of agronomist Trofim Lysenko(1898-1976), who synthesized Communism and biology in opposition to Mendel's genetic theory. Famines in the Soviet empire had created a desperate desire for science that would support socialist principles and promise increased crop yields. Techniques like the winter storage of wet wheat seed were promoted with the assurance of radically increased harvests, but experimental results were never able to confirm the claims of Lysenko's labs. Other scientists whose work did not conform to the dictates of Lysenkoism were imprisoned, and hundreds of them died in this purge, one of the most awful periods in the history of science.

Serving under both Stalin and Khrushchev, Lysenko enjoyed more than three decades of media attention and immunity from opposition. After prominent Soviet physicists in the early 1960s denounced his work as fraudulent science, he was removed from the directorship of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences, and was publicly disgraced, not only for the misrepresentation of experimental results, but also for the death of millions in the famines that followed, notably in China. Lysenko's name is remembered primarily as an egregious example of allowing politics to distort science.

Feels good to beat up on the former "Evil Empire," doesn't it? Guess where I'm headed next with this.

Science under the Bush administration is a disgrace. (And, no, the disgrace didn't start with this administration, but it has certainly reached a personal best.) While not a human rights disaster of the scale of Lysenkoism, I fully believe that history will look back on this time as a grim one for science and reason. The political perversion of science education, especially in the repression of evolution teachings; the muzzling of women's clinics and other health care providers in providing or even communicating about abortion or birth control; the culture of deceit and lack of accountability in agencies like NASA, the EPA and the FDA; the suppression of information about environmental degradation and pillage; the political pressure and even censorship of public health leaders like the Surgeon Generals; and the widespread deterioration of science literacy will leave a disastrous legacy. Above all, the sway of conservative Protestant ideology and politics over the work of science will haunt us just as Lysenko's story continues to haunt the remnants of the former Soviet empire.

*

2007-08-05T13:55:00.000-05:00

We're learning that there's a special category of "firsts" and "bests" in the world of famous feats -- those that we now feel obligated to qualify with a "*".

The New York Times reported a couple of days ago on Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, discredited for having fabricated his ground-breaking successes at human stem cell cloning. It turns out that Dr. Hwang did accomplish something spectacular and noteworthy, just not what he claimed to have accomplished.

Dr. Hwang and his laboratory are apparently the first to produce stem cells by the process of parthenogenesis, that is, reproduction from an unfertilized egg. While this is perhaps not quite as spectacular as actually cloning stem cells, it is a significant achievement. Reading the reporting on this, however, what I notice is emphasized is Hwang's tarnished reputation and public humiliation. No matter how important his successful parthenogenesis was, we will mentally mark it with an "*". As if this weren't traumatic enough for the scientific world, the trustworthiness of the peer-reviewed scientific journal has also been called into question, because respected publications failed to catch the fabrication.

This reveals just how critical scientists consider our professional reputations. It's not enough merely to discover something exciting; the credibility of our work also depends upon the reputation we've built. It's clear that the peer-review system is not infallible, and that getting published does not guarantee an article's truthfulness. (Of course, having a good reputation still does not constitute an iron-clad guarantee, but it helps.)

At the same time that Dr. Hwang's laboratory was back in the news, the world has also been {irony} waiting with bated breath {/irony} for Barry Bonds to break Hank Aaron's career home run record. In a manner similar to Hwang's, Bonds' achievement will always be tarnished with that pesky asterisk, a reminder that his years of excellence are offset by charges of performance-enhancing drug use. Times columnist Selena Roberts even went so far as to call Bonds a "vainglorious impostor" to Aaron's record. (She also indicts a larger circle of enablers, but pulls no punches in criticizing the artificiality of Bonds' record.)

I do agree with Roberts' criticism on one important point: the culture of celebrity moves us to do some stupid, dishonorable things. When so much is at stake dependent on being first, or most, or best, of course people will sacrifice honor and integrity for the prize. Maybe the question I'm left with is, How will the rest of us refuse to participate in the larger system that makes these scandals inevitable?

Reports of the Death of Colonialism...

2007-08-02T16:04:00.000-05:00

...have been greatly exaggerated.

An article in today's New York Times reports on Russia's successful expedition to the North Pole this past weekend. Nothing newsworthy there, you might think, except the team planted their titanium version of the Russian flag two miles under the ice, on the Arctic Ocean's floor. A pair of mini-submarines, Mir-1 and Mir-2 (creative with the names, those guys are), entered the ocean through a hole cut in the ice, and carried explorers through the total darkness to their goal.

Pretty neat stuff, from a scientific perspective; I hope that there will be underwater photos passed around. But the interesting part of the story from my corner of the world is the connection between exploration and ownership. In the Times' reporting of the story, the expedition and media attention were scripted to bolster the case for Russia's ownership of that territory, based on the extent of the nation's continental shelf. Pravda's (English version) reporting made a little more of the scientific significance of the expedition, but also underscored the posturing that the effort represented.

I was bothered on the first reading of this by the voyage's egregiously political purpose (two of the crew are members of Russia's Parliament, according to the Times.) What bothers me more at this point, though, is the implicit link between exploration and ownership. A quote from Canada's foreign minister Peter MacKay, sums it up:

This isn’t the 15th century; you can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say "We’re claiming this territory."

Interesting thought. We haven't had to deal with this issue much lately here on terra firma, thinking we had pretty much already raised our leg on every corner of the planet. However, the ocean floor beneath the North Pole is a potentially rich source of oil and minerals, and so nations are jockeying for position to be able to claim the "rights" to that land. (The thought of us drilling and mining beneath those ice shelves leaves me sleepless, but that's another rant.) It's a problematic idea that we should be able to claim pillaging rights to the ocean's floor as if we were calling "shotgun" for a ride in the car, and doubly problematic that scientific exploration has to be motivated by this posturing.

One Thing At A Time

2007-07-14T14:46:00.000-05:00

I've been getting messages from colleagues who are religious professionals, wondering when I'm going to knock off all this hairsplitting about science and give religious thought a crack at the spotlight. And my friends involved with Eastern Europe want to know when I'm going to give a little bit of time to history in that fascinating part of the world.

All in good time, my pretties... all in good time.

One of the qualities that I'm hoping will make this blog interesting is my commitment to taking religious thought seriously. I've been disappointed, although not particularly surprised, at the dismissive attitudes toward religion in many of the science blogs that I otherwise respect and enjoy. The conventional wisdom (in that fishbowl, at least) is that religion or spirituality necessarily includes supernaturalism and irrationality. I admit that most religious perspectives are founded on the supernatural, but not all of them. The ones that are not antagonistic toward science are what allow me to hope that some fruitful co-existence might be found. More on this as my studies progress.

I'm going to be enrolled this fall in "Science in the Enlightenment" and "History of the Soviet Union and Eastern/Central Europe," so I know that I'll have many opportunities to bring these interests together.

Important Tension

2007-07-14T14:08:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Orac, who put a plug for Occam's Trowel on his blog Respectful Insolence today. Since I suspect that might draw a few scientists this way, I want to touch on an important tension that I'm encountering regularly in my studies.

The view of science from a practicing scientist's perspective is not the same as what philosophers and historians of science see. Chris Rowan has a post on Highly Allochthonous about one place where this tension is being played out. When I was still in physics, it was a basic assumption that we were looking at the world objectively, untainted by the subjectivity, wish-fulfillment and political maneuvering that other disciplines suffer. This, in fact, was ultimately why I left physics, I think: our professors never discussed the limitations of scientific knowledge, or the ways in which science had not simply reported the world "as it essentially was". I found it pretty disillusioning that the practice of science didn't seem to live up to its ideal.

Studying the history and philosophy of science has been an exciting reintroduction to that world, however -- one that reflects science's status as a human activity, and is all the more complex because of our fingerprints all over it. The choices that scientists make about what to observe, how to observe it, how to interpret it, and how to communicate it render science something other than objective... but I'm still learning what that other is. I've found that scientists in general don't like having their subjectivity questioned, as if it impugns their integrity and professionalism. Don't get me wrong -- I still think it's the best approach we have for understanding how the world works, but that it's far more interesting than the simplistic picture we put forward. Especially with the attacks coming from the land of pseudoscience, we want to defend the integrity of its methods and product.

The question that's on my mind today is how to reconcile these two views of science: the practicing scientist's striving for objectivity, and the historical/philosophical view that science is not perfectly objective. Is there some common ground to be found here?

A Misguided Sense of Fairness

2007-07-12T08:09:00.001-05:00

Oh, and since I've just mentioned pseudoscience, I want to point out an often-misunderstood (or willfully misunderstood) point about science. It's not a playground where the rules can be changed to make it more "fair".

An excellent Guardian article by Jonathan Wolff and equally insightful blog response by Jake Young help make this point. For all of Fox News' work to provide "equal time" to flat-earthers and corporate shills, science maintains its own criteria for entry into the world of credibility.

A common appeal by New-Agers and other pseudo-scientists is that the ivory tower of science just doesn't want to share any of its power with pioneers in the exciting new fields of woo. Sorry, folks, the reason that science has been such a powerfully successful force is that it functions in a very conservative manner. Articles gain trustworthiness in being reviewed by credible scientific peers, not out of some naive sense of "fair play". If your new idea is a scientifically valid one, have no fear: it will stand up to the peer-review process. If not, well, wishful thinking won't make it so.

Gregg Mitman on The Diane Rehm Show

2007-07-11T19:36:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to The Diane Rehm Show for several years now, and she continues to be my favorite radio personality. I'm sorry that we don't get to hear her show live on public radio in Madison, but I still go to her website regularly to listen to her archived programs. She does exceptional work, in my opinion, and I get quite a few ideas from her interviews.

UW History of Science professor Gregg Mitman was featured on a recent show to talk about Breathing Space, his book on the history of respiratory allergies and their treatments. Interesting stuff, and worth listening to.

Disclaimer

2007-07-11T11:09:00.000-05:00

While I'm on the subject of boundaries and their usefulness, it seems appropriate that I say out loud: comments posted that are off-topic will be deleted. I'm not interested in this becoming a forum for others to grind their personal axes, nor am I interested in debating the relevance of comments that I have chosen to delete.

And this is specifically to you, Robin -- no more about your grudge-match with the UUA and the Montreal church. Last warning.

Good Fences and Good Neighbors

2007-06-28T10:24:00.000-05:00

Had a great discussion a couple of weeks ago with others from the department about the early ecological work done on the Illinois river near Peoria (below) in the late 19th century.

One of the more spirited parts of our conversation was about the role of the innumerable fishermen, hunters, and other non-professionals who assisted early ecologists in understanding the relationship between the river and the floodplains surrounding it. Clearly these locals were not themselves scientists, but is what they were doing "science"?

Professors Tom Broman and Lynn Nyhart argued for the importance of clear boundaries between science and non-science in this situation. This has been on my mind a lot lately, as I've been reading A People's History of Science by Clifford Conner (right), and he argues pretty persuasively for more explicit recognition of the laypeople whose experience and knowledge have been appropriated by the professionals.

This week, at the same lunchtime discussion, we wrangled over the first couple chapters of Conner, and argued about many of the same issues related to how we distinguish between science and non-science. One particular question was, "who does science?" Conner's book advocates for the nameless laborers whose work served as the foundation for celebrated scientists; so intent is he on undoing the "Great Man" model of scientific history that he often appears to be saying that the only science done was by these fishermen, midwives, and other unrecognized workers. Being a work of popular science, Conner perhaps wasn't the best choice for an academic lunch discussion, although I appreciate his intent to provide a more complex picture of how science emerged. I also hope that the world of science will become a little more aware of how dependent it is on society in general, and help non-scientists to better understand what science is, and why we should all support and protect its work from erosion by pseudoscience and political machinations.

The Way Things Really Are

2007-06-26T15:09:00.000-05:00

I'm realizing as I get more enthusiastic about my reading how much the impulse that first attracted me to Unitarian Universalism is also pulling me into the history of science. Both of these attractions have developed around a core belief: that knowledge is a human undertaking that is emerging and evolving, rather than an a priori entity.

What started me down the road away from my work with the space program and toward ministry was the recognition that faith is more than I had thought it was -- rather than being an unchanging possession, I came to see it as an evolving quality of human life. By faith I mean not belief, but ultimate trust in a center or centers of value and power, "our way of finding coherence in and giving meaning to the multiple forces and relations that make up our lives" (kudos to James Fowler for his definition). Reading that someone else recognized that faith is not a thing that we find or lose, but an evolving quality of relationship and commitment, was a thought liberating enough to inspire me to a change of career.

My seminary studies helped me to understand the same about religion, the institutional expression of faith and belief -- it too has evolved across the course of human history: prophetic voices have been embraced or disregarded, newly-discovered statements of wisdom upheld or censored, official canons constructed and promoted. Even the most revered sources have a story.

This has not been an uncontroversial claim. When early liberal theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher (right) tried to reconcile the worldview of the Enlightenment with Protestant theology, they came to see that religion could be more fruitfully unpacked when they used the tools of historical research upon it. Searching religious scriptures for misspellings, additions and deletions, stylistic evidence and other artifacts has helped us to better understand their true authorship and the time and place of their writing and incorporation into their accepted canon. Religious studies have thus become more than just accepting the official version and trying to understand its importance for our lives -- instead, we are drawn onto a winding trail of cultural influences, politics, and poorly-known sources. In my mind, this makes religious life infinitely more interesting, but others would disagree with me, and some quite strongly. To portray scriptures as a body of messages that have been cobbled together, edited with a variety of agenda in mind, and accepted or rejected based on the vagaries of church politics -- well, some feel that this robs religion of its power. If it's not divine and incontrovertible truth, they say, what good is it? What's the point?

I would reply, the point is that it's true to life; the point is that it is a product of time and place, just like everything else in our lives.

I reminisce about discovering these ideas in the religious world because I'm now drawn to the same ones in the history of science. In my training in physics, I swallowed the conventional understanding of science, that we were just reporting on the world as it was. It was this objectivity, we agreed, that gives science its authority and its success in helping us to understand and manipulate the world around us.

This sentiment is summed up in the words of German historian Leopold von Ranke (right), who spoke of writing history wie es eigentlich gewesen, "as it essentially was". von Ranke's work marks the beginning of modern history, when we began to question the objectivity of historical reports and to recognize that they, too, have a story.

Even science has a history. This is undoubtedly the point at which the most people get hung up on when I tell them that I'm studying the history of science. Rather than portray science as knowledge waiting fully-formed for us to discover it, successive theories have acknowledged in more and more complex ways how it too has evolved. Not surprisingly, I find these far more interesting than viewing science as simply "the way things are".

Here's to You, Sir Fleming

2007-06-05T12:01:00.001-05:00

A tip of the latté mug to Sir Alexander Fleming, credited with discovering in 1928 the power of the penicillium mold to inhibit bacterial growth, and the many others whose labors made penicillin a readily-available treatment.

I've spent the last few days with the right side of my face swollen, the result of a gum infection after a couple of dental crowns. The infection spread through my jaw and beyond with alarming speed, and I'm mindful of how miserable I'd still be this morning without the intervention of Penicillin V, the orally-active form of penicillin. A century ago, or on a deserted island, I would have had the tooth pulled or endured feeling like a throbbing water balloon for considerably longer while my natural defenses worked to keep my infection from becoming encephalitis.

Now that the pressure in my face has subsided, and I'm capable of something more thoughtful than Spider Solitaire, I thought that my first action should be one of gratitude. Sir Fleming, and the many others who have helped free our lives from the threat of infection, here's to you.

The Hands that Rock the Cradle

2007-05-23T18:45:00.001-05:00

Just returned from a meeting with three members of my congregation who have written a children's religious education curriculum on evolution, which we have tested with our fourth- and fifth-graders this year. Scientific understanding is an important source of inspiration for Unitarian Universalism, and I want so much for our children to be scientifically knowledgeable in a future that looks increasingly like it will be populated with scientific illiterates. I also want for them to be able to feel the joy and wonder at the world that so many of us in the disciplines of science feel.

One story that I especially treasure is from the 10-year-old daughter of one of our staff, who has taken this evolution course at the same time that she has been learning essentially the same material in her public school a couple of weeks later. Seeming to know all of the material ahead of the rest of her class, she confessed that she's been learning all of it in Sunday School. I'll bet her teachers are enjoying having a child speaking from a religious perspective that understands and affirms evolution!

We're going to be talking more about how to improve this curriculum after its first year of testing, and one of the suggestions I had was about the need to make sure that the teachers themselves are feeling inspired before they can inspire the kids. As tempting as it is for religious education teachers to just teach the content, especially when the content is something as informational as science, the sense of meaning and wonder is at least as important as the information itself: knowing that we are part of something enormous, complex and ever-changing, seeing the universe's story as our own story, and feeling a duty to preserve the beauty of the natural world.

An important -- and poorly acknowledged -- chapter in the history of science is how we have communicated it to our young people. To raise a next generation of potential scientists, we will have to overcome the anti-intellectualism, the lack of imagination, and the rapacious consumerist attitudes toward nature that are threatening the practice of science today. As under-appreciated as science education is, the values and ethics that lie at its heart are as important as any concern I can imagine.

A Grand Woman of Science

2007-05-18T15:16:00.000-05:00

I spent this morning officiating at a memorial service for a very dear woman in our congregation, Suki Croan, who died on Monday of a brain tumor. It's been a hard few months for her family, because both she and her husband Mel developed terminal diseases at about the same time. He has late-stage cancer, but was fortunately able to be at Suki's memorial, and he even stole the show with his typically eloquent and witty words.

All of the people who rose to speak at the service shared essentially the same message about Suki: that she had a generous and open heart, and shared her gifts and her personality abundantly with everyone who knew her. What I was struck by in the group of her admirers was the number of female scientists who had worked with her at Forest Product Laboratories -- clearly, Suki's achievements included more than just her own success. Although she was completely unassuming in person, she had earned degrees in pharmacy, mycology, and microbiology, and produced a significant amount of important research in the interaction between fungi and wood tissue, especially relating to the production of ethanol.

I raise a glass to Suki in this forum because it's easy to forget the subtle (and not-so-subtle) pressures on women in science. One of the things we have historically told ourselves about science is that it's just the reporting of "the way things really are," and that anyone with a commitment to this venture can make a life as a scientist. A theme of this blog will be just how much science is actually shaped by social concerns, for better or worse. There's no shortage of good blogging right now about women's experiences of barriers against their work in this profession, and I'll link to those bloggers when I can explore the topic in depth. For now, I wanted to acknolwedge one particular woman who not only succeeded in a male-dominated discipline, but also devoted a lot of her life's energy to helping other women into professional lives.

The raison d'être for Occam's Trowel

2007-05-07T11:02:00.000-05:00

As I think about committing more time to blogging here, I'm clarifying in my own mind just what I'd like to focus on. Here are some (very preliminary) thoughts:

- the history of the demarcation problem: that is, how we have decided what is and is not science;
- the history of reason's role in religious thought;
- the propagation of early scientific thought;
- understanding of the history of science outside Western Europe and the US;
- the different understandings of science among professional scientists, philosophers and historians of science, and the general public;
- public literacy and illiteracy in science; and
- public literacy and illiteracy in religion.

Why History of Science?

2007-05-06T21:13:00.000-05:00

One of the questions that people have had about my new program of study is, why affiliate with UW's History of Science department? They don't see any connection to my core interest -- religion and science -- and, in fact, they're often surprised that History of Science even exists as a topic, much less an entire department.

The University of Wisconsin was the first to create a department for this subject, and it's no small controversy that so much energy is put into studying the history of science. The historicity of science is something I'm definitely going to write about later, because it's not obvious about why it would be contentious to say that science has a history. It's enough to say for now that UW's program has attracted some strong faculty with backgrounds in religion and science. In particular, Ron Numbers is well-known for his work on the history of "creation science". I also enjoyed studying with Mike Shank last semester, and am looking forward to enjoying his expertise in medieval science.

My current interests are in early science and how it relates to religious thought, especially on the fringes of the Western world. I lived in Eastern Europe for a time, and I'd like to look at how religion and science interacted there in the past; I'm guessing that the story there isn't simply a copy of that in Western Europe. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself; more on this later!

Up and Running

2007-05-05T16:24:00.000-05:00

Well, although I know that I won't have lots of time to contribute to this blog in the near future, I thought that I should at least get it started. As I leave my position with First Unitarian Society and move into full-time student status again, I'm hoping that I'll be able to make more time for writing. In the meantime, I should be finishing my paper on the history of the journal Zygon. More from me soon, I hope.