Cocktail Party Physics

two magesteria In the courtroom

Three years before he died, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, one of my favorite popularizers of science, published a book called Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, basically consigning the two subjects to different realms of thought and influence. Gould maintained that the two areas of inquiry asked and answered different questions that need not impinge on each other. The reaction was, well, reactionary and not all of it truly thoughtful. I thought at the time that many of the reviewers were hell-bent on developing their own Theory of Everything that reconciled all areas of human thought. Many scientists, skeptics, and atheists (sometimes embodied in one person) roundly denounced the work (and Gould, in the kind of low-blow ad hominem attacks they decry in others, I might add) for daring to try to "legitimize" religion or spirituality in the same breath as science.

This post is not about that.

I mention it because, as was inevitable, the question of whether a scientist can have any kind of religious faith or even just entertain the idea separately from his or her own professional work has now reached the courtroom stage in the case of Dr. C. Martin Gaskell, a  University of Nebraska astronomer who was turned down for a post by the University of Kentucky because an internet search of his name revealed he was an evangelical Christian who wasn't shy about writing about astronomy and the Bible. Gaskell has taken pains to point out that he is not a creationist and he does not have any problems with the theory of evolution. A department staff member, Sally A. Shafer,

found links to his notes for a lecture that explores, among other topics, how the Bible could relate to contemporary astronomy. “Clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with,” Ms. Shafer wrote, “but potentially evangelical.” . . . Francis J. Manion, Dr. Gaskell’s lawyer, said: “I couldn’t have made up a better quote. ‘We like this guy, but he is potentially Jewish’? ‘Potentially Muslim’?”

Put in those terms, this becomes not just an issue of scientific accuracy and honesty, but of censorship and, yes, plain ole bigotry.

The job Gaskell applied for was running the new UKentucky student observatory, which also involves lecturing publicly about science. Keep in mind that UKentucky is not far from the Creation Museum in the heart of the Bible Belt, which may have contributed to their jitters about hiring someone they perceive as working for the other side. But it may be that it's that perception that's the problem. One of the basic rules of discrimination and bigotry as that it lumps large numbers of people together in a single group without regard for individual differences. The terrorists who took down the Twin Towers in 2001 were Muslim; hence all Muslims are terrorists. Stated so baldly, bigotry is laughably simplistic to anyone with the ability to analyze and think for themselves—a trait I would hope scientists and education leaders would possess in abundance.

Now, bear with me for a moment and imagine you are a practicing Christian—not an unquestioning, blindly faithful zombie Christian, but a thoughtful, questioning, testing-your-faith kinda Christian—living near the University of Kentucky where Dr. Gaskell has just been hired, and you see an advertisement for this talk by Dr. Gaskell: "Modern Astronomy, the Bible and Creation." Back in the day, when I was a Jehovah's Witness, I had a really healthy curiosity about Life, the Universe, and Everything and a talk like this would have more than piqued my interest. Quite likely, I'd have trundled off to hear it, possibly dragging one or two others of my equally curious JW friends with me. Here's what I would have heard (PDF) according to his own summary:

I give my responses to some of the questions I am most frequently asked on the subject of the Bible and modern astronomy. I start out by emphasizing that many scientists and philosophers have strong religious beliefs and I give some quotes from famous scientists and philosophers. I list, and briefly discuss, some of the main theological interpretational viewpoints of the creation stories in Genesis. It is explained that there are more than just two extreme views on the origin of the universe and that the majority of scientists who are Christians adhere neither to the view that the Bible is irrelevant to the earth's origin (which exponents of atheistic evolution claim) nor the view that God made the earth essentially as it now is in six 24-hour periods about 6000 years ago (the “young earth creationist” position.) [emphasis mine] The origin of Bishop Ussher's date of creation is explained and the question of “days” in Genesis 1 is discussed. Examples of where modern astronomy is supporting the details of Genesis 1 are described. A list of suggested readings for those who wish to read more about Christianity, the Bible, and some of the scientific issues is appended.

Gaskell goes on to say that, "The main controversy has been between people at the two extremes (young earth creationists and humanistic evolutionists). 'Creationists' attack the science of 'evolutionists.' I believe that this sort of attack is very bad both scientifically and theologically. The 'scientific' explanations offered by 'creationists' are mostly very poor science." "Mostly very poor science," huh? Hmmm. And that would have piqued my interest too. Why is it poor science, I would have wondered? Further investigation would have followed—and did, in a similar situation, leading me to where I am now: skeptic in fact if not by affiliation, and Buddhist fellow-traveller.

Honestly, none of Gaskell's talk sounds Creationist to me. What Gaskell is actually doing is finding common ground with his audience, in this case the Bible, to talk about science, without distorting either. This is something Jennifer does with just about every post she writes, but her common ground is pop culture. And as a former fundy science nerd, I can testify that science history this reasonably presented would have been greeted with interest by any but the most fundamentalist of Christians, who are probably already a write-off. But that's not what happened in Kentucky. There was nothing reasonable about the response in Kentucky. Oh, no. There was, instead, a "rush to judgment."

In recent years there's been more than a hint of the hysterical witch hunt in the voices of some skeptics and scientists crusading (and yes, I use that word intentionally) against creationism and Intelligent Design. Phil Plait, the favorite Bad Astronomer of Cocktail Party Physics, addressed this at a recent TAM meeting in his inimitable way, in a talk called "Don't be a Dick":

Part II

Part III

Rather than seeing someone like Gaskell as a possible bridge between the reasonable, questioning, curious Christian community (and there is one; I've been part of it), UKentucky freaked out about a possible PR nightmare in hiring someone perceived as a narrow-minded pseudo-scientist. One thing I don't think you can accuse Dr. Gaskell of is being a pseudo-scientist. If you skim his publication lists (he's now at the University of Texas), you'll see he's co-authoring with legitimate scientists in his field, and publishing in all the usual places that "real" astronomers publish in. Not the Discovery Institute, but the American Astronomical Society's journal, and other well-known scientific journals.

Now, call me crazy, but I always thought the purpose of a university was to offer education. It's hard to educate people if you don't speak at least some of their language. Most Christians—most religious people of any stripe—feel that scientists not only don't speak their language, but are only interested in belittling them, not in having a reasonable conversation with them. So even if you have questions, as a religious or spiritually inclined person, who are you supposed to ask, when the scientists will just mock you? As Phil says in his talk, we should be "relying on the merits of the arguments, which is what critical thinking is all about, what evidence-based reasoning is about." Not vitriol. Not bigotry. Not prejudice.

The truth about the history of scientific thought that many modern scientists would like to shove under the rug is that it sprang out of the only educated community in the middle ages and Renaissance: church clerics. Before the Age of Enlightenment was the Age of Enlightenment, it was the Age of Faith, and you can take the boy outta the church, but you can't take the church outta the boy. References to God and creation are everywhere in the history of scientific inquiry, even if only used metaphorically. Why not use them, as Gaskell does, as a lever to open the doors of blind faith just a crack, to slip in some scientific fact? It accomplishes more than just telling people they are fools and morons. Skepticism isn't teaching people what to think; it's teaching people how to think. You don't accomplish that by telling them that everything they know is wrong.

I'm glad Gaskell is bringing this issue to court, because it's something the scientific community needs to confront about itself. By tarring all spiritual seekers with the same brush of ignorance, extremists in the the secular world in general and the skeptical community in particular reveal their own fear of the Other, the same kind of cheap, petty, ignorant fear that white supremacists, jihadists, and homophobes display. Not nice company to be lumped into, is it? Fear isn't rational, though. And that alone should wake you up, if you're one of those frothing at the mouth skeptic/atheists. Use the rational mind that God gave you, for Pete's sake.

China report

  I've been back from China for about a month and I'm still processing the experience, but I thought I'd tell you all a little about some of my observations in and out of the classroom. I was hired to teach English language and culture but really, in three weeks, there's not much language teaching you can do, so it mostly winds up being an English culture summer camp and conversation program. Which is great. There's a lot more learning of language that goes on in informal sessions than formal ones, and it was really a pleasure to get to know both the students and faculty of the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).

Harbin is an industrial city in the north of China, with a population around the same size as New York's. As Chinese cities goes, it's pretty new, springing up in the late 1800's when the Russians built a railroad from Vladivostok to a sleepy fishing village on the Songhua River for trade purposes. Russian Jews migrated there and helped build the city, giving Harbin its first hospitals, schools and libraries as well as two synagogues and a sizable cemetery that's still lovingly cared for by the Chinese. At one time the city housed an international, multiethnic population and was called the Paris of China, and passed through both Russian and Japanese hands before becoming wholly Chinese. Now, its population is almost exclusively Chinese, with a few Japanese and Korean residents. (If you're interested in pictures, you can see what I took at my Flickr account, or our fearless leader, Marcy Bauman's. You can also take a look at my blog posts about the trip.)

The city has a number of universities and top-notch schools. HIT is the third-best university in China, on par with our MIT and like MIT, focused on science and technology fields. The students are chosen from the top 2.5 percent of those taking the national admissions exam, so they are smart, smart kids, and HIT tends to promote from within its graduate population. One thing the language barrier often does is disguise just how darn smart folks are, and I know I was underestimating the intelligence of most of the people I was talking to. The few technical conversations we had were as much hampered by my lack of technical vocabulary as their lack of English vocabulary. I met aerospace, civil, environmental and all other kinds of engineers, materials scientists, chemists, computer scientists and new media specialists, economists and architects, and people specializing in technological innovation, with research areas as diverse as composite materials, solid oxide fuel cells, optical thin films, and microporous and mesoporous materials. Many of my students were studying alternative energy technologies and environmental sciences.

These last two subjects are big issues for China, and you can see the need for them all over Harbin itself. The weather was beautiful during the first week of my stay: warm and dry and windy. I was really puzzled when people kept asking me if I found Harbin's air dirty. And then the next week we had a temperature inversion and I understood the question. You can see the difference in the two photos I took from my 15th floor window on campus:

There's blue sky underneath that smog, believe it or not. And that's the way it was for most of my visit. It's not eye-stinging or smelly like the air in Pittsburgh was when I lived there in the late 70's, but it makes New York on a bad day seem edenic. Ozone shmozone. Most of what's in the air is not car exhaust but coal smoke. There were several coal-fired electricity plants on campus, and that's where most of China's power comes from. At least in Harbin, cars are a relatively small part of the problem because there just aren't that many per capita yet (not so for Beijing and Shanghai). That doesn't stop the traffic from being completely insane, but that has more to do with the total disregard for signs (if there are any) and rules of the road than numbers. And the donkey carts don't help, either, I'm sure. Especially the ones on the expressway. Or the massively laden trikes.

If Harbin is any indication, one of China's biggest priority has got to be infrastructure. I'm used to not being able to drink the water when I go somewhere out of the country, but in Harbin no one drinks the water. You can wash in it, and wash your clothes and dishes, but you can't drink it because there are no purification plants and largely unregulated wastewater dumping. Cooking and drinking water is all bottled, which adds its own problems in recycling (that's what the guy on the trike is hauling, incidentally). In one of the first conversations I had with the faculty when school started, I spoke with a prof whose specialty is construction materials and engineering and we talked about the lack of regulation in China, not only in building materials and codes but in industry as well. Where we have legislation like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (however badly they're enforced), China has nothing but local committee oversight, which is subject to bribery and corruption. (Interestingly, while I was writing this, the New York Times published the first of a series called "Toxic Waters: America's Growing Pollution Problems." So it's not like we're doing such a great job either. But the major difference is that we have the legislative framework to deal with it.) There seems to be a major push in Harbin, to correct some of these issues, at least on the wastewater front; streets all over the city were torn up both for new sewage and water lines and for a new subway the city is putting in. And many of my students were keenly interested in environmental issues and abatement technology. I got a lot of questions from both faculty and students about how pollution is managed in the States (and was grateful for 10 years of editing environmental impact statements to give me the background to answer them).

But the two issues that really struck me as an educator and a science geek were the attitude toward education in general and how different it is talking about science without religion getting in the way. I was teaching mostly incoming freshmen and sophomores, and not only were they some of the brightest students I'll ever have the privilege of teaching, I've never had students who were so eager or so respectful. This program was basically a three-week summer camp and still there was nothing my students balked at doing. Homework? Sure, no problem! Write in class? No problem. Ask me awkward questions about Tibet? Sure, happy to. Eat lunch with you? Absolutely. Students were on time, every day, or almost humiliatingly apologetic if they were late. They stood up to answer me in class. And thanked me after each one. After day one, I was reeling with culture shock. This is not to say my students here are not hungry or grateful, but in a completely different way. My students here know they've missed out on something and want to make up for that so they can get good jobs and support their families. The intellectual hunger in Chinese students is just that: intellectual hunger for new ideas, new ways of thinking, new information.They have a visceral love of learning you see in some of the best schools here and with individual students even at third tier U.S. schools. In part, that's because getting into college is so competitive, even more so than here. The major difference, and something I missed, was that Chinese students won't often argue with you. They're so respectful, and often used to learning by rote, that disagreeing with a professor seems rude to them. Teachers are really important people in China, and paid accordingly. We could really learn something from that.

And yet, one of the faculty and I had a conversation about this and he insisted that U.S. schools were still superior because we taught students to think independently. Gosh I wish that were still true. As I recently said in another conversation over here, our schools are leaning more and more toward shaping students for particular careers and offering them skill sets, rather than the ability to learn quickly and think for themselves, which can be applied in any career. (I'm not saying you don't need skill sets, especially in the sciences, but along with that, you need critical thinking skills and imagination, rather than just the skill sets. It's what sets a technician apart from a scientist.)

The unit that I taught was about science in the U.S. and covered a little history of science (the development of the scientific method, major discoveries, major players); the two-way exchange between science and culture; women in science; science in entertainment (thanks, Jen!); communicating science; current controversies; and how the public views science. We watched a couple of CSI episodes, Minority Report and The Matrix, and a couple of clips from Babylon 5. Some of the entertainment was familiar, and some not, but the references that went right over everyone's head were the religious and mythological allusions in The Matrix—not surprising, since that same stuff goes right over my head in Chinese opera. More confusing for them, though, was the whole idea that people would actually disbelieve scientific fact in favor of religious teachings or myth. When I described the controversies about teaching evolution in public schools and what ID and creationism were, they were clearly boggled. When I asked how many of them had some sort of spiritual belief, whether Buddhism, Confucianism, Islamic, or Christian, not one hand went up. (Just to clarify, each of those religions is legal in China; there is an active Buddhist temple in the city, some of the faculty are Buddhist, and though the Jewish population is long-gone, their synagogues were not razed during the Cultural Revolution as were most of the Christian churches. So this wasn't fear of reprisal that kept them from professing religious belief. It was simple lack of interest.) For the Chinese, if anything plays this role in forming or deforming scientific thought, it's politics, and I think that's less true now than it was during, say, the Cultural Revolution.

And these two facts, if anything, are what's going to allow the Chinese to roll over us economically in ten or twenty years. Not their sheer numbers, but their respect for education and their lack of muddying religious issues. They're intensely proud of their country and their accomplishments, which are indeed impressive, and that pride and ambition and ability will carry them a long way. Unless the US gets its priorities straight (more money for education, better pay for teachers, more access to quality education for everyone), we're soon going to be buying more than cheap tchotchkes, outsourced electronics, and pirated movies from China. We'll be importing technology we should have invented and produced ourselves.

tongues of fire

There's very little these days that will keep me up past my usual bedtime; chalk it up to one too many all-nighters in college, but unless I get engrossed in a really good novel and just have to see how everything ends, I'll usually opt for a good night's sleep. But Saturday night (or, technically, early Sunday morning), I had the rare opportunity to make my first guest appearance on the Coast to Coast AM radio program with host Art Bell.

I was a bit nervous about the prospect. It had been an especially hellish week, and I was exhausted, physically and mentally. I almost never listen to any kind of radio (no particular reason, I just don't), so I only had a passing acquaintance with Bell's show, and therefore had no idea what to expect. Plus, it meant staying up all night: on the East Coast (where I'll be until April), the show runs from 2 AM to 5 AM. This is not a time frame in which I am at my most cogent and articulate, and Bell likes to talk about some pretty far-out subjects, only some of which I'm familiar with, so it would be a tough gig even when all the neurons are firing. So I was pleasantly surprised to find I genuinely enjoyed the experience, and snagged a good book recommendation in the process (Tess Gerritsen's Gravity).

Much of the credit for this belongs to Bell, who is a gracious, genial host, skilled at putting his guests at ease, without letting them off too easy. I was an obvious outsider -- an avowed skeptic amidst his loyal late-night following. It was a bit like walking into a cocktail party where everyone knows everyone else, and trying to join a conversation that's been in full swing for quite some time. But Bell made me feel welcome, and while neither one of us changed the other's mind about anything, I felt we had a friendly, interesting exchange. Among other things, we discussed my religious upbringing and current agnostic status (a rare area of agreement). It reminded me that I've been meaning to write something about glossolalia -- a.k.a., speaking in tongues -- since last fall, when researchers at the University of Pennsylvania briefly made headlines with the first real-time images of the brain's activity while speaking in tongues.

My first experience with the phenomenon occurred at the age of 9 or so, when my mother took me to a Pentecostal prayer meeting. I was a kid; I was curious; and it sounded kinda cool. But my skeptical tendencies were emerging even then. No matter how much the evangelist laid hands on me and prayed, I just couldn't do it -- even though there were kids running around younger than me, babbling away with wild abandon. My strongest inclination was to kick the evangelist in the shins so he'd stop pressuring me to attempt something I clearly had no affinity for.  But I did wonder about the ease with which those with, say, less cautiously reserved personalities than mine engaged in the activity: they literally seemed able to turn it off and on at will.

For those who might not be familiar with the Book of Acts in the New Testament, the second chapter tells the story of the very first Pentecost,  in which the Apostles gathered together to pray after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Tongues of fire appeared over their heads, and they began speaking in unknown languages, so that other people in the room who spoke foreign languages could understand their words. It was kind of the antithesis of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament, where god supposedly scrambled the tongues of men to keep them from building a tower to heaven and putting themselves on the same level as god. Or something. (In literary terms, this would be known as hubris).

Even among evangelical Christians, the practice of speaking in tongues tends to be a bit controversial. There are those who think it was a one-time event, not something that should be practiced in modern times, and those for whom it is part of their daily prayer vigil, and people in between. Historically, it's popped up regularly among church practices. For instance, there are references to speaking in tongues in the writings of Justin Martyr (150 AD) and Tertullian (circa 200 AD), and in the 1100s Hildegard of Bingen spoke and sang in tongues. Ditto for the Moravians in the 1300s, a sect of French prophets called the Camisards, and the early Quakers in the 1600s

For all its association with Christianity, the second chapter of Acts is not the first time in the history of the world that such a strange phenomenon has been recorded. The famed Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece housed a female oracle (a pythia) who would make sacred utterances -- a.k.a., "gibberish" -- while in a trance-like state most likely brought on by the inhalation of noxious fumes emanating from faults beneath the temple. There's a lively debate going on between scientists in Rome and Connecticut, as to whether those emissions were carbon dioxide mixed with methane, or ethylene. (The latter stimulates the central nervous system, causing hallucinations, and also emits a sweet odor -- a detail that appears in the writings of Plutarch.) More recently, glossolalia has been observed in Haitian voodoo rituals, and in shamanistic practices, and it can be induced by taking certain hallucinogenic drugs.

Early in the 20th century, psychiatrists linked glossolalia primarily to schizophrenia and hysteria, but that explanation is (a) unfair, (b) overly simplistic, and (c) no longer the widely accepted scientific view. Those who practice speaking in tongues don't generally suffer from mental illness and actually experience less stress, although psychologist John Kildahl observed in 1972 that such people "tend to have more need of authority figures." Nor is it a trance; in fact, it might be an acquired ability to which some people might be more naturally inclined, in the same way that some people pick up sports or knitting more easily than others. (I suspected as much as a child.) But even so, it still requires a bit of practice to achieve the polished, flowing glossolalia.

Around 390 AD Augustine of Hippo mentioned the practice among certain believers who sang god's praises in a way that "may not be confined by the limits of syllables." That turns out to be a pretty accurate description of glossalalia, lingustically speaking. William Samarin is a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Toronto who has conducted an extensive study of the practice worldwide. His conclusion:

Glossolalia consists of strings of meaningless syllables made up of sounds taken from those familiar to the speaker and put together more or less haphazardly. The speaker controls the rhythm, volume, speed and inflection of his speech so that the sounds emerge as pseudolanguage in the form of words and sentences.

According to Skepticwiki, the inventory of sounds is simple, the sequence highly repetitive, there are almost no predictable structural units or systematic word or sentence meaning. "Glossolalia is language-like because the speaker unconsciously wants it to be language-like. Yet in spite of superficial similarities, glossolalia fundamentally is not language." People want to believe, plain and simple, and no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary will change any True Believer's mind about his/her beliefs, because the experience is very real to them. And no wonder. The University of Pennsylvania imaging results demonstrate that this stubborn mindset might have a scientific basis: "[S]omeone in the throes of glossolalia is having an experience which they find genuinely inexplicable because they are not consciously thinking about the stream of syllables which pour from their tongue."

Heading up the Pennsylvania study was Andrew B. Newberg, director and co-founder of the Center for Spirituality and Neurosciences, and author of Why We Believe What We Believe. He studied the brain activity of five Pentecostal women, all of whom regularly spoke in tongues. To do so, he used a nuclear medicine imaging technique called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), which detects gamma rays after the patient is injected with a radioactive tracer chemical (usually hexamethylpropylene amine oxime). This enables scientists to "see" which areas of the brain are most active during given behaviors -- in Newberg's case, when his test subjects were speaking in tongues, and when they were singing Gospel tunes (the control activity). A gamma camera takes pictures as it rotates around the subject's head from multiple angles -- this can take 15-20 minutes -- and this data is fed into a computer, which uses it to construct a 3D image. The study results were published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

Newberg's findings were quite interesting. Specifically, he measured a near-shut-down of the part of the brain (frontal lobe) related to reason and self-control -- indicated by decreased blood flow to that region -- and a sharp increase in activity in that part of the brain (parietal region) which takes in sensory information and tries to create a sense of self relating to the world. In the most simple terms, activity in the conscious language centers of the brain decreased while activity in the emotional centers of the brain increased. This is actually opposite to what happens when people practice meditation: there, the frontal lobe becomes more active, while activity in the parietal region decreases. That's because glossolalia is concerned with giving up control and feeling like the self is relating to god, while meditation is about losing the sense of self and controlling focus and concentration.

The study supports Newberg's basic hypothesis that "we are biologically driven to find meaning and wholeness throughout our lives. In fact, our brains have the capacity to create and maintain a system of beliefs which can take us far beyond our survival-oriented needs." However, he also points out that "we are also born with a biological propensity to impose our belief systems on others." 

Science has a way of off-setting the risk of wishful thinking, which is why I'm such a big fan of the scientific method. I'm as prone as anyone else to self-deception, but Newberg's hypothesis rings true to me -- especially the bit about the pronounced need for those with strong belief systems to impose them on others. That does seem to be a particularly ugly, ingrained aspect of basic human nature. It's not just present among evangelical Christians, either, the current political environment notwitstanding. (And boy, is it prominent in politics!)

For instance, the flurry of emails I've received since my appearance on Coast to Coast (and if I haven't responded to some people, my apologies, but time is tight these days) run the gamut from True Believers who are angry that I don't have more of an open mind and insist on politely pointing out the flaws in their reasoning, and hard-core skeptics who are angry that I wasn't more rudely aggressive in debunking some of the wilder claims because THOSE CRAZY PEOPLE MUST BE STOPPED AT ALL COSTS! (Jen-Luc Piquant sniffs that she is tolerant of almost anything, except intolerance... and yes, she is well aware of the paradox, and embraces it. It's a faux-French thing.) The common thread: their strong personal beliefs result in outrage that someone is expressing an opinion not 100% in agreement with how they would have expressed it. (In fairness, I've received many very nice emails, too, and not just from my parents.)

Fortunately, I've learned a valuable lesson over the years: it's impossible to please absolutely everyone, so you might as well follow your gut instincts and just please yourself. There's no fancy scientific study backing up that particular hypothesis, but as a simple coping mechanism, it works for me. And I stand by what I said on the show: the sharply polarizing extreme rhetoric being employed on both sides of religion vs. science debate (or science vs. pseudoscience, liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republication, apples vs. oranges...) isn't helping convince anyone in the long run. Invariably, such people are more concerned with being right and advancing their own beliefs/agenda than they are with actually being heard. Me? I'd rather be heard, even if it's just by one person.

[UPDATE: It's a holiday for godless heathens: welcome to Darwin Day! Darksyde has a nice musing in Darwin's honor over at Daily Kos, while the indefatiguable Coturnix has compiled a terrific list of links here. Where does that guy get his energy?]

experience preferred

"A wise man learns through the mistakes of others. Only a fool learns by experience." At least that's what I was taught growing up; I think it's from the Book of Proverbs. I distinctly recall self-righteously parroting this adage at the ripe old age of 15, as if it was some profound insight that explained everything about the world. What can I say? I was young and naive. I was also the progeny of born-again fundamentalist Christians. Pat Robertson's 700 Club was a weekday morning staple over breakfast, and I witnessed my first exorcism at the age of 10 -- it scared the hell out of me, quite literally. I was dragged to Pentecostal prayer meetings, faith healing sessions, James Dobson seminars, and educated on "the four Christian temperaments" by Tim and Beverly LaHaye (basically a reworking of the medieval concept of the four "humours"). While other kids my age were discovering the Marvel and DC Comics universes, I was reading the schizophrenic rantings of Jack Chick comics (amusing parodies of Chick comix can be found here).

Needless to say, it was not an environment that fostered intellectual independence or critical thought. Religion is the opiate of the masses precisely because it discourages thinking for oneself. (Since people's hackles tend to rise at the merest hint of any god-related criticism, let me state quite plainly that this comment pertains to organized religion as a social -- and these days, political -- infrastructure, not to private, personal beliefs.) Conformity was (and is) the rule du jour, and believe me, the Bible-thumping community is ruthless when it comes to squelching opposing viewpoints. Yet somehow, I developed those attributes in spite of myself, thanks to voracious reading habits and an insatiable curiosity about the world around me  that my upbringing couldn't quite dampen. I may have been outwardly docile to avoid attracting negative attention, but even back then, Jen-Luc Piquant was lurking in the background of my psyche with her sharp, snarky tongue, healthy skepticism, and common sense -- just waiting for me to wake up and acknowledge her.

By the time I was 17, I'd figured out that personally, I preferred to learn by experience, the proverbial "school of hard knocks." I've been following that pedagogical model ever since. Sure, sometimes it hurts a bit more than mere book-larnin', but the lessons learned, and knowledge gained, is much more concrete and lasting. There's a difference between knowing something is right in an intellectual, abstract sense because you've been told, and knowing something is right because you've tested it in the real world. The entire scientific enterprise is based on learning through experience: forming abstract hypotheses, making predictions, and testing those predictions through rigorously designed experiments.

Yet somehow, when it comes to actually teaching math and science in our schools, the element of experience is often overlooked in favor of cramming abstract knowledge into students' brains so they can pass the requisite standardized tests. That's the gist of a fascinating article in the new issue of SEED by Jonah Lehrer (available online), entitled "How We Know."

Lehrer opens with the story of Cambridge math teacher Bob Moses, who took it upon himself in 1982 to instruct his daughter and her junior high school class in algebra because her public school didn't offer such a course. Frustrated that most of the students couldn't grasp the basic concepts, Moses realized it was because his pedagogical approach was, well, just plain wrong. And it inspired him to create a new curriculum called the Algebra Project that grounded the lessons of algebra in the real world: for instance, "a ride on the T became a lesson in coordinate graphing and negative numbers.... The first rule of Moses' math class was that students always had to 'participate in a physical event.'"

Gosh, I wish I'd had Moses as my teacher for high school algebra. As mentioned in a prior post, I consider myself functionally innumerate, despite having performed very well, academically, in all my math and science classes. Just because I got straight As didn't mean I took away much lasting knowledge. Mostly, I was just crunching out rote answers, with very little comprehension of how it all fit together. I've been highly suspicious ever since of the standard metrics used to measure academic achievement. What was lacking in the classroom was a real-world context. Most of us just aren't abstract thinkers, so it helps to have something concrete that illustrates in some way the concepts we're supposed to be learning. Experience is definitely preferred when it comes to acquiring true understanding of a subject; indeed, I'd argue that it's essential.

According to Lehrer's article, my instincts on this issue are pretty accurate. Moses found that students responded beautifully to his innovative pedagogical approach; not only were they learning, they were retaining the new knowledge, precisely because they could relate their lesson plan to real-world experiences. Quoth Moses: "What you're really doing is developing a new way of thinking. Instead of just trying to memorize these strange equations, you're busy relating the math to your own experiences. All of a sudden, you're finding math spilling over into other areas of your life."

Nor is his success merely anecdotal; the numbers back him up. Some 92% of those who graduated from the Algebra Project went on to take upper-level math courses, which Lehrer reports is twice the rate of those students not in the program. The Algebra Project's success was even more noticeable at Lanier High School inJackson, Mississippi, where the percentage of students receiving a passing grade on the state math exam went from close to zero to 55% within two years. Alas, despite its demonstrable success, apparently the Algebra Project has been discontinued, yet another victim of the pressure to conform to standardized testing requirements and the ill-conceived No Child Left Behind legislation.

It's worth quoting from Lehrer's article at length on this point: "Bob Moses' insight was that the math curricula these schools follow misunderstand the mind. The same abstraction that many educators celebrated... stifled learning for many students.... He realized that the brain wasn't designed to deal with abstractions it doesn't know how to use, or to solve variables while sitting at a desk. Our knowledge, Moses intuited, is a by-product of activity. What we end up knowing is what we can learn how to use. We learn by doing."

That's probably not news to Jeff Francis, the 25-year-old southpaw pitcher for the Colorado Rockies, who was a physics and astronomy major at the University of British Columbia before hitting the major leagues. Francis is profiled in the latest issue of Symmetry magazine, focusing specifically on his understanding of the Magnus force, so named because it was first demonstrated in 1852 by the German physicist Gustav Magnus. Magnus showed that a spinning object moving through a fluid (like a baseball moving throgh air) experiences a sideways deflection in its path (like a curve ball).

The article goes into the physics behind pitching and hitting in a bit more detail, but I was most intrigued by Francis' comment that good pitchers and hitters are natural, instinctive physicists, even though most have never heard of the Magnus force. They learn "by just being around baseball and observing," says Francis. "For example, you'll always see hitters tapping their bat with their hand and then listening to it like a tuning fork, knowing that a higher sound means a higher frequency, which means harder wood, which, in turn, means the ball will jump off the bat more." In other words, first-hand experience counts.

Perhaps some of you are still a bit skeptical -- especially those who do happen to perform well at abstract thinking, and therefore do just fine with the way math and science is traditionally taught. And being trained to be skeptical, why should you trust my intuition -- or Moses' anecdotes, or Francis' first-hand view from the mound -- on the matter? Well, according to Lehrer's article, studies in modern neuroscience back us up. So there. Learning by doing turns out to be how the human mind functions best, thanks to the presence of so-called "mirror neurons": brain cells in the motor cortex that -- in the case of an Italian study involving monkeys -- enable the brain to combine the reason we are moving with the actual movement itself. Mirror neurons "translate our ideas into action," because, says Lehrer, "The human mind understands the world by interacting with it."

The Francis profile also illustrates my earlier comment about different styles of learning. It's a myth that math and physics phobes aren't capable of understanding the basic concepts; they simply aren't drawn to the way it's traditionally taught. But "different" does not automatically equate with "inferior." This point is especially relevant to the perennial debate about supposedly innate gender differences in math and science abilities. Yet another round in the ongoing battle has been playing out in the blogosphere this past week, sparked by a New York Times article about transgender biologist Ben A. Barres, who has a commentary in Nature on the question of gender in science.

There's been a lot of truly eloquent blogging on the subject, so I don't feel the need to expound at length about it here. My favorite take comes courtesy of Joanne Hewitt at Cosmic Variance, who dismisses the gender argument as, well, complete bullshit, listing at random a dozen or so gifted women just in her own field of high energy physics that defy the stereotypes. I happen to be a woman who fits the prevailing stereotypes: my talents lie more in writing and communication than in math and the hard sciences. But I am far from incapable in those latter fields, even if they aren't where I truly shine. I would add that there are plenty of men who also excel more at the humanities than in math and science. What's the gender-based excuse for their supposed "shortcomings"?

That men and women are different in many ways is indisputable -- although whether or not those differences relate to math and science ability remains unproven -- and I'm one of those people who relish the differences and find them enriching and rewarding. I only get testy if someone insists that one set of innate abilities (or style of learning) is somehow inferior (or superior) to another. We are different, yet equal, bringing complementary strengths to the table; it's that simple. Experience has taught me that.

ancora imparo

Today's subject line is courtesy of Michelangelo. Translation: "I am still learning." This morning I had my very first live radio interview with KQED-FM, an NPR affiliate in San Francisco. It proved to be a lively, thought-provoking discussion, conducted by a polished, knowledgeable interviewer who had obviously read my book very closely -- always gratifying -- and was skilled at keeping the dialogue going without letting it get stuck on any one particular issue.

Not surprisingly, the issue of science vs. faith proved to be especially volatile, especially given the current prominence in the news of efforts to bring Intelligent Design/Creationism into the classroom. My careful demarcation between personal faith and organized religion/dogma -- illustrated via Isaac Newton (one of the greatest physicists of all time), who never let his faith in god interfere with scientific evidence to the contrary -- was clearly lost on one apoplectic caller, a self-described physicist who professed his own antagonism toward all organized religion, and angrily accused me of trying to "speak for all physicists" when I said the profession had been unfairly portrayed by Creationists as anti-faith. [There's probably a fascinating personal story there for my innocuous comments to elicit such a vehement response. :)]

Let me say outright that I am adamantly opposed to the Intelligent Design movement, indeed, to all attempts to bring creationism (in whatever form) into the science classroom. I am also an agnostic  -- albeit one raised by fundamentalist Christians -- who finds organized religion and dogma as overly restrictive and personally distasteful as the apoplectic physicist. But I respect the faith of others who don't share my particular views. And I am able to do so because I don't confuse religious dogma with personal expressions of faith. I stand by my position in the interview: science and faith can co-exist; there is no inherent conflict; and it is a deepy personal choice that can only be decided by individuals on a case-by-case basis.

Science doesn't mix well with dogma, however. To my mind, the conflicts between science and religion arise not from faith, but from the innate inflexibility of dogma, specifically from an overly literal or faulty interpretation of the Bible or other religious texts. The "early adopters" of Copernican theory in the 1600s ran afoul of the Church because the Church, faced with scientific evidence to the contrary, refused to admit that perhaps their interpretation of Scripture might be wrong. One of the aspects I most appreciate about the scientific method -- indeed, science as a whole -- is that it is predicated on the necessity of admitting when one has been wrong, and altering one's theories accordingly with the preponderance of evidence. That's how science progresses. It's how we learn. Failure is always an option in science, even if it's not the most desirable one.

But it's not just organized religion that is at fault here. The apoplectic physicist reinforced every negative stereotype of scientists being anti-faith (he seemed to be anti-religion, but many people fail to make that distinction). Science has become his "dogma," his own private organized religion. Clearly he hasn't learned that attacking someone's deepest personal beliefs isn't the best way to win them over to your way of thinking, and perceives himself as a victim of religious fanaticism. That may, or may not, be the case. But it calls to mind the example of Bruno, an early 16th century mystic who embraced Copernican theory and was summarily burned at the stake by the Church. He's often held up as the first Copernican martyr, but in fact, Bruno wasn't executed specifically because he was a Copernican. He embraced all kinds of notions  that semed fantastically heretical at the time. He also had an abrasive personality and disdain for all forms of compromise, constantly finding himself embroiled in disputes wherever he went. Don't get me wrong, the Church was indisputably oppressive towards Copernican theory, and Bruno did not deserve to die for his beliefs. But the severity of Bruno's punishment might have stemmed in part from the fact that, well, he was kind of a jerk.

We have a fondness for uncompromising personalities, but when it comes to living together in a peaceful society, strict adherance to doctrine and an inability to respect differences is counter-productive. Attitudes such as those expressed by the apoplectic physicist -- as well as the inflexibility of the more fanatical elements of the Christian right -- do nothing to advance the debate, or the overall cause of improving science education among the general populace. It merely serves to polarize the issue further by adding more tension and rancor. The result is an ever-widening gulf between scientists and non-scientists. [Don't even get me started on the caller's insistence that because I wasn't a physicist, I had no right to talk about this issue from the perspective of physics. That's a whole other problem.]

Surely there's room for everyone at the physics table, provided everyone adheres to the rules of engagement (the scientific method) and, like Newton, doesn't let their personal faith (or adherence to dogma) interfere with the data/evidence. I was always impressed with Richard Feynman's take on the quantum revolution. Many early physicists, including Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Schroedinger himself, were deeply troubled by the implications of quantum physics. It seemed to defy not just common sense, but everything known thus far about how Nature worked at the macroscale. And yet the evidence kept mounting until they were forced to accept that Nature does indeed seem to work in such an irrational way at the subatomic level. Feynman said we didn't have to like it, but as scientists (or, in my case, as a science writer), we must accept what the evidence tells us. Dogma -- whether it comes in the form of organized religion, political correctness, or overly-zealous apoplectic physicists -- has no place at the table, because by its very nature, it interferes with the process of scientific advancement. Ancora imparo: we are still learning. That's part of the excitement of physics.

Other insights I gleaned over the course of the interview:

1. It is impossible to condense the mind-boggling intricacies of quantum mechanics into a two-minute summative sound bite. But I shall keep trying until I find something that works without giving the interviewer a headache.

2. I talk too fast.

3. Radio is strange because you must wear headphones, and can hear your own voice as you speak. It can be quite distracting until you figure out how to ignore it.

I am still learning, too...