Steven Pinker: Panel on The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2004)

of the best american science and nature writing 2004 next he's joined by contributors daniel dennett a tool Gawande Michael Connor chet raymo and max tegmark it's an hour 15 minutes thank you very much editing the best american science and nature writing was a good occasion to reflect on what I value in science writing what makes a good science essay and I think that I look for two qualities one of them is explanation the ability to give the reader the click of understanding that aha that comes from seeing a complex phenomenon explained from more elementary principles and the ideal that I had comes not from a work of science writing but rather from an experience that I had as a graduate student not anything that I learned in graduate school mind you but the experience that one tends to have living in the kind of apartment that a graduate student can afford so I had some leaky plumbing in my Somerville tenement and a the landlord called in a plumber who then offered an explanation as to what had gone wrong and he said I feared at the time that he might be an underemployed PhD in physics during a time of high anxiety about job prospects for for PhDs but nonetheless I was very impressed by his explanation pointed out first of all that water being matter obeys Newton's second law that water is dense and that water is incompressible so when you turn on your tap and then turn it off you've got a big heavy incompressible mass that has to decelerate very quickly kind of like a car slamming into a brick wall and left to its own devices that collision would tend to work away at the threads of the pipe causing a leak time after time you'd have this massive heap of substance going wham against the end of the pipe so to deal with this problem plumbers install a little gadget called a pipe riser which is simply an empty pipe filled with air and sealed at the end at right angles to the direction of the flow of the water then when you turn off the tap the water compresses the air which unlike water is compressible which acts as a shock absorber so that the suddenly decelerating water doesn't loosen the pipe threads however Henry's law applies for those of you who remember that from high school namely that a gas under pressure will dissolve into a liquid and over time the air and the pipe riser will gradually dissolve into the water the pipe riser fills with water rendering it useless so every once in a while a plumber has to bleed the pipes let air into it so that it can refill the pipe riser restoring its efficacy as a shock absorber the landlord hadn't done that that's why there was a loud water hammer that's why the threads got loose that's why there was a leak now this isn't exactly the harmony of the spheres or the grandeur in this view of life but it captures one of the two things that I value in science writing and that is showing how a capricious phenomenon can be completely explained through the interaction of a few elementary laws now of course the second quality of a good science essay as opposed to just a good lecture in a science class is a good writing clear elegant vigorous writing and again I have a an idealist how that should be done again from graduate school and again not from the graduate school curriculum but rather the late psychologist gordon allport who was taught for many years at Harvard had composed a mini a graft two-page document that he used to hand out to his graduate students on how to write a thesis and he was long dead by the time I got to Harvard but the these guides had been passed down from generation to generation of graduate students I still remember the purple mimeograph as before Xerox machines were affordable and in it he gave an example of his ideal of a well-crafted scientific prose which came from a 10 year old girl who he said deserved our admiration if not for the accuracy of her facts then at least for the clarity of her diction and I'm going to read to you from that essay it's called the owl by a ten-year-old girl the bird that I'm going to write about is the owl the owl cannot see it all by day and at night is as blind as a bat I do not know much about the owl so I will go on to the Beast I'm going to choose it is the cow the cow is a mammal it has six sides right left an upper and below at the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush with as it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk the head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere the horns are too but with and the mouth is to move with under the cow hangs the milk it is arranged for milking when people milk the milk comes through and there is never any end to the supply how the cow does it does it I have not yet realized but it makes more and more the cow has a fine sense of smell one can smell it far away this is the reason for the fresh air in the country the Mancow is called an ox it is not a mammal the cow does not eat much but what it eats it eats twice so that it gets enough when it is hungry it moves and when it says nothing it is because it's inside is all full up with grass and as all port ended his essay ladies and gentlemen let that be your model well we have this evening a number of models of both elegant explanation and clear vigorous prose and i'm going to introduce them to you in alphabetical order the first of the contributors who could be here this evening is my friend and colleague Dan Dennett is the author of freedom evolves Darwin's dangerous idea and many other books he is university professor and Austin be Fletcher professor of philosophy and director of the Center for cognitive studies at Tufts University he was born in Boston in 1942 the son of historian by the same name and received his BA in philosophy from Harvard in 1963 he then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle who by the way is the originator of the phrase the ghost in the machine it was only later that it was co-opted as the name of an album by the rock group the police but Dan's adviser Gilbert Ryle deserves that credit he taught at UC Irvine from nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy one when he moved to Tufts where he has taught ever since his first book content and consciousness appeared in 1969 followed by brainstorms elbowroom the intentional stance consciousness explained Darwin's dangerous idea kinds of minds and brain children in addition he co-edited the mind's eye capital I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981 I'd like to add that Dan who I'm sure is well known to many of you occupies a special place in contemporary philosophy I think more than any philosopher of the last half of the 20th century he has both contributed to the subject matter of philosophy and made it accessible to a wide readership dan takes the toughest problems in philosophy the nature of free will the nature of consciousness the mind-body problem the nature of knowledge and many others and as well as developing his own original analyses analysis of these problems conveys it to people in a way that is filled with humor and insight and though the content is difficult any intelligent person willing to put in the effort can get something out of Dan Dennett's writings so it's with great pleasure that I introduce Dan to read from his essay thanks Steve it's an honor to be among the authors in the book that you edited and among particularly the ones on the podium with me here I've read all their stuff and it's just it's great to be part of this group my selection from the book is called the mythical threat of genetic determinism and it appeared which originally in The Chronicle of Higher Education and I'll just read a part of it we have a very short time here it is time to set minds at ease by raising the specter of genetic determinism and banishing it once and for all according to the late stephen jay gould genetic determinists believe the following quoting now if we are programmed to be what we are then these traits are ineluctable we may at best channel them but we cannot change them either by will education or culture if this is genetic determinism then we can all breathe a sigh of relief there are no genetic determinists I have never encountered anybody who claims that will Education and Culture cannot change many if not all of our genetically inherited traits my genetic tendency to myopia is canceled by the eye glasses eyewear but I do have to want to wear them many of those who would otherwise suffer from one genetic disorder disease or another can have the symptoms postponed indefinitely by being educated about the importance say of a particular diet or by the culture born gift of one prescription medicine or another if you have the gene for the disease phenylketonuria all you have to do to avoid its undesirable effects is stop eating food containing phenyl Alan I'm what is inevitable doesn't depend on whether determinism reigns but on whether or not there are steps we can take based on information we can get in time to take those steps to avoid the foreseen harm there are two requirements for meaningful choice information and a path for the information to guide without one the other is useless or worse in his excellent survey of contemporary genetics Matt Ridley drives the point home with the poignant example of Huntington's disease which he said in his book described it as pure fatalism undiluted by environmental variability good living good medicine healthy food loving families or great riches can do nothing about it this is in sharp contrast to all the equally undesirable genetic predispositions that we can do something about and it is for just this reason that many people who are likely given their family tree to have the Huntington's mutation choose not to take the simple test that would tell them with virtual certainty whether they have it but note that if and when a path opens up as it may in the future for treatment for treating those who have Huntington's mutation these same people will be first in line to take the test and since I've written that exactly this has happened Beverly Davidson at the University of Iowa has found a way of addressing the huntingtin protein gene and so the very the very example that Ridley gave as an example of what is currently genetically inevitable is going to be a thing of the past in the near future Steve back to the text here Gould and others have declared their firm opposition to genetic determinism but i doubt if anybody thinks our genetic endowments are infinitely revisable it is all but impossible that I will ever give birth thanks to my Y chromosome I cannot change this by either will education or culture at least not in my lifetime but who knows what another century of science will make possible so at least for the foreseeable future some of my jeans fix some parts of my destiny without any real prospects of exemption if that is genetic determinism we're all genetic determinists Gould included once the caricatures are set aside what remains at best are honest differences of opinion about just how much intervention it would take to counteract one genetic tendency or another and more important whether such intervention would be justified consider the affliction known as not knowing a word of Chinese I suffer from it thanks entirely to environmental influences early in my childhood my genes had nothing nothing directly to do with it if I were to move to China however I could soon enough be cured with some effort on my part though I would no doubt bear deep and unalterable signs of my deprivation readily detectable by any night native Chinese speaker for the rest of my life but I could certainly get good enough in Chinese to be held responsible for actions I might take under the influence of Chinese speakers that I encountered isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment what else is there this nature and there's nurture is there also some X some further contributor to what we are there's chance luck this extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star it's all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes and unfixed by salient causes in our environment this is particularly evident in the way the trillions of connections between cells and our brains are formed it has been recognized for years that the human genome large as it is is much too small to specify in its gene recipes all the connections that are formed between neurons what happens is that the genes specify processes that set in motion huge population growth of neurons many times more neurons in our brains will eventually use and these neurons send out exploratory branches at random or pseudo-random of course and many of these happen to connect to other neurons in ways that are detectably useful detectable by the mindless processes of brain pruning these winning combinations tend to survive while the losing connections die to be dismantled so that their parts can be recycled for the next generation of hopeful neuro and growth a few days later this selective environment within the brain especially within the brain of the fetus long before it encounters the outside environment no more specifies the final connections than the genes do salience ease in both genes and developmental environment influence and prune the growth but there's plenty that's just left a chance when the human genome was recently published and it was announced that we have only about 30,000 genes by today's assumption about how to identify and count genes not the hundred thousand genes that some experts had surmised there was an amusing sigh of relief in the press who we're not just the products of our genes we get to contribute all the specifications that those 70,000 genes would otherwise have fixed in us and how one might ask are we to do this aren't we under just as much of a threat of the dread environment nasty old nurture with its insidious indoctrination techniques when nature and nurture have done their work will there be anything left over to be me does it matter what the trade-off is if one way or another our genes and our environment including chance divide up the spoils and fix our characters perhaps it seems that the environment is a more benign source of determination since after all we can change the environment that's true but we can't change a person's past environment any more than we can change her parents and environmental adjustments in the future can be just as vigorously addressed to undoing prior genetic constraints as prior environmental constraints and we're now on the verge of being able to adjust the genetic future almost as readily as the environmental future suppose you know that any child of yours will have a problem that can be alleviated by either an adjustment to its genes or an adjustment to its environment there can be many valid reasons for favoring one treatment policy over another but it is certainly not obvious that one of these options should be ruled out on moral or metaphysical grounds supposed to make up an imaginary case that will probably soon be outrun by reality suppose you are a committed Inuit who believes that life above the Arctic Circle is the only life worth living and suppose you are told that your children will be genetically ill-equipped for living in such an environment you can move to the tropics where they will be fine at the cost of giving up their environmental heritage or you can adjust their genomes permitting them to continue living in the Arctic world at a cost if it is one of the loss of some of their natural genetic heritage the issue is not about determinism either genetic or environmental or both together the issue is about what we can change whether or not our world is deterministic thank thank you Dan Dennett Atul Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon at brigham and women's hospital and the dana-farber cancer institute he is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in the Harvard School of Public Health he has also been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998 his first book complications surgeon's notes on an imperfect science was published in 2002 and was a National Book Award finalist for nonfiction he is in theory working on a book about experimentation in medicine and those of you who have read of tools essays in new york i'm sure will agree with me that they are each one of them is a little gem of honest elegant and fascinating reporting both on the science of medicine such as it is and on the experience of practicing it with all of the constraints and imperfections that come about because it is a human science now we'll hear to a go oddly reading from his essay best American science thank you it's a it is a great honor to be here especially amongst these writers whom I've read for far longer than I've written and and admire so much part of me has to wonder about why I might be here in the first place a surgeon is the furthest from a scientist for many people perhaps a craftsman or perhaps a plumber or a carpenter would be a closer approximation but there are scientists among us in surgery one of the greatest was for anymore a surgeon at my hospital the former chairman of surgery he had among other things led the team that succeeded in doing the first kidney transplant operation the first transplant surgery of any kind and when they did so it was what it took that fascinated me they had 30 deaths before that they had their first success after ten people in the medical community asked is it right to be continuing the experiments that they were doing after 20 there were people revolting even within the hospital residents who would never have questioned Authority at this level in the 1950s actually refused to take care of the patients who were being operated on calling it murder and then after 30 they succeeded and the team won the nobel prize for that work for any more was on the cover of Time magazine what I wondered about is what it took to be the sort of person who could push ahead with your experiments to be arrogant enough to believe that you could succeed where all the evidence in front of you what showed you were failing and the story of four anymore then began with of all things a fire and so I'll start from there in this piece which had appeared in The New Yorker on November 28 1942 and errant match satellite the paper fronds of a fake electric lit palm tree in a corner of the Coconut Grove night club near Boston's theater district started one of the worst fires in American history the flames caught onto the fabric decorating the ceiling and then swept everywhere engulfing the place within minutes the club was jammed with almost a thousand revelers that night it's few exit doors were either locked or blocked and hundreds of people were trapped inside rescue workers had to break through the walls to get to them those with any signs of life were sent primarily to two hospitals Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston City Hospital at Boston City Hospital doctors and nurses gave the patients the standard treatment for their burns at mgh however and iconoclastic surgeon named Oliver cope decided to try and experiment on the victims Francis Daniels more then a fourth-year surgical resident was one of only two doctors working on the emergency ward when the victims came in the experience and the experiment changed him and because they did modern medicine would never be the same it had been a slow night and more who was 29 years old was up in his call room listening to a football game on the radio at around 1030pm he heard the familiar whine of an ambulance arriving outside put on his white coat and went to see what was going on making his way to the ward he heard another ambulance arriving then another and another and another he broke into a run in less than two hours he received 114 burn victims he described the scene several days later in a letter to his parents down the hall were streaming stretchers with burned people on them one a young girl with her clothing burned off and her skin hanging like ribbons as she flailed her arms around screaming with pain another a naval lieutenant who kept repeating over and over again I must find her I must find her his face and hands were the dead paperwhite that only a deep third-degree burn can be and I knew only looking at him for a moment that if he lived in two weeks his face would be a red unrecognizable Slough he didn't live more grabbed a syringe full of morphine and gave anyone he found alive a slug for the pain dozens died in those first few hours many succumbed from shock and overwhelming injuries others some without a single burn on them died of asphyxia their singed throats slowly swelling closed and all nearly 500 people died from the fire of mgh is 114 patients only 39 survived long enough to be admitted to the hospital and treated for their burns bodies were laid in rows along a corridor a hospital floor was cleared for the survivors and it caught oliver copse insistence the experiment began the conventional treatment for severe burns was to tan the burned surface as quickly as possible and at burn at boston city that is what the surgeons did people who initially survive bad burns remain at high risk of dying from infection in the days to follow your skin protects you from the germs of the outside world a burn opens the portals applying tannic acid to a burn was a way to create a thickened protective cover patients were given morphine and soaked in a bathtub then their blisters were cut off and the acid slowly poured on their wounds the process was extraordinarily painful and laborious and sometimes fatal it also took four or five trained personnel to care for one patient still it was approved therapy and it had been standard practice for years medicine especially surgery is a conservative profession a physician departs only reluctantly from the established techniques and lessons and for good reason the stakes if you are wrong or too high doctors are expected to adopt new treatments only with strong evidence that they will have better results but cope was a believer and one of the things he believed was that tannic acid treatment was no good earlier that year he'd been called on for advice following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor investigators had found that the major casualties were not from blast injuries but from burns from the fires that followed medical personnel had been overwhelmed by the labor required by tannic acid treatments a day and a half after the attack they still had not completed the initial care for victims many patients died waiting cope proposed wrapping people's burns in gauze coated with petroleum jelly and then leaving them alone the treatment would be far less painful and a single doctor could care for four or five patients by himself too many the notion that a thin layer of gauze smeared with Vaseline would stop infection seemed foolish yet on the night of the coconut grove fire despite numerous lives at stake intense media attention criticism from the surgical establishment and the fact that mg H's results could be compared very easily with Boston city's cope insisted on his experimental treatment he tried it just twice once on himself but he had found in the laboratory that blisters protected by petroleum jelly gauze appeared to stay sterile Francis more was intelligent and ambitious he was also before the fire still relatively unformed he had received his undergraduate and medical degrees at Harvard but had distinguished himself more as a wit than as a scholar chronic asthma from childhood had kept him out of the war he was no better skilled in the operating room than his fellow residents but the Coconut Grove disaster became his Omaha Beach it exposed him to a magnitude of suffering he scarcely imagined possible leaving him with a thick protective hide of his own and it gave him his first true expertise he saw more serious burns from this one catastrophe than most surgeons do in their careers and he came to publish dozens of papers in the field despite the range of his eventual influence he called himself a burn surgeon the rest of his life more or franny as everyone called him went on to become one of the most important surgeons of the 20th century he discovered the chemical composition of the human body and was a pioneer in the development of nuclear medicine as the youngest chairman of surgery in Harvard's history he led his department to attempt some of the most daring medical experiments ever conducted experiments that established among other things organ transplantation heart valve surgery and the use of hormonal therapy against breast cancer along the way the line between patients and experimental subjects was blurred his attempts to develop new procedures inevitably cost lives as well as saved them his advances made medicine more radical more invasive of human bodies and more dependent upon technology but in November of 1942 he got his first sense of what might be possible when you put aside custom and convention in the hours and days after the fire more carried out Cope's experimental treatment a month later investigators from the National Research Council arrived in Boston at Boston City Hospital the council's final report said some thirty percent of the initial survivors had died most from infections and other complications of their burns at MGH none of the initial survivors had died from their burn wounds cautious experience lost and as more would always remember experiment one thank great that was a tool gawande Michael Connor graduated in nineteen seventy five from Westfield State College with certification in teaching that ended up taking a job as director of a cape cod youth center after five years Mike left the lucrative eight thousand dollars per year youth center job and took a job delivering coal really this is it was while driving around Cape Cod in the coal truck that he realized that other people besides himself were putting out bird feeders in the spring of 83 he tearfully left his cool job and opened the birdwatchers general store in Orleans as far as he knew it was the first birding store ever and most bankers in real estate people agreed as they were reluctant to take his idea sip seriously yet nearly 22 years later the birdwatchers general store is still selling birdseed while thousands of other bird-watching specialty shops have opened up around the country in the year 2000 the local newspaper of the cape codder asked Mike to white write a weekly Q&A column about birds called ask the bird folks recently community newspapers as inserted the ask the bird folks call him in all of their other weekly Cape Cod papers I have been going to the to Cape Cod during the summer and many weekends for years and I by the cape codder just so that I can read ask the bird folks way before I had any interest in Birds it is I think among the wittiest best informed most enjoyable nature writing that I've seen in many years and I was very eager to get the chance to meet Mike so on one weekend this past summer my 12 year old nephew an avid birdwatcher he knows this boy knows more species than John James Audubon spent the weekend with me and we were going to make a pilgrimage to the bird watchers general store Eric my nephew found on one of the Cape beaches and egg which he identified as the egg of a piping plover which those of you who frequent Cape Cod know is a threatened species one for which considerable effort is expended to preserve them and we took it to the Cape Cod general store to ask Mike what should be done with it and Mike looked at it said make an omelet it's not going to hatch so this I think captures the irreverence and wit of ask the bird folks it contrasts I think very pleasantly with typical nature writing at least satirized by Mark Twain his quote far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept upon motionless wing that's what a lot of nature writing sounds like to me but Michael Connors nature writing is something different and this evening he's going to tell us a bit about it thanks Steve thank you and I have to admit I'm a bit embarrassed and extremely flattered to be on the stage but these gentlemen yeah I got an email from Steve last spring asking me if I wanted to be included in this I said oh yeah sure of course I had no idea what it was and I thought oh well just this will be fine and then the book came out this fall and I could feel the blood rush out of my head when I read the people that were in here in the credentials and I'm so glad that this doctors on the stage because I could just pass out at any second right now it's true that um since 83 we've been running the broad watches generals thrown on the cape and and even though some of these people that I'm up here with a daily ask questions that deal with life and death it really doesn't compare to the egg and i have to go through trying to tell people how to keep squirrels away from their feeders seems to be that one of the most important questions that was on everybody's mind that I deal with on a daily basis in back in year two thousand there was a the cape codder which is a weekly newspaper on the Lower Cape they carried a kind of a birding column that wasn't I didn't think was very good and one day one of the people from the newspaper came in and I said you know you have so many talented people does Mass Audubon has a property the museum of natural history the Cape Cod National Seashore has these top-flight naturalist I think you can do better this woman really wasn't doing a very good job you might want to consider one of them so three days later they came in and asked me to write it that's what I get so what I basically did was you know took the endless questions about birds and things that people had and you know answer their question but and put them into the newspaper once a week um you know I get I guess I'm taking the credit now but the staff we have a talented artist that does all the illustrations for the column and the staff proofreads things and tell me how many mistakes I've made me go over and over and he seems have gotten away and somehow i'm in this book i don't really understand why but i'll take him so on the way up on the train we took the train my friend jeff and i took the train from kingston up here and I'm thinking you know I don't really know what's gonna happen i don't i do we sign books and really no don't know what's gonna happen and jeff said well they might ask you to read Oh a very good reader so we still want your practice so the train was wasn't very crowded they only had one car open and it was like a dozen people there was us ten other people and a screaming baby so we went down at the end with the other people were they trying to avoid the baby and I so I practice reading one of the columns I practice it over and over and by the time i looked up everybody had moved back with a screaming baby and then then I got here and I see cameras and I see these gentlemen ties and I feel like okay I'm so out of place here so what i will do is just through this somehow is read one of the columns that i've written based on a question from some guy named Toby from wellfleet last year exactly at this time you know the Cape is kind of a place of unusual bird show up just like Mount Auburn cemetery is over here Cape Ann and last year we had scissor-tailed flycatcher now assisted tail fly catch it's a fairly ordinary looking fly catcher a simple looking bird but it has these beautiful long streamers coming out of his tail and really de little then people would ask and would go up and see it and stuff but evidently this person Toby from willfully kind of missed all the excitement in was walking the beach one day and saw all the goings-on and he decided to write to me about it or write to us about it he wrote dear bird folks last week while I was walking my dog Mitzi I was taking my dog Nikki for waka Marconi beach and wealthy I came upon a group of nerdy bird watchers they were all standing in the middle of the parking lot staring what at what appeared to be a mockingbird I was told that the bird was a scissor-tailed flycatcher I didn't have any binoculars with me but the bird didn't seem to be anything special what was all the excitement about Toby from wealthy hold on Toby you were spending the day at the beach with Mitzi the pug dog who I'm sure was wearing a sweater and you are calling a group of highly informed bird watchers nerdy let me tell you something about my fellow bird watchers thereby by far the most respectable wait I know the group too talking about you're right they are kind of nerdy forget what I said in no offense to Mitzi or her sweater it's too bad you didn't have binoculars with you because souza tail fly catches are really great looking birds I'd be the first to admit that many birds are dull and difficult to identify some birds a similar social mode that they are impossible to figure out you know like trying to tell the difference between a pug dog and a squash loaf of bread but there are plenty of birds like puffins Roadrunners that will even catch the eye of non birdie people the scissor-tailed flycatcher is one of those exciting i catching birds with this pink colored sides an elegant 9 inch long tail the scissor-tailed flycatcher is a striking bird mostly found in Texas Oklahoma in whatever that state is above Oklahoma so scissor-tailed flycatcher catches our indeed a rare bird in these parts they are more at home flying across the open the open western grasslands than on the dunes of Cape Cod what makes us bridge so fun to watch is that it is highly active and it's it's out in the open for all to see perched on exposed branches of post the scissor-tailed flycatcher watches with keen eyes looking for the slightest movement once it spots an insect it zaps out flashing its rose-colored size and opening and closing it's showy long tail just like a pair of scissors beetles grasshoppers bees wasps appear to be the birds favorite food that's right these birds actually eat bees and wasps and seemed to enjoy them that should really figure out those people who worry about birds eating rice at weddings after the breeding season the scissor-tailed flycatcher is for massive communal roots in which many hundreds of these splendid birds seem to Ruth in a single tree in the morning the entire flock heads off in different directions creating what must be a spectacular sight seeing this I like that would almost make it worth moving to Texas I said almost after the breeding season the fly catches go to Florida but most of them head to Central America where they have cleaner elections what this loan bird is doing far from its normal range is anybody's guessed it could have been pushed up by a storm or its migration in stings could have somehow failed or perhaps it 15 million dollars in the lottery and used it as down payment on one bedroom cottage in south wellfleet whatever the reason scissor-tailed flycatcher do have the habit of showing up in Cape Cod every few years it's now the first week in december in the bird you saw has been in the same spot the parking lot of milk marconi beat for nearly three weeks I have no idea how long the bird will stay there and if it will finally get a clue and head salt or even if it will survive but if I were you I would grab you youself some binoculars and go out and take a look at this flashy bird while you still can so the tail fly catches a warm where the birds and they really aren't made to handle our Cape Cod climate however it's not up to us to interfere but if seeing out there in the cold concerns you Toby you can always let it borrow one of Michy's sweaters thank you mike o'connor chet raymo recently retired as professor of physics and astronomy at stonehill college in massachusetts where in May 1989 he received the college's first award for teaching excellence for 40 years he has been a teacher and writer exploring relationships between science nature and the humanities he is the author of a dozen books on science and nature for a general audience and four novels and one a 1998 land and literary award for his non-fiction work raymond wrote a weekly science nature column for the Boston Globe between 1983 and 2003 his science musings can now be found on the web at WWE Night Stand Jay Gould once distinguished two styles of science writing which he called Galilean and Franciscan Galilean writing was what how Steagall characterized his own essays namely concerned with abstract principles argumentative expository analytical and he contrasted that with franciscan writing named after a saint francis which was more of a aesthetic appreciative of nature lyrical in its writing style like steve gould i tend to favor Galilean writing over a franciscan writing when it comes to science essays but the columns of chet raymo and combine both styles in a way that made me an addict of the science section of the Boston Globe for the twenty years in which he wrote them the essays are both poetic and lyrical and make interesting analytical observations and I like many people greatly miss seeing his column every Tuesday in the Boston Globe chet raymo well the bases are loaded now and I suppose I'm supposed to hit a home run but at least I've got a recent arrival here to back up for me Stephen thanks first of all for the honor of including me in in the anthology this is one of a thousand essays that I wrote for the boston globe / those 20 years which have now come to an end I indeed i have written about at least three or four people on this podium in my columns these are the people who give me something to write about this is the one that Stephen picked out of the 54 last year how'd you do that when I was in high school many long years ago the sciences were the basics physics chemistry biology boys took physics and went on to become engineers and automobile mechanics girls took biology and became nurses and homemakers and nobody took chemistry if they can help it except a few nerds who wanted to make stink bombs these days the sciences are rather more jumbled up and students might encounter physical chemistry biophysics biochemistry or any of many other blended specialties gender in the classrooms is rather more jumbled now too but by and large the old categories stand if you are going to organize science under a few practical headings physics chemistry and biology are the best way to do it these categories are not arbitrary in broad outline they correspond to how the universe evolves in space and time the universe began as pure physics in an explosion from an infinitely hot seed of radiant energy during the first trillion trillion trillionth of a second matter in any matter flickered in and out of existence the fate to the universe hung precariously in the balance it might grow or it might collapse back into nothingness suddenly it ballooned to enormous size and what cosmologists call the inflationary epoch bringing the first particles of matter the quarks into existence within a millionth of a second the rapid swelling ceased and the quarks began to combine into protons and neutrons the universe continued to expand and cool but now at a more stately pace within a few more minutes protons and neutrons combine to form the first atomic nuclei hydrogen and helium but the universe was still too hot for the nuclei to attract electrons and make atoms not until three hundred thousand years after the beginning to the first appear in all of this there was nothing of relevance to a chemist or a biologist chemistry could only begin when parts of the universe had cooled sufficiently for atoms to cling together as molecules but not so cold that everything is locked together in rock-hard solids and biology could only begin with the right kind of atoms carbon nitrogen oxygen phosphorus and sulfur had appeared on the scene the atoms of life were cooked up in stars by nuclear fusion and blasted into space when the stars died as supernovas so even after the air of chemistry had begun there was not yet the right elements for biological molecules billions of years had to pass and generations of stars had to come and go before life became a possibility chemistry and biology require a flow of energy from the fabulously hot interiors of stars to the unimaginable cold of the intergalactic space only in tiny enclaves precisely placed in this flow is biology possible the earth is one such Enclave physicists have all the universe to play with chemists are basically confined to the galactic neighborhoods of stars the realm of biologists is those slivers of space just so far from the star but not too far where molecules such as water can exist as liquids somewhere between steam and ice if as most cosmologists now believe the universe will in expand forever then the sciences will leave the stage in the reverse order in which they made their appearance as the universe is stretched increasingly thin the Stars will eventually cease to shine and the flow of energy will stop life will be extinguished first then chemical activity physics is indifferent to the temperature of the universe the infinite temperature of the first instant or the absolute zero of the end it's all part of the territory high school science might be a lot more fun if it were taught in the context of the universe's story the creation myths of our ancestors began with biology a human-like divinity says let there be light and they end with biology to the lights go out with human history the modern universe story starts and ends with physics with biology can find somewhere to the middle and with even chemistry boring old chemistry getting its star turn on the stage thank thank you chet raymo we have a arrival of one more contributor to best american science in nature right in 2004 and Amanda I think we've been doing pretty well in keeping the the readings concise do we have any time for our last contributor to read a paragraph or two okay very good max tegmark in this particular universe is an associate professor of physics at MIT in the University of Pennsylvania and you will soon learn why it is relevant that that qualifier in this particular universe is part of his biography is that still true at MIT and University of Pennsylvania okay after growing up in the Viking capital Stockholm and abandoning his parents and his brother to do a PhD in berzerkeley and a postdoc at Munich he studied cosmology where and currently he measures the properties of the universe using tools such as the cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering and for those of you who are will be reading the essays and best american science and nature writing certainly the contribution by max tegmark is you will find probably the most mind-expanding musing on the current state of physics that you're ever likely to read this was I think a masterful blend of the most abstruse physics explained very lucidly with equally lucid comments on the philosophy of science as it applies to the mind-bending notion of parallel universes and I'll max tegmark will enlighten us about that thank you for this unexpected honor I think since in some parallel universe I get to do a full reading anyway rather than Ren read to you from from a random fragment of this you can read much better at your own pace afterwards if you get the book I would prefer to die I'm gonna just make a few philosophical remarks which connect to what I wrote and follow naturally on what you heard from chet raymo here because especially being in a church and all its sort of inevitable to feel very small and insignificant hearing to what you hearing what you said and thinking about us being just a little blip and something even larger maybe a level one parallel universe with an infinite space and infinitely many planets and stars which is in turn may be just one and one of these level two multi-verse as I talked about from inflation which is yet another little part of a still bigger quant the multiverse and so on it's very easy to ask you what's the point of the whole thing no oh is what I do here is what you do here just completely irrelevant aren't we so small that we should all go home depressed so let me just share with you my own personal emotional view on this which is actually changed quite a bit over the years and right now I'm actually feeling quite strongly that I don't think we're quite as small and insignificant as i thought when i was a little bit younger let me share with your wife so when we look out there in space there are two possibilities either what we normally call our universe which is simply this spherical region of space that we can see the sphere of diameter about 13 billion light-years from which light has actually had time to come to us right the reason we can see either that's teeming with life the other alien civilizations that for some reason we haven't found yet or heard of either that or this is it we're alone the only okay the only honest thing to say i think is at this point we don't know and and and frankly it may well be that life requires a number of that evolution requires some pretty serious coincidences and that any that we perhaps are the only life and the whole glorious university we can see out there and that really puts a very different spin on everything we talked about here because if you look at all this beautiful stuff out there and imagine that we humans were not here on this planet as far as I'm concerned it would all just be one grand waste of space with no one there to behold it and it isn't in that case we humans really we self where organisms here the give meaning to all of this it's it's only an hour I is that it's beautiful and meaningful and that makes it feel very significant so even though which may be may be small what I'm saying here is science isn't everything and we're small not just in space we humans are small and fragile also in time the universe has been here for a 13.7 billion years or so give or take a few and we humans have only been walking this earth for about a hundred thousand years which is very short time and we laugh at the dinosaurs for being sort of a loser species and going extinct but they lasted a lot longer than we have so far right so this is also very special time that we're living in and to make us feel to make you feel even more significant about yourselves think about this it may be in your lifetime that the that it just decided whether we're just going to nuke ourselves off as planet and make the hole everything we can see you waste of space or get our act together and help life grow into something much richer and much more exciting than we've ever been able to dream up so on that optimistic note thank you very much for inviting me here Thank You max tegmark now I understand we have time for a few questions and there is a microphone set up at the front I would ask those of you who have questions to come and direct them to the appropriate panelist from the microphone here at the front of the church yes the question is for you dr. Pinker I was just wondering if you had a response to the article in today's globe about the effort of various creationist groups to teach creationism in in the public schools to change the curriculum and in fact it's probably a question I could address to all of you whether the whether you are part of any joint effort by other scientists to try to do something to perhaps to combat the rising tide of what i feel is anti-intellectualism politically and throughout the world in this country is special yes question was about referred to a story and the newspaper this morning about it development that has been growing over the last few years which is to try to reintroduce creationist themes into biology education in many parts of the United States often under the rubric of so-called intelligent design in contrast to the question was about the recent political attempts to reintroduce creationism into biology education in American schools often under the guys at the so-called intelligent design movement which unlike young Earth Creationism namely biblical literalism the claim that the earth really came into existence 5,000 years ago with Adam and Eve in six days of creation and so on telligent designed as a more subtle attempt to reintroduce creationism into the schools by saying that life is too complex at the molecular and other levels to have arisen by by chance as they put it misleadingly because Darwinian natural selection is anything but random and therefore the complexity of life speaks to the existence of some cosmic engineer in the intelligent design movement the engineer is not specified but I think everyone understands the subtext to be that that is God have I been involved in the efforts to address this I'm glad that you asked because I am one of the charter members of project Steve now project Steve is the brainchild of Eugenie Scott the director of the National Center for Science Education which attempts to fight back at religiously motivated efforts to twist the biology curriculum in American education it was a response in particular to a series of paid ads in a number of newspapers in which the a creationist think-tank the Discovery Institute would round up somewhere in the country 20 scientists who would publicly express doubts about the validity of Darwin's theory of natural selection she said you have 20 scientists who doubt evolution well we have 200 scientists who support evolution all named Steve ah this this was in part a memorial to Stephen Jay Gould who fought the encroachment of creationism in the 1980s and it was an encouragement for of scientists named Steve Stephan Stephan o hn Stephanie Steffi and so on to sign on this Steve ometer now is well over 400 of steeped in the population one can estimate the degree of support of evolution needless to say is overwhelming I think this is significant and it's easy Dogma is being propagated that typically the attempts to reintroduce creationism take the form of same not saying evolution is false or that intelligent design or other variants of creationism or true but rather to frame it as a free speech issue teach the controversy that both sides should be presented students should know that this is a supposedly an active area of debate which is in principle a reasonable idea as long as the alternatives all are considered by virtue of some kind of scientific coherence or evidence which is most definitely not the case for intelligent design creationism where if it wasn't for a religious motivation then we would never have heard of it so it is not just a case of competing scientific theories battling it out but really one of them motivated by considerations that have nothing to do with science and that that I think is an important distinction because indeed no one wants to suppress minority theories are unpopular theories if they have some claim to ordinary standards of scientific defensibility yes yeah my question is through any one of three or four of you on the panel who might feel you know interested in following up on it in this sort of a segue from the other question which is that my understanding of evolutionary psychology is such that in the last couple of decades or so it's been more or less determined that a lot of the the neuronal self arrangements basically operate on an evolutionary basis those that work are essentially of maintained where is organisms that have others that don't work have sort of vanished and so we don't have Neanderthals wandering around and basically I was wondering if one of the modules or if one wants to think in terms of many types of modules that exist in the mind of the brain that enabled the organism to to function and two genetically prosper is one that actually it sets up the idea of some sort of a belief in either a deity or an overarching type of principle and whether in fact this may in fact from an evolutionary point of view be something that supports the organism in other words I've I understand that our genes that present really represent who we were 50,000 years ago because things have been changing very rapidly but whether in fact that type of a belief system helps people to survive disease or get together and group better from a social point of view and things like that the do people believe that there are modules where there is a module like that in the brain that sort of leads in that direction God subjective cover story in Time magazine by dean hamer and a god module by the eminent perceptual psychologist vs ramachandran it's not clear whether this was intended tongue-in-cheek or not I myself am skeptical that a particular part of the brain was shaped by natural selection to foster religious belief just because the fitness disadvantages would seem to me to be much more striking than any fitness advantage if there was an advantage to group solidarity for example that would lead to the evolution of the appropriate emotions to foster group solidarity such as loyalty concerned with reputation desire to aid one's comrades and so on why there would be a belief in a supernatural deity in miracles in prognosticating the future from arbitrary signs and so on is much less clear my own hunch is that it's more likely to be a byproduct of other parts of the mind that were selected for their benefits in particular our ability to impute minds to other people what Dan Dennett is called the intentional stance the ability once you have a species that explains other people's be havior by alluding to minds that they have that you can't witness directly you can't read someone else's mind immediately but you can guess that they have one well it's a short step to then positing minds that don't happen to be linked to bodies that are in objects where we call them idols or in natural things where we call it animism or free-floating in which we call them souls and spirits likewise there may be part of mind that attributes design to complex entities in the world what again I'll appeal to Dan who calls this the design stance it's a mental attitude that we are equipped with that perhaps was selected by natural selection in a tool using species but which is apt to fall into the habit of saying you look around you you spoke marvelously complex things called organisms it must have been a cosmic engineer who designed them to do all the wonderful thing things that they do and indeed one can even suggest that until the advent of Darwin's theory itself it was quite reasonable to attribute design in the world to a designer because we had no alternative Richard Dawkins once said that Darwin made it possible for the first time to be an intellectually coherent atheist I would add that the advent of neuroscience eliminated the other temptation namely to explain the complexity of human perception behavior in terms of the key material spirit now that we know something about the brain it's kind of a sweat for animistic release out of an intelligent person's belief system has some sort of evolutionary value when I was wondering whether one could identify some sort of PET scan experiments or something like that that could be tried out on people of strong belief to see whether there was some area in the brain that lit up or something like that yes indeed that has been done and there's controversy over the interpretation but that hasn't been done yeah it's like fearful I think the question is good it's time to look for naturalistic explanations for this amazingly robust and expensive phenomenon that we have a religious practice and religious belief and I think the first thing you have to realize is that evolution isn't a one-trick pony there are many many possible ways in which the evolution of our species could have created features which then are exploited in various ways and elaborated in various ways that create the phenomena that we observe around you I'll give you an example this is not at all proven but it's a hypothesis to test it does look as if religion as we know it today organized religion all organized religions have descended from earlier religions folk religions which pretty much all involved shaman's or healers Magic Man witch doctors who ministered to their little groups their local groups and it is distinctly possible first of all we know that people all over the world have pretty well found all the edible plants all the domestic a table species all the useful herbs and drugs that are in their area and have figured out how to exploit them so it's also very likely that these healers over time found all the techniques for improving the health of and the end particularly lowering the anxiety and improving the the mental health of the people who sought them out and what I suspect may be the case and this is not just my hypothesis others have worked on it is that if that is true and if there is a genetic disposition for being hypnotizable being readily more likely to to exhibit a placebo effect then there could be in fact a very strong selection in our in our ancestors for the capacity to be moved by the sort of treatments that the shaman's discovered after all they were they were the only HMOs of their time and if they found some tricks that worked on some people there could have been very strong selection my model here is what's known about lactose tolerance we know that human populations that raised dairy cattle that we're dairying people that in those people by large this is it's a more complicated story but the simple version is that that that cultural phenomenon created a selection pressure for adult lactose tolerance and where that cultural phenomenon wasn't present we don't have adult lactose tolerance by and large and this is genetic all you have to suppose is that the culture of Shaymin shamanic healing could have created a strong selection pressure for emotional responsiveness to the sorts of treatments that were available that could explain that just one of dozens of possibilities that can be explored as you can perhaps a guess from my having a lot to say on this subject I'm writing a book on this very topic now and come back next year and and you can read that book I agree with the argument that creationism should not supplant science what and this is now my question does I'll make it quick but what bothers me sometimes is that the statements the visions you have of religion a lot of times look back at an easy target and in fact me the greater issue of spirituality and that is very alive and very well today and there is legitimate there's a legitimate and I consider myself an engineer as a scientist and there's a legitimate discussion of what it's all about that we could have it struck me I heard Richard Dawkins a week ago and it struck me to introduce himself by saying or he was introduced but i'm sure he wrote it himself by his pointing out he was an atheist now nothing against atheism but i just found interesting that the scientists would normally go up and say i'm a jew or I'm a Catholic he would go up and speak as a scientist my question is actually to the gentleman spoke about the universe and that is in fact francis drake said a while ago there's quite likely there are millions of intelligence so whatever but he did the math of it which in some ways i find the discussion of religion to be kind of a science applied it something that is assigned to scientism and i found interesting that he said it's quite possible to were the only intelligent species around which i like you start out with francis drake being right here oh and now i'm wondering about the equation but i will ask you given that we are so short-lived and possibly not just that we have been here so little but that we may expire long before the universe goes away and that you think about these things how do you relate to things like the argument about gay marriage or things that happen now that may seem either within our span of time on on planets so inconsequential and yet seem to be so important in what we're doing with each other so when I hear people arguing bitterly about gay marriage or arguing bitterly about whether you're supposed to now pray on fridays or saturdays or sundays or not at all i personally have very hard time to getting get particularly worked up about either of those two issues because to me the really big issue is here we are on the spinning ball discovering all these beautiful things out there and it we've just discovered the technology they can put an end to it all and destroy ourselves it happened in the last 100 years right and in early within the lifetime especially of the young a part of the audience here no it's it is quite possible that we might just wipe ourselves out on the other hand it's also quite possible that will somehow get an act together iraq together and maybe even the life we know is just the tip of the iceberg of a much more profound for sorts of life we haven't even dreamt of so to me the much more exciting question is you know what's the future of life in the universe and i really think that this place and this time even though it's very small and very short our lifetime maybe you know the most important place and the most important epoch in the history of everything we see out here because it's within the power of you guys to go think about this go on and do something about it to try to so insolence that and don't get too distracted by by whether two lesbians you like each other can live together or not you know because there are more important things to worry about that's that's my message I want to thank everyone for coming and thank all of our speakers here tonight people will be signing up here all of our speakers those copies for sale in the lobby and thank you all for coming and I hope you have something to think about the best american science and nature writing 2004 is published by houghton mifflin for more information visit hm co com

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Length: 77min 37sec (4657 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2013