Sometimes, at least, our unquestioned dedication to such literary barbarisms can yield some humor to lighten a tough day at the office. I once, for example, blue-penciled the following comment from the dissertation of an earnest graduate student, committed to following the rules and joining the club, but untutored in the fundamentals of English prose. He wished to make the important point that his elaborate measurements of human skulls required more than a morning’s work, and that he had to insert a break between the two halves of his protocol. He wrote, “The room was then left for lunch”—and I could only imagine the office furniture grabbing a quick roast beef sandwich when the human occupants took a break at midday.
This lack of attention to style, combined with an active belief that quality of prose cannot impact the power of an argument, at least confers an admittedly undeserved blessing upon those few scientists who, by rare training or good fortune, happen to write unusually well and persuasively. In the humanities, such verbal power would be recognized and properly discounted in judging the logical acumen of any argument. But scientists believe that only the quality of data and the logic of presentation pack persuasive punch, and simply do not recognize—and can therefore be invisibly influenced by—the sheer power of prose, even in support of a dubious case. To cite my two favorite examples of great writing that carried questionable arguments, Charles Lyell became the father of geology, and the apostle of gradualistic change, more by the extraordinary quality of his elegant and lucid prose (in the three volumes of his Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833) than for the evident veracity of his theories of change or the quality of his field work. (Lyell’s poor eyesight guaranteed that personal observation of strata and landforms would play little role in developing or supporting his views.) Rather, as a trained barrister with a wonderful flair for polemical writing (the primary desideratum of his original day job, after all), Lyell won his case for uniformitarianism more by composing a brilliant brief than by empirical documentation. Then, in our last century, Sigmund Freud rose to preeminence as a paramount social force through his unparalleled literary gifts, and surely not for his cockamamie and unsupported theory of the human psyche. If The Interpretation of Dreams had been written in the unrelenting passive voice of more-scientific prose, I doubt that Mr. Freud’s theory would have attained the status embodied in the literal meaning of his name—joy.
Given my commitment to reciprocal enlightenment between science and humanities, and not wanting so thoroughly to castigate my own colleagues or my revered profession, let me close this diatribe by pointing out, lest my humanistic readers become smug, that we scientists have also figured out a foxlike thing or two about communication, and that you would do well to heed the rustics and naifs operating by the seat of their pants within the world of science. We may generally write poorly, and by rules of our own construction that make no sense under any ideal of stylistic felicity. But we generally talk ever so much better than you do—and for a pair of reasons related in reverse to our failures in writing: because, in this sphere, unlike our writing, we have not set poor rules for false purposes, whereas you have done so, and have therefore failed by disregarding a natural inclination toward proper communication.
As a trade secret of the academic arts and humanities, scholars in these disciplines almost always read their papers from previously prepared texts. I find this odd procedure counterproductive (a diplomatic and euphemistic term masking the strong labels I might otherwise be tempted to apply) for a host of reasons. Above all—and folks in the humanities who count words as their stock-in-trade should know this principle better than anyone else—written and spoken English are quite separate languages, and should never be thus confused. Written texts are spare, formal, and nonrecursive at best (for a reader can always return to something missed the first time around). Spoken English, by contrast, must employ repetition to reinforce points that have faded into a nonrecoverable temporal void, and must proceed with greater informality, lest a barrier rise to human contact with a face and body directly before one’s eyes.
I challenge anyone who denies the difference to read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, beyond dispute one of the greatest orations of the twentieth or any other century. But the text fails as written English because its poetic repetitions, based on “let freedom ring” and “I have a dream” do not work as silently read prose. For a less potent example, I could never figure out why such doggerel as “Casey at the Bat” became the most famous of American baseball poems—until I heard someone read it out loud, and realized that the piece had been composed for declamation, a common party activity in nineteenth-century drawing rooms, and not for silent reading. The klutzy but perfectly rhyming meter and lines make perfect sense (and drama) in verbal presentation, but not before one’s silent eyes in schvartz.
For a second reason, most people read aloud very badly, without inflection or emotion, and with eyes downcast on the text. So even if a written text reads well, few people will execute the task adequately. Finally, we must face an almost ethical point for harried academics. Why should I come all the way to attend a talk, just to hear someone read a text poorly in real time that (since the speech already exists in a printed version) I could read for myself, and probably with greater profit, at one-tenth the temporal expense?
While I am pursuing this rant, let me mention my other pet peeve about papers presented at meetings by scholars in the humanities. With the exception of art historians, who, by good custom, always use two slide projectors simultaneously, humanistic scholars almost never show any pictures at all—even for subjects with the most clearly intrinsic visual content. In fact, slide projectors are rarely available at humanistic meetings, even if an alien speaker should come prepared to show some pictures. I have facetiously remarked that if I ever had my name attached to any natural principle, I would specify the following rule as “Gould’s Law”: If you, as a scientist, are ever asked to give a talk to a humanistic audience, please remember to ask in advance for a slide projector. (Scientists invariably use visuals and know that projectors will always be available. In fact, the opposite sin of innumerable scientific talks lies in our tendency to darken the room immediately when we step up to the podium, thereby sending a high percentage of the audience to dreamland, and then to structure the talk around a continuous series of slides. An old joke among scientists asks: What would Galileo’s opening line have been if he had initially presented Sidereus nuncius—his revolutionary “pamphlet” reporting his first telescopic observations of the heavens—as a talk at a modern professional meeting? The answer, of course: “First slide, please.”)
I will merely describe, as evidence, my oddest academic experience—in Paris several years ago at a major international conference to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the great Natural History Museum. One could scarcely imagine a more visual subject (and primates are visual animals, after all), as speaker after speaker told their tales of specimens in the museums, animals in the adjacent zoo, and curators who once led the world in scholarship. But not one speaker from a department of the humanities showed slides. In fact, only three speakers presented any visual material at all: Martin Rudwick and I, both trained as professional scientists, but now also engaged in academic work in the history of science (Martin as a true professional, I as an informed amateur), and the curator of the collection of wax models at the museum, who could scarcely not show images of the magnificent objects under his care.
I don’t know why humanists, the supposed experts and guardians of good language, fail to grasp this elementary point about the difference between written and spoken English. I can only surmise that they so fear the possibility of any slip if they speak spontaneously—a misplaced preposition, God forbid—that they discount a proper intuition about effective presentation and opt for the safety of something fully prepared in advance. (As the Holiday Inn used to advertise: “no surprises.”) But we should all heed the wise advice of a true master in all modes
of communication, Thomas Henry Huxley, who stated that a speaker could present a paper in three ways, but should nearly always select the third mode as best: (1) impromptu, or in modern parlance, “winging it” without much thought or preparation, which one should never do, if only for the disrespect thus shown to audiences; (2) by reading a text, which one should also generally avoid for all the reasons expressed above; and (3) extemporaneously, or well prepared and thought out beforehand, but then spoken directly in the unwritten language of oral presentation, which, Huxley advises, a good speaker should almost always do. Virtually every scientist speaks extemporaneously all the time. I do not think that we so proceed because we have explicitly developed any proper theory about the differences between spoken and written English, but largely because we value informality (but not carelessness), and would never spend hours writing for ten minutes of reading. I expect that scholars in the humanities fail to heed Huxley’s principle because they fear that a truly extemporaneous speech will be mistaken for an impromptu presentation, then rightly castigated. We all need to learn the crucial difference.
My third and final point matches or exceeds the others in importance, but has been discussed before and need only be summarized here: Science may have a unitary goal—to document the factual character of the material world and to explain why nature operates as it does, and not in some other conceivable way; that is, and roughly, to ascertain fact and explicate theory. But nature works in many ways its wonders to perform, and conventional procedures in science do not always resolve these modes in an optimal or most insightful manner—not because “science” itself cannot, in principle, generate the appropriate range in ways of knowing the empirical world, but rather because the contingent history and conventional sociology of science has favored some modes and largely ignored others. In particular, and in a legacy dating back to the Scientific Revolution itself, the practice of Western science has strongly favored quantitative and experimental techniques so brilliantly suited to the resolution of relatively simple systems, causally set by a few determining variables subject to experimental manipulation, and operating under invariant laws of nature that impart no history to a subject’s phenomenology, but always operate in predictable ways, under definable circumstances.
Yet a large range of factual subjects, evidently part of science and duly explainable (in principle) by empirical methods operating under natural laws, treats different kinds of inordinately complex and historically contingent systems—the history of continents and landforms, or the pattern of life’s phylogeny, for example—as not deducible, or predictable at all, from natural laws tested and applied in laboratory experiments, but crucially dependent upon the unique character of antecedent historical states in a narrative sequence fully subject to explanation after the fact, but unpredictable beforehand. Narrative explanations of this kind could have been developed within the sciences, but were underplayed or ignored in these realms because the particular history of disciplinary specialization in Western universities allocated this way of knowing primarily to historians in departments of the humanities. Our intellectual taxonomy need not have developed in this manner, but it did—and the socially defined institution of “science” therefore failed to nurture or often to understand at all, or, in worst cases, even to reject explicitly as outside its bailiwick and therefore unworthy in principle, several important modes of explanation that regulate many aspects of the empirical world (and therefore become part of science by broad definition and legitimate range of options by the fox’s good and flexible approach to workable strategy).
As a scientist who does much of his study in this historical domain—trying to know the reasons for particular incidents and patterns in the unique history of life, as well as pursuing the more conventional scientific goal of trying to explicate the timeless generalities of evolutionary theory—I have found the standard techniques of my discipline quite inadequate, and often even misleading, in my quest to understand the nature of causality in contingent historical sequences that can occur but once in all their detailed glory. I have therefore actively sought insights from theorists in the study of human history. In particular, I never grasped the crucial—and eminently knowable—role of contingency in the history of life until I learned why the South had lost the Civil War, not as a predictable and inevitable consequence of superior Northern forces and firepower, but as a contingent result of many particular events, each of which could have unfolded in an opposite direction, but did not for resolvable reasons effectively unrelated to general laws of nature (or even to Voltaire’s quip that God always favors the bigger battalions), but crucially dependent upon quirks of individual human decision.
In summary, the three themes discussed here should establish a strong case for the practical value—not to mention the abstract beneficence in an ecumenical and irenic world—offered by humanistic studies as three foxlike strategies of great potential benefit to the operational world of science. A more perfect union of our falsely sundered disciplines would offer powerful benefits, in terms of insights and methods of study, for furthering the ordinary work of empirical science. In particular, I have here extolled the superior understanding of the humanities in three areas: (1) acknowledging and analyzing the social influences and cognitive biases within and behind all creative work, including empirical studies; (2) emphasizing the importance of stylistic and rhetorical concerns in the presentation and acceptance of any good argument; and (3) developing certain modes of knowing that science needs but, for contingent reasons of its own history, never emphasized or even downgraded, but that flourished instead within the humanities. In short, humanistic study can teach scientists to recognize embeddedness, value style, and access additional modes of explanation. Science, in return, offers just as much to the humanities—so reintegration, after so many centuries of mutual suspicion and denigration, should rank high on everyone’s list of priorities.
2. A sympathetic application and understanding of “user friendly” themes in humanistic study will aid the approbation and acceptance of science by a suspicious general public. The breaking down of artificial barriers between the sciences and humanities will help even more.
As a flip side to aid offered by humanistic study in extending and refining our own explorations of the natural world, the same themes can help us to bear (and lighten or even discard) our other major cross in this modern world of suspicion and division: the widespread perception of science as an alien and incomprehensible force in contemporary society; and, even more perniciously, the widespread impression that the practice of science somehow confutes the ethical norms of human decency, or even threatens human continuity by its intrinsic procedures and dangerous knowledge.
The insights of the humanities offer a direct exit from the first dilemma of perception as alien. The fascination of science has always won the affections of a substantial percentage among our population. One need only conjure up the familiar image of a kid in his basement with a chemistry set or a microscope. But this picture also includes the seeds of suspicion and limitation—for the kid is a boy, and also a lonely nerd, preferring his own solitude to a game of stickball (soccer, these days, I suppose) with his classroom or neighborhood buddies. We scientists, in fact, have failed notoriously in our responsibility to foster and maintain the interest and approbation of the general public. We have constructed an arcane jargon that makes us look like a hedgehog’s impenetrable ball of sharp prickles, thus driving interested, but untutored, people away. And we have fostered the impression of science as a closed priesthood, penetrable only by rigorous study in certain fields—advanced mathematics, in particular—that do not match everyone’s abilities or sensibilities, and that scare many otherwise fascinated folks permanently away.
Creative, frontline work in several sciences does require this kind of mathematical training and experimental skill—and not everyone can muster the requisite ability, generate the necessary energy, or win the appropriate access. But just as few of us could eve
r, no matter how we might practice, learn to play the violin with sufficient skill to win membership in a world-class orchestra. A crucial paradox therefore arises: Why do we regard classical music as accessible to any layperson imbued with the will and time to gain deep appreciation and appropriate understanding, whereas we assume that science must remain impenetrable, even to potentially interested people who could no more twirl a laboratory dial or manipulate a double integral than I could match Pavarotti (in his prime) performing Puccini? One need not practice at the highest level in order to understand in a quite sophisticated manner—both in music and in science. Yet we grant the accessibility of Nessun dorma, while denying similar status to E = mc2.
I regard the arcaneness and inaccessibility of science as pure mythology, unfortunately abetted by some conventional aspects of scientific practice (but also countered by others, unfortunately not so visible, or not so readily acknowledged as part of science). I believe—and have attempted to put into practice in some fifteen books of general writing—that even the most complex and sophisticated scientific concepts can be explained in fully accessible layman’s language without any dumbing down, or loss of the detail and technical concepts required for genuine understanding.
The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox Page 15