Ignorance
Ignorance
How It Drives Science
Stuart Firestein
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Copyright © 2012 by Stuart Firestein
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Firestein, Stuart.
Ignorance : how it drives science/Stuart Firestein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–982807–4 (hardback)
1. Science–Philosophy. 2. Ignorance (Theory of knowledge)
3. Discoveries in science. I. Title.
Q175.32.K45F57 2012
501′.9—dc23
2011051395
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in United States of America
on acid-free paper
Acknowledgments
At the start of my Ignorance class, in response to the inevitable questions about grades, I warn the students, partially tongue in cheek, that they should consider carefully what grade they would actually like to appear on their records. After all, the transcript will read “SNC3429 Ignorance”—and do they want the grade that appears after this to be an A … or an F? There is some of the same uneasiness about acknowledging the many contributions of friends, colleagues, students, and family to a book called Ignorance. Nonetheless, my debt is great, and I can only hope that these many co-conspirators will be happy to have their names mentioned here. Special thanks then to the many wonderful students at Columbia University who gambled on taking a class called Ignorance and have added so much to it. Teaching this class has been one of the real highlights of my career at the University. And of course there are my courageous colleagues, working scientists who have taken two hours out of an evening and bravely put their ignorance on display, captivating and enlightening both the students and me. Some of them appear in the case histories that are part of this book, and the names of the others can be found at the Ignorance Web site. I had the tremendous fortune to have a member of my laboratory volunteer to be a teaching assistant at the outset of the class and he helped me develop it intellectually, and in many other ways that insured its success. His name is Alex Chesler and you will hear from him, I’m sure. After Alex left, Isabel Gabel served as a teaching assistant and what was so special about Isabel was that she was a graduate student in the History Department and so brought quite a different and fresh perspective.
Several close colleagues and friends, scientists and humanists, have read various versions of this manuscript and have been extremely generous, not to mention unflinching, in their comments. They include Terry Acree, Charles Greer, Christian Margot, Patrick Fitzgerald, Peter Mombaerts, Philip Kitcher, Cathy Popkin, Gordon Shepherd, Jonathan Weiner, and Nick Hern. Many important things have been changed according to their critiques, but any foolishness that remains is entirely my responsibility.
Three years ago a small group of neuroscience graduate students and graduate MFA nonfiction writing students here at Columbia came to me with a proposal to form a writing group with the particular purpose of putting our heads together and trying to learn how to write about real science for a real public audience. This group has been dubbed Neuwrite, although our subjects often wander far afield of neuroscience. Sections of this book have been mercilessly workshopped by this remarkable and talented group, and it is impossible for me to overstate what I have learned through the generosity and insight of this band of young writers.
I have been fortunate to have several editors who have been not just supportive but truly enthusiastic about this project. First Catherine Carlin, who suggested making a book from the class, and more recently Joan Bossert, who has taken over this manuscript as though it were a child. It was Joan who asked Marion Osmun to perform a serious edit on an early draft and who so thoroughly got what the book was about. The Alfred P Sloan Foundation supports a program to make science accessible to the public, and they have been generous in supporting this project with a grant. I should also note that an early proponent of the importance of ignorance in science was a former director of the Foundation, Frank Gomoroy.
And mostly my greatest debt of gratitude is to my wife, Diana, and daughter, Morgan, who have shown unshakeable faith in my ignorance, and other important things, for as long as they have known me.
Contents
Introduction
ONE
A Short View of Ignorance
TWO
Finding Out
THREE
Limits, Uncertainty, Impossibility, and Other Minor Problems
FOUR
Unpredicting
FIVE
The Quality of Ignorance
SIX
You and Ignorance
SEVEN
Case Histories
EIGHT
Coda
Notes
Suggested Reading
Additional Articles Consulted
Index
Ignorance
Introduction
“It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room,” warns an old proverb. “Especially when there is no cat.”
This strikes me as a particularly apt description of how science proceeds on a day-to-day basis. It is certainly more accurate than the more common metaphor of scientists patiently piecing together a giant puzzle. With a puzzle you see the manufacturer has guaranteed there is a solution.
I know that this view of the scientific process—feeling around in dark rooms, bumping into unidentifiable things, looking for barely perceptible phantoms—is contrary to that held by many people, especially by nonscientists. When most people think of science, I suspect they imagine the nearly 500-year-long systematic pursuit of knowledge that, over 14 or so generations, has uncovered more information about the universe and everything in it than all that was known in the first 5,000 years of recorded human history. They imagine a brotherhood tied together by its golden rule, the Scientific Method, an immutable set of precepts for devising experiments that churn out the cold, hard facts. And these solid facts form the edifice of science, an unbroken record of advances and insights embodied in our modern views and unprecedented standard of living. Science, with a capital S.
That’s all very nice, but I’m afraid it’s mostly a tale woven by newspaper reports, television documentaries, and high school lesson plans. Let me tell you my somewhat different perspective. It’s not facts and rules. It’s black cats in dark rooms. As the Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles describes it: It’s groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says, “Oh, wow, so that’s how it looks,” and then it’s off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline. If this all sounds depressing, perhaps some bleak Beckett-like sce
nario of existential endlessness, it’s not. In fact, it’s somehow exhilarating.
This contradiction between how science is pursued versus how it is perceived first became apparent to me in my dual role as head of a laboratory and Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University. In the lab, pursuing questions in neuroscience with the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, thinking up and doing experiments to test our ideas about how brains work, was exciting and challenging and, well, exhilarating. At the same time I spent a lot of time writing and organizing lectures about the brain for an undergraduate course that I was teaching. This was quite difficult given the amount of information available, and it also was an interesting challenge. But I have to admit it was not exhilarating. What was the difference?
The course I was, and am, teaching has the forbidding-sounding title “Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience.” The students who take this course are very bright young people in their third or fourth year of University and are mostly declared biology majors. That is, these students are all going on to careers in medicine or biological research. The course consists of 25 hour-and-a-half lectures and uses a textbook with the lofty title Principles of Neural Science, edited by the eminent neuroscientists Eric Kandel and Tom Jessell (with the late Jimmy Schwartz). The textbook is 1,414 pages long and weighs in at a hefty 7.7 pounds, a little more in fact than twice the weight of a human brain. Now, textbook writers are in the business of providing more information for the buck than their competitors, so the books contain quite a lot of detail. Similarly, as a lecturer, you wish to sound authoritative, and you want your lectures to be “informative,” so you tend to fill them with many facts hung loosely on a few big concepts. The result, however, was that by the end of the semester I began to sense that the students must have had the impression that pretty much everything is known in neuroscience. This couldn’t be more wrong. I had, by teaching this course diligently, given these students the idea that science is an accumulation of facts. Also not true. When I sit down with colleagues over a beer at a meeting, we don’t go over the facts, we don’t talk about what’s known; we talk about what we’d like to figure out, about what needs to be done. In a letter to her brother in 1894, upon having just received her second graduate degree, Marie Curie wrote: “One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done …”
This crucial element in science was being left out for the students. The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that “turns your crank,” the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation.
And so it occurred to me that perhaps I should mention some of what we don’t know, what we still need to find out, what are still mysteries, what still needs to be done—so that these students can get out there and find out, solve the mysteries and do these undone things. That is, I should teach them ignorance. Finally, I thought, a subject I can excel in.
This curious revelation grew into an idea for an entire course devoted to, and titled, Ignorance. A science course. That course, in its current incarnation, began in the spring of 2006. At the heart of the course are sessions, I hesitate to call them classes, in which a guest scientist talks to a group of students for a couple of hours about what he or she doesn’t know. They come and tell us about what they would like to know, what they think is critical to know, how they might get to know it, what will happen if they do find this or that thing out, what might happen if they don’t. About what could be known, what might be impossible to know, what they didn’t know 10 or 20 years ago and know now, or still don’t know. Why they want to know this and not that, this more than that. In sum, they talk about the current state of their ignorance.
Recruiting my fellow scientists to do this is always a little tricky—“Hello, Albert, I’m running a course on ignorance and I think you’d be perfect.” But in fact almost every scientist realizes immediately that he or she would indeed be perfect, that this is truly what they do best, and once they get over not having any slides prepared for a talk on ignorance, it turns into a surprising and satisfying adventure. Our faculty has included astronomers, chemists, ecologists, ethologists, geneticists, mathematicians, neurobiologists, physicists, psychobiologists, statisticians, and zoologists. The guiding principle behind this course is not simply to talk about the big questions—how did the universe begin, what is consciousness, and so forth. These are the things of popular science programs like Nature or Discovery, and, while entertaining, they are not really about science, not the day-to-day, nitty-gritty, at the office and bench kind of science. Rather, this course aims to be a series of case studies of ignorance—the ignorance that drives science. In fact, I have taken examples from the class and presented them as a series of “case histories” that make up the second half of this book. Despite them being about people doing highly esoteric scientific work, I think you will find them engaging and pleasantly accessible narratives.
Now I use the word ignorance at least in part to be intentionally provocative. But let’s take a moment to define the kind of ignorance I am referring to, because ignorance has many bad connotations, especially in common usage, and I don’t mean any of those. One kind of ignorance is willful stupidity; worse than simple stupidity, it is a callow indifference to facts or logic. It shows itself as a stubborn devotion to uninformed opinions, ignoring (same root) contrary ideas, opinions, or data. The ignorant are unaware, unenlightened, uninformed, and surprisingly often occupy elected offices. We can all agree that none of this is good.
But there is another, less pejorative sense of ignorance that describes a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight, or clarity about something. It is not an individual lack of information but a communal gap in knowledge. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense, don’t add up to a coherent explanation, cannot be used to make a prediction or statement about some thing or event. This is knowledgeable ignorance, perceptive ignorance, insightful ignorance. It leads us to frame better questions, the first step to getting better answers. It is the most important resource we scientists have, and using it correctly is the most important thing a scientist does. James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, advises that “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
…
Before diving into all that ignorance, let me take a moment to provide a guide for reading this book. First, it’s short, which you will have already noticed from its size. I would have liked it to be shorter, but as Pascal once said by way of apology at the end of a long note written to a friend, “I would have been briefer if I’d had more time.” I would have been briefer if I’d been smarter, but this will have to do.
I have envisioned a reader who is not an expert. That, of course, includes everyone, since, in a field not our own, we are all beginners. Working scientists will, I believe, find much here that is familiar but rarely talked about; nonscientists will find a way to understand what may seem most baffling about science. It is this second reader that I especially care about and whom the book is largely written for and to.
I like to think of this book being read in one or two sittings, a couple of hours spent profitably focusing your mind on a perhaps novel way of thinking about science, and by extension other kinds of knowledge as well. The point is that it ought not to interfere with your daily life, your occupation, your work, by exacting a significant debit on your valuable time. It should add to it.
To accomplish this, I have taken several steps aimed at making the book easier to scan. I have not included extensive and distracting notes, citations, or footnotes. Where someone is quoted in the text, and their identity is obvious, I have not added any further citation material—you can look these things up on the Web easily enough. W
here further notes or expansion of the material could provide something interesting to some readers but are not integral to the forward progress of the text, I have included suggested reading at the end with comments and often keyed to particular points in the text. There is a Web site—http://ignorance.biology.columbia.edu—for the book, and the course that it is based on, with a great deal more information on it, and this will be available to interested readers.
The form of the book is also aimed at producing a reasonably manageable read. The book is split into two distinct sections. The first half is an essay form and the second half is narrative, composed of four case histories of ignorance, that I think you will find engaging and revealing, based on the classes in my course. In the essay portion what I hope are a few crucial ideas are repeated in slightly different ways from different angles to add up to a novel perspective. I have learned from years of teaching that saying nearly the same thing in different ways is an often effective strategy. Sometimes a person has to hear something a few times or just the right way to get that click of recognition, that “ah-ha moment” of clarity. And even if you completely get it the first time, another explanation always adds texture. Thus, it is not a “well-organized” book in the sense that the chapters lead the reader through a thicket of facts and concepts to an inescapable conclusion. It is not so much a discourse, as a musing with a point. I have considered various ways of organizing the material and what appears here is to my mind the most straightforward, if not the most attractive. I invite the reader to wander through the material rather than be guided down a path of argument.
ONE
A Short View of Ignorance
Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting.
Perhaps this sounds strange because we all seek knowledge and hope to avoid ignorance. We want to know how to do this, and get that, and succeed in various endeavors. We go to school for many years, in some cases now for more than 20 years of formal schooling, often followed by another 4–8 years of “on-the-job” training in internships, fellowships, residencies, and the like—all to gain more knowledge. But how many of us think about what comes after the knowledge is acquired? We may spend 20-plus years being educated, but what about the following 40 years? For those years we foolishly have no well-defined program, and much of the time we do not even have an inkling of what to do with them. So what does come after knowledge? You might not think of it in this order, but I would say that ignorance follows knowledge, not the other way around.
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