It is often said that much in science is serendipitous; crucial discoveries are as much happenstance as the result of a directed search. This makes for nice stories, but it’s rarely that simple. As Louis Pasteur, himself a beneficiary of some good fortune, noted, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Lawyers don’t make scientific discoveries by accident; only scientists do. That’s because their curiosity is driving them to screw around with things to see what will happen. And often, it is true, the thing they find is not what they were looking for, but something unexpected and more interesting. Nonetheless, they have to be looking. The serendipity stories don’t teach us that its mostly dumb luck, but rather that we are often not smart enough to predict how things should be, and that it’s better to be curious and try to remain open minded and see what happens. Most important, never dismiss anomalous data; it’s often the best stuff.
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Now we have a kind of catalog of how scientists use ignorance, consciously or unconsciously, to get a day’s work done, to build the edifice we have come to call modern science. It includes a remarkably diverse group of ideas like connectedness, solubility or tractability, and others like measurement, revisiting settled questions, using small questions to get at big ones, curiosity. A jumble of ideas and strategies. Some or all of these come into play at one time or another in the career of every scientist, from one’s graduate student days through emeritus (a word my brother pronounces with a long “i,” as if it were a disease).
SIX
You and Ignorance
Now we may turn to the question of how you can use ignorance to understand that activity broadly called science and the things it produces, rather than being alienated by something you know you depend on. If you meet scientists—at dinner parties, at your kid’s school, at alumni events, just by chance here and there while traveling—don’t ask them to explain what they do; ask them what they’re trying to find out. Scientists love questions. And they usually hate talking about what they do because they are sure they will be boring you out of your eye sockets in no time at all. But they like questions. Ask them what the questions are, what are the interesting things in their field that no one knows about?
For an example of how this might work, we could do what scientists call a thought experiment. Let’s say you had the opportunity to spend 5 days with Albert Einstein. What would you do? You could ask him to explain relativity to you. After all, getting it from the master himself would be a unique experience and surely you could come away knowing that you finally got what it is exactly that e = mc2 means, and why it makes bombs work. But you’d be wrong. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel and the namesake of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Tel Aviv, had just this opportunity. He and Einstein were on an Atlantic crossing together, and they determined that for 2 hours each morning they would sit on the ship’s deck and Einstein would explain relativity to Weizmann. At the end of the crossing, Weizmann claimed that he was “now convinced that Einstein understood relativity.” Weizmann, of course, was no wiser. What he should have asked him was, “What are you thinking about these days, Albert?” “What are the problems you are working on?” “What are the new questions that physicists are asking now that the universe is relativistic, whatever that means?” “What are the loose ends?” And what if Weizmann had asked him questions like those? Then I think Weizmann would have heard an earful of remarkable puzzles and lots of gossip about the new quantum mechanical theories of Bohr and his colleagues and whether this meant that God could be ever be the same God that Weizmann and Einstein grew up believing in. And Weizmann, or at least his thinking, would have been changed forever.
So what makes good questions, and how do you come up with them? And how do you use them to better understand the science? There is a tendency for us to come up with questions for which we think there is an answer, perhaps because ignorance seems embarrassing. But by now you know that this is a bad idea. Ask a softie question of a scientist and you’ll just get an answer that’s too technical to understand, even if the scientist tries to speak in layman’s terms. Francis Crick, Nobel laureate and codiscoverer of DNA, admonished scientists to work on what they talk about at lunch, because that was what really interested them. That’s often easier said than done for the practical reasons of funding and the like, especially if you don’t happen to own one of those Nobel Prizes. But it is the basis of a good question. So ask the scientist you get hold of what he or she was talking about at lunch. That may generate a host of other questions: “What’s the one thing you’d like to know about X?” “What is the most critical thing you have so far failed to understand?” “What things (calculations, experiments) aren’t working?”
These may seem like general questions that could be asked of anyone or any scientist. But it’s not hard to become more specific. You have to do a little background reading to find those questions, but that’s easier than you think. You can even start in the popular press—for my class I usually assign a couple of articles from Discover magazine or Scientific American or even the New York Times Science section that are related to the work of the visiting scientist. But even reading science papers, real science papers in real journals, need not be as daunting as it seems. And we often read those as well. There are many scientific papers, even in biology, the field I have a degree in, that are too technical for me to appreciate. But usually I can read the Introductory paragraphs, even in a physics or mathematics paper, and then often I can slog through parts of the Discussion section at the end of the paper. The important thing, I find, is to keep reading past the parts you don’t get because of their technical nature. Don’t let an unknown word stop you; just breeze on by it. At some point the questions will appear, and you will begin to get what the science is about—the why if not the how.
One of the more remarkable personal experiences I had teaching this class in ignorance was my first try at having a mathematician come talk to us. I was almost as apprehensive as the poor mathematician. Mathematicians are sort of poignant because much of their work possesses an exquisite aesthetic expressing deep truths abstracted to purity, but there are only a few dozen people in the world that they can tell about it.
I read a longish article supplied by the professor on “topology” as it related to the then recent solution of the Poincare conjecture (one of the notorious Hilbert 23). I curled up with the 55-page paper and wondered how much of it I was really going to get through—and how many times I’d drift into stuporous sleep. But it wasn’t like that at all. Yes, there was a lot I didn’t understand in detail and some of the mathematical notation was beyond me—but a lot of that was easy to get if you just looked it up on the Internet. In the end I really enjoyed, yes enjoyed, reading this paper that opened up a world to me previously unimaginable, where spheres are two- (not three-) dimensional structures, and knots, like those you get in your shoelaces, have unimagined mathematical properties.
The class with the mathematician turned out to be one of the best in 5 years. By the way, that mathematician was John Morgan, then chair of the Math Department at Columbia and now director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York.
Here are some examples of what have turned out to be good questions in my class:
Do you think things are unknowable in your field?
What?
What are the current technological limits in your work?
Can you see solutions?
Where are you currently stuck?
How do you talk about what you don’t know?
What was the main thrust of your last grant proposal?
What will be the main thrust of your next grant proposal?
Is there something you would like to work on knowing but can’t?
Because of technical limitations? Money, manpower?
What was the state of ignorance in your field 10, 15, or 25 years ago, and how has that changed?
Are there data from other labs that don’t agree with
yours?
How often do you guess?
Are you often surprised? When?
Do things come undone?
What questions are you generating?
What ignorance are you generating?
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Let’s review. Science produces ignorance, and ignorance fuels science. We have a quality scale for ignorance. We judge the value of science by the ignorance it defines. Ignorance can be big or small, tractable or challenging. Ignorance can be thought about in detail. Success in science, either doing it or understanding it, depends on developing comfort with ignorance, something akin to Keats’ negative capability. Most important, you, that is you the lay person, the reader, can understand an awful lot of science by focusing on the ignorance instead of the facts. Not ignoring the facts, just not focusing on them.
At this point I think it would be helpful to consider ignorance in the particular rather than as a general idea, to get some feel for how it works in the life of a working scientist. To do this, it might be worthwhile to utilize a method of presentation common in medical lectures—the case history—to gain further insight. Can we look at a particular scientist, or a few scientists in a particular field, and analyze their work as a case history in ignorance?
Drawn from my course on ignorance, each narrative that follows is meant to illuminate some particular aspects of ignorance and its importance in the scientific program, but none is a simple parable with a clear and pat message. Like any other life, the scientific life is something of a jumble and the process for each person is, as I have said, idiosyncratic. I have tried to emphasize the points of ignorance in these narratives, but I have not purposefully slanted them to be examples of this point or that. I think you have read enough about scientific ignorance to appreciate it in its various guises wherever it pops up, as it does aplenty in these little histories.
SEVEN
Case Histories
1. IS ANYONE IN THERE?
Is there anything harder to know than what’s inside another person’s head? What is he or she thinking, feeling, perceiving? Is my “red” her “red”? What is it like to be him? Is there anything we can know with less surety?
Yes. What is going on inside another animal’s head.
And this is where Diana Reiss looks for ignorance.
Cognitive psychologist Dr. Diana Reiss wonders whether other big-brained animals have higher mental faculties similar to ours. Dr. Irene Pepperberg at MIT is asking the same sort of question of an animal with a much smaller brain—a bird brain, in fact. The deeper question that both of them are asking is whether there is a smooth progression of mental function across species, or is there a mysterious discontinuity when it comes to humans? Can we see into the animal mind? Is there a mind there to see? For many years, many centuries really, it has been dogma that animals and humans are fundamentally different when it comes to cognition, to mind. It may be that our hearts, livers, kidneys, and other parts are all recognizably similar, if not precisely the same; it may be that our physiology and biochemistry are fundamentally the same; it may be that our reproductive and eating requirements are pretty much indistinguishable. But when it comes to mind, there is a difference. Historically this difference was inextricably bound up with the notion of the soul—something humans clearly have and other animals probably (we hope?) do not. For many people this is still the crux of the matter. For a scientist this is no longer where the questions endure.
As part of the inexorable march toward proving the “Law of We Ain’t Nothing Special,” it now appears that in addition to not being the center of anything cosmological (solar system, galaxy, universe, multiverse …), we are also not so special among the living creatures inhabiting our little, out of the way, dirt sphere. Our brains, although bigger than most (but not all) and of perhaps more complex organization (except that we haven’t really looked as carefully at other complex brains), are still fundamentally more similar to, rather than different from, those possessed by at least the rest of the order of mammalia.
The trouble starts when you talk about consciousness—or where conscious awareness resides. In the 4th century B.C. Aristotle worried about this difference, arriving at what he called (and we have via Latin translation) the “Scala de Naturalia” or Ladder of Nature in living things. In this scheme, plants have a vegetative soul for reproduction and growth, nonhuman animals possess, in addition, a sensitive soul, which through the senses perceives the world, and humans add to both of those a rational soul, for thought and reflection.
Whether soul or consciousness, it is no longer in the breast of man, no longer in the heart, no longer even in the pineal gland (as Rene Descartes proposed)—it has come to rest in the brain. It is the “special sauce” that makes the human brain conscious, more than just a fancy computer that runs the organism in predictable if fascinating ways. If animals have brains like ours, do they also have souls? Even if their brains are only half as good as ours, don’t they get some soul for that? Do they have feelings? Can they be hurt in more than just purely physical ways? Do they feel pain, not just experience it? The way you think about these questions will affect your moral view of the world on everything from getting vaccinated, to eating meat, to aborting pregnancies, to worrying about the climate, to thinking about death. Except that we don’t burn folks at the stake anymore, the stakes can be high when these questions arise.
Descartes, near the very beginning of what we identify as the Western scientific tradition, stopped the field of animal cognition in its tracks by claiming that most animal, and even much of human, behavior is like the workings of a machine, predictably adhering to the laws of mechanics. Thinking was something separate from the rest of behaving, maybe even governed by different laws and principles. While this extreme view, known as the mind-body duality, is no longer commonly held, precisely where we draw the line, or if there is a line, between mind and behavior remains very controversial.
Here we have science fraught with history and carrying the baggage of possible religious, or at least moral, connotations. Reiss points out that the threshold for showing cognitive abilities in animals is much higher than it is in humans, even obviously damaged humans with severe mental dysfunction. No matter how retarded a child may be, we still believe he or she has essential human qualities, including a cognitive life that is soul-like. Animals, on the other hand, have to perform at nearly superhuman levels to be even considered as having something we might call “mind,” whatever that is.
In fact, this is precisely one of the big problems for Reiss. What we call mind tends to be circularly defined as something that humans have. But this kind of definition, even if only implicit, is useless. It creates ignorance in precisely the wrong way—by appearing to mean something, when in fact it means nothing. This has the effect of stalling inquiry rather than propelling it. As Reiss asks, “Why do we think animals don’t think? We begin with a negative starting assumption and then must prove that they do.”
Even worse perhaps is that there is an implicit double standard in the thresholds for what is considered proof and how the data are to be obtained. This is what the late Donald Griffin, a Harvard researcher in animal behavior who discovered the sonar abilities of bats, called “paralytic perfectionism”—setting the standards so high that progress is virtually impossible. For example, in the several projects devoted to teaching chimpanzees rudimentary language skills, much of the criticism has been over charges of “cueing”—the conscious or even unconscious cues that a researcher may give to a subject that changes its behavior—what many of us call body language, although it may not be limited to posture. Now, of course, these sorts of social cues are critical to how a child learns language. Imagine trying to teach your son or daughter English without ever smiling or nodding or changing your expression—just rewarding him with a cookie when he says something correctly and ignoring him when he makes mistakes. This borders on child abuse, but it is required procedure in animal language experiments.
But as
Reiss points out, this apparent injustice serves some purpose as well, helping to avoid the many pitfalls that come along with cognitive research and collecting data about another mind that finally you can never know entirely. For example, the outward appearance of cognitive behavior may not be an accurate depiction of inner life—even in humans. We have expectations about the behavior of others, built into us either by genes or early learning, and these expectations are more likely to be satisfied by what we observe. We have an idea of what consciousness looks like, and we are apt to recognize things that look that way and call them conscious behavior—even when they are not.
The famous story of Clever Hans the horse is instructive. Clever Hans was a horse that could apparently perform mathematical calculations. Owned by a retired schoolteacher, he received wide attention from the press and the general population—possibly because of an interest in animal intelligence motivated by the recent publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Herr Van Osten, the school teacher/owner, would ask his audience for a mathematical problem—how much is 5 + 3, for example—and then ask Hans for the answer. Hans, to the amazement of all, would tap his hoof eight times. He was just as good at addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and other simple numerical tasks. Hans was a sensation. Investigations by panels of “experts” concluded there was no fraud. He performed scores of free demonstrations to crowds all over Europe.
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