OK - enough frivolous posts for the moment. There’s an election in the offing, and I want to address those of you who care whether the next President is science-and-technology-literate. Which should be ALL of you, right?
Sciencedebate 2008 (of which I am a supporter, along with a zillion other science bloggers) wants to give us an answer to that question. Express your support here, or if you have questions, listen to this NPR interview with Shawn Otto about the process of setting the debate up. Seriously, kids. Support this one.
Unfortunately, until a science-centric debate materializes, you have to retro-engineer the candidates’ science platforms based on what they have said and done in other contexts. SEA (Scientists and Engineers for America; yeah, I’m also a member of this) is contributing to this effort via the SHARP Network (Science, Health, and Related Policies), a Wiki-based platform for tracking the candidates’ positions on key issues. It’s a great idea, but as they note, Wikipedia often falls victim to partisan sabotage, so I’m holding my breath to see if they can keep it cleaned up. If you like Wiki-ing, consider helping out.
Finally, AAAS also has an S&T election website, which although not a Wiki, does cite Wikipedia (is that okay with everyone now? I missed the memo.)
Darn, I wish I was at the science blogging conference right now! Hopefully next year. . . have fun in NC, y’all.
Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant. - Lawrence Krauss, Wall Street Journal
In a related vein, that naughty Saint Gasoline makes me laugh and then snort, yet again:
Sadly, I think you could probably persuade politicians to use this strategy - if you could make them, or the American public, understand it. Or get them to pronounce “Schrodinger.”
Someone should ask about quantum physics at Sciencedebate 2008. . . nah. That would be mean.
I found this post on the NYT Health blog “Well”, by Tara Parker-Pope (when did the NYT switch to a blogging model? am I just oblivious?) Anyway, the post was mildly intriguing. But then I started reading the comments, and man, they just pissed me off.
The gist of the post is that some nutritional scientists demonstrated that, calorie for calorie, junk food is substantally more affordable than healthy food, especially fresh produce. This supports the premise that the obesity epidemic in this country - which disproportionately affects the poor - is at least partially due to the fact that the poor can’t afford to eat as well as the rest of us. (Other possible reasons include lack of education about nutrition, lack of time to prepare food from scratch, lack of access to quality grocery stores. . . need I go on?)
The annoying thing is that at least half of the comments are by people crying foul and calling the study junk science, because they, personally, are able to eat healthfully and affordably by doing such things as. . . .making large batches of lentil stew! Uh, yeah. The fact that you enjoy living on lentil stew means that junk food is really more expensive than it appeared to the researchers! Or something!
This is an example of a fallacy that simply must have a formal name, though I don’t know what it is: disbelief in the results of scientific research because the implications conflict with personal experience.
First, the validity of the science is independent of its political or social implications. Secondly, your personal experience, while no doubt extremely important to you, don’t mean diddly when addressing populations in bulk (no pun intended).
To balance the anecdote about living healthfully on the cheap by making bohemian lentil stew, I have a story about how my mom (a working single mother) used to serve instant (generic) gravy on (generic) Wonderbread when our money ran out. It wasn’t because she didn’t value health - this is the woman who didn’t let me eat sweetened cereal until I was 12 - but because she knew white bread was an extremely economical source of calories in a pinch. Why didn’t she make organic lentil stew by buying in bulk from Whole Foods? I know this is hard to believe, but we didn’t own a car, and there was only one supermarket in our town - hardly a Whole Foods. (Before you even start. . . no, there were no buses!) Given our impoverished state, did we eat at McDonalds? Rarely - because it was too expensive!
What is your immediate, knee-jerk reaction to that paragraph? Disbelief? Then I bet you’ve never lived in the middle of the country.
Believe it or not, there were and are large swaths of America without Whole Foods, public transportation, internet, cell phone service, Target, bagels, sushi, or farmer’s markets. Yet in my time living on the coasts, first left, then right, I have consistently run across something I call the Coastal Fallacy. This is a bizarre set of blinkers which compels people to deny the possibility of American lifestyles outside their realm of experience. They simply can’t imagine towns like the one where I grew up, because there aren’t any towns like that near them. It drives me absolutely crazy - except at cocktail parties, when I can make good use of the shock value in remarks like “my entire family has lived (or does live) in mobile homes,” or “I never met a Jewish person until college.” If you expect to understand this country as a whole, you need to accept that some parts of it are very different than what you’re used to, and that your personal experience does not define the opportunities available to others.
Tragically, most of the comments on the NYT post show minimal understanding of nutrition, science, or how the poorer half lives. And the commenters who give a location all seem to be, ahem, living on the coasts. But I was impressed by this comment, from msd:
One thing the posters here haven’t commented on is the feeling of psychological deprivation that comes with long-term poverty and how that contributes to poor food choices. It’s easy to live on rice and beans if you’re a grad student or a middle-class person going through a rough financial time. It’s another thing if someone feels they are part of a permanent underclass. It’s no wonder chronically poor people console themselves with of sweet and starchy mass-produced food. It’s the only way they can experience abundance.
That may not be scientifically supported, but it sure rings true, doesn’t it?
In a great post at The Intersection, Sheril takes on sexism, science, and stereotypes. This is exactly why I like “The Big Bang Theory,” yet feel strangely uncomfortable watching it.
The Nov/Dec issue of Seed features an interesting article by Jonah Lehrer on science and art. It’s a short read, but it touches on most of the big issues at that intersection, primarily through the lens of neurobiology.
I haven’t read Jonah’s new book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and I’m probably not going to get around to it for a while, if the half-dozen half-read books around my apartment are any indication (News flash: Machiavelli and Stephen Pinker are vying with John McPhee for the top of the heap)! I’m going to assume that the scanty arguments in the article are fleshed out further in the book, which is getting good reviews. But I have some quibbles.
The point of the article is solid: art can, and should, inform science, and both are necessary to answer “the deepest questions” of human experience. My first response was, well, duh. But I understand that to a lot of people, this isn’t necessarily intuitive. Science is so well-defined, and art is so, you know, fuzzy!
Jonah plays into that cliche:
. . . this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn’t be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.
But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium.
I like “plunged straight into the pandemonium”: what a great description of the human mind in all its messy, noisy glory (that goes equally for an EEG, a whole-genome association study, or a Pollock). But what’s up with this anthropomorphizing of “science”? And later in the article: “Neuroscience, of course, believes it has no inherent limitations.” I don’t know; I haven’t spoken with Neuroscience lately - but I bet Jonah hasn’t either.
Neither science nor its moody teenage spawn neuroscience can want or believe anything - that’s just fuzzy language. It wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it’s also one way in which creationists and others denigrate science: by insinuating that science is an entity with an implicit, inextricable agenda to devalue the entire non-scientific realm (including both art and faith). Just as we have a responsibility to use the word “theory” carefully, because we know its weight, we must consistently distinguish the process of science from the agendas and prejudices of the flawed human beings who practice it.
I know no neuroscientists (say that three times fast) who claim neuroscience is without limitations. Personally, I believe human understanding in its entirety has fundamental, biological constraints - and at least for the foreseeable future, the practical power of neuroscience is thus constrained as well. Jonah asserts that art can extend our understanding past those constraints, through metaphor and analogy - a point I made myself in a short essay last spring, and one I fully agree with. Einstein’s thought experiments were brilliant launching points for his science. But to me, art isn’t part of science. Art may help us decide where to point our scientific searchlight, but it’s just a first step - the intuition that sets the detective on the right path, not the evidence, and definitely not the crime lab.
That’s where I begin to disagree with the message of this article - I don’t think that art is necessary for the practice of good science. I think art complements science in the human experience, and inspires humans who do science. According to the article, “We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process. . . it’s time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method.” I think that’s a huge overstatement. I used to teach the scientific method, and I’m not sure where I’d put “art” in the flowchart. At the beginning, I suppose, as an inspiration for hypothesis formation - alongside other inspirations like nature, dreams, falling apples, or finding only one sock in the dryer. When it comes to informing science, is art really privileged over other aspects of the complex human experience?
When Jonah says, “the arts are an incredibly rich data set,” he’s absolutely right. And he’s right that artists discovered and exploited many of the basic principles of our visual systems:
As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, “Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them.” Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.
But if you “reverse-engineer” something, doesn’t that imply you understand its mechanism? To claim artists understand the visual system because they can harness its rules to good effect. . . that’s a big leap. Good cooks aren’t often able to explain chemistry, and athletes don’t necessarily understand either physics or physiology.
Even if art can be defined as a process of investigation, for the creator and the viewer, the discoveries it yields are inarticulate, unquantifiable, irreducible - that’s why we have art in the first place. Just try to get all the people in a gallery to agree on what they see in an abstract painting, much less why they feel about it as they do. Scientists like Zeki and Ramachandran study the effects artistic elements have on the brain, but they don’t embed their results in yet another piece of art.
In this essay, Jonah seems to argue that because art is irreducibly contradictory, like the human mind, art is therefore necessary to help science unpack the mind. I guess it’s the principle that “like dissolves like”? I’m not sure that’s what he really means to say; I think he was hobbled by the brevity of the assignment. But it was a nice read, and it did have a highly entertaining moment:
Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they’re meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.
Plug “modern art” in for “modern physics”. The sentence works even better now! Ha. Expecting modern art, which most people don’t get in the first place, to make science more comprehensible is like . . . expecting a child’s balloon to steer a dirigible! (OK, I have no idea what that sentence means. I was trying to expand my limited understanding of reality through metaphor, and went fatally awry.)
So what place does art have in science? It enhances creativity. It helps us see things with new eyes - prompting us to ask new questions or resolve intractable problems. In the quantitatively inclined, it maintains a healthy left-brain/right-brain balance: most scientists I know are either artists or musicians (I may have a biased data set). And because art vaults right over jargon and equations, it’s the best tool we have for sharing complex scientific concepts with nonspecialists, or for “re-phrasing” what we know, so we can consider it from a new angle.
Consider this recent Nature Chemical Biology article by David Goodsell (Nov 2007), from which the lovely image at the top of the post is taken. Goodsell emphasizes the power of art as a scientific tool:
Pictures are powerful: they radically shape how we think about the subjects that we study. Think of Jane Richardson’s ribbon diagrams, and the way they have shaped our thinking about proteins. The clear and compelling nature of these ribbon diagrams spawned an entire discipline of folding classification and taxonomy. . .
The picture at the top of this post, with the orange spheres, depicts a current model of phagocytosis. It’s a sort of pictorial hypothesis that is incredibly helpful to focus thinking, but - obviously - it’s not true until the structures shown are verified. But is that so obvious? Goodsell’s article also makes the point that
Pictures can be dangerous as well. A clever artist can make even the most preposterous hypothesis seem familiar and plausible. This is doubly difficult with molecular imagery, given that so much of it is computer generated, based more or less on underlying experimental data. Completely believable images can be created for real molecular structures, as well as purely fictional constructs, and unless the sources are reported in the caption, it may be difficult to separate the real ones from the fakes.
Goodsell offers the following quiz: one of these three molecules is completely imaginary -a fictitious structure for a fictitious molecule. One is based on real structural data, for a real molecule. And one is a fictitious structure for a real molecule. Can you tell the difference?
Obvious? maybe not (I found this article via Biocurious, where the answer, and many guesses, are posted). #3, the DNA cube, is a fictitious structure - but a real (though synthetic) molecule; #1, a nanotube synthase, is the one that’s entirely made up. #2, the rotary motor, is the real structure.
Fiction is a perfectly valid component of art. But fiction in science - once it is known to be fiction - is abhorrent. Scientific/medical art is fascinating precisely because there is powerful tension between the scientific, didactic role of a specimen, supposed to be a purely accurate and objective representation of Nature, and the imaginative realm in which the artist casts it.
Just look at my last post on Delvaux, or indeed, most of the art I’ve discussed on this blog. Even in the simplest botanical print, or inventory of a wonder cabinet, the artist always “frames” the science - it can’t be helped! Choice of medium, choice of angle, choice of context - all of these are choices. The line between representation and story-telling is very fuzzy indeed, and the distinction is hardly science. But then, one shouldn’t expect it to be.
FYI: I couldn’t find the Seed article quoted here online. If you’re interested, it might be worth finding a copy of Seed in your local bookstore - that is, if you’re in a city. You know if YOUR bookstore carries this sort of thing. I couldn’t even find a copy of the New Yorker where I used to live, much less Seed: Science is Culture! If you can’t find a copy, consider subscribing: it’s worth it just for the design.
Protein #324, 2003
enamel, silk-screen on paper Steve Miller
The protein-inspired art of Steve Miller in turn inspires Visualizing Science: Image-making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge, a cool-sounding symposium to be held next Wednesday, October 24, 2007, at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.
Miller’s strongest work is reminiscent of Japanese brush painting or Hubble photographs: darkly tangible, stylized forms floating in luminous space. But other pieces, like “Protein #330,” rely on the intrigue of the incomprehensible. What can that scribbled notation mean to the audience? Yes, it’s imposing a certain quantitative context on the protein’s inscrutable, cloud-like form, inviting reflection on the tension between the unlabeled natural artifact and the scientist’s interpretation of it. But I have no idea what it means. Nor would it matter if it was mathematically nonsensical; no one would notice. Not sure how I feel about that.
Protein #330, 2003
silk-screen on paper Steve Miller
The co-discoverer of the double helix, James Watson, has once again placed his Nobel-icious foot in his mouth.
He was meant to give a talk today in Britain on his new book, but his appearance has been cancelled in the wake of remarks implying that people of African descent are genetically less intelligent than whites. He’s also been suspended by Cold Spring Harbor, which is perhaps a wee bit disingenuous of them, because he’s said many outre things before, and as far as I know they’ve never done anything about it.
The thing that surprises me most is not that he offended people, but that he’s now criticizing the genes of dark-skinned individuals. I thought he was on the other side - when I last saw him talk, he argued that pasty white women have inferior libidos. Oh, and that we should be genetically engineered to be prettier. What-ever. . .
Stephen King’s column in the 8/10/07 Entertainment Weekly charmed me. Struck by a silly YouTube video, he launches into a paean to entertainment that, without regard for artistic integrity or prestige, purely entertains:
I sat there amazed and full of happiness, thinking: ”Yeah. This is exactly what I wanted today.” I feel it every time I listen to ”Jump” by Van Halen or ”You’ve Got Another Thing Comin”’ by Judas Priest. I feel it every time I put on my club mix of Lou Bega’s ”Mambo No. 5.” I’m sure some of you think that’s silly, but you probably have your own personal joy buzzers (for a very hip friend of mine who shall go unnamed in this piece, it’s the Dolly Parton version of ”I Will Always Love You”).
It’s easy — maybe too easy — to get caught up in serious discussions of good and bad, or to grade entertainment the way teachers grade school papers (as EW does, in case you missed it). Those discussions have their place, even though we know in our hearts that all such judgments — even of the humble art produced by the pop culture — are purely subjective. And as a veteran grade-grind in my youth, I have no problem with awarding A’s, B’s, and the occasional F to movies, books, and CDs (which is not to say I don’t also have reservations about such drive-by critiques). But artsy/intellectual discussions have little to do with how I felt when I saw Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. This movie made virtually no one’s top 10 list except mine, but I’ll never forget some exuberant (and possibly drunk) moviegoer in the front row shouting: ”This movie KICKS ASS!” I felt the same way. Because it did. (Stephen King: The Pop of King (EW))
King is talking about guilty pleasures, of course, although he claims that the phrase “is meaningless, an elitist concept invented by smarmy intellectuals with nothing better to do.” Perhaps as a writer of guilty pleasures, he’s sensitive to the strange fact that our personal joy buzzers usuallydo make us feel guilty or embarassed. I bubble over with elation at the first strings of “Come on Eileen,” and can’t help skipping to the electronic staccato of Fatboy Slim’s “Magic Carpet Ride” remix. Yet I remain completely indifferent to Beethoven. I’m horrified that I respond this way, but I can’t help it. Guilty pleasures, like crushes, are intense and irrational.
Unfortunately, iPods can make musical guilty pleasures mortifyingly public. All it takes is one revealing random playlist, and I’m blushing at the inopportune appearance of “MmmBop” while my friends say, “but we thought you liked Damien Rice?” I now preface use of the iPod with the reminder that workout music must not be held to the same rigorous standards as “real” music. It’s like the disclaimer before an early-morning infomercial: this is my iPod, but the musical tastes it espouses are not necessarily the tastes held by my educated, discriminating cerebrum.
Why do we feel guilty for responding emotionally to things that don’t quite live up to the (arbitrary) standards of art? Why do we judge ourselves, or fear others will judge us, for having genuine emotional responses? It’s not just entertainment - consider “comfort food.” I like McDonald’s cheeseburgers, but I don’t respect them. I could claim to be enjoying them in a meta/ironic/kitschy/subversive way, and I’d probably get away with it, but it wouldn’t be honest. I just plain like them. Why do I feel guilty about that? It’s puzzling, isn’t it?
I’m depressed. Jane was trash, but always amusingly, smugly arch in its trashiness. The result was a sometimes disorienting pastiche of fashion, gossip, and quirky cultural surprises. Case in point: the June/July 2007 issue of Jane put Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night on its summer bookshelf! I doubt the word “bluestocking” has ever been used in Cosmo or Glamour, much less with approbation!
In its trendy, smart-girl snarkiness, Jane was a spiritual successor to Sassy, which I devoured in middle school (both were created by Jane Pratt; her departure from Jane appears to have led to its eventual demise). It was pure mind fluff - I looked forward to my Jane fix even more than the arrival of the high-maintenance, “read me or be uninformed” New Yorker. My friends won’t understand this, but I’ll miss you, Jane.
“Science-in-fiction” novelist/chemist Carl Djerassi’s play Phallacy marks its American premiere this month, hosted by Redshift Productions. The play’s teaser? “The battle between art and science begins.”
If I were in NYC I’d definitely go see this, although I’m not sure I ought to. Since reading Allegra Goodman’s Intuition last year, I’ve realized that portrayals of backbiting, self-absorbed academia leave me shuddering, even when they’re hilariously spot-on. It’s been a few years since grad school, but I’m still hypersensitive. (Will it ever go away?)
Like Intuition, Phallacy seems to be as much about the lead characters’ sex lives as their science. According to Jennifer Rohn’s review of the 2005 London production of Phallacy,
Still, it struck me that Otto, in being more preoccupied with getting into Emma’s pants than with analyzing Renaissance alloys, was quite reminiscent of many younger postdocs today, to whom science is an enjoyable job but not necessarily the be-all and end-all of existence. In this respect, he is probably the most post-modern scientist character that Djerassi has yet produced.
I hope that’s true (that Otto enjoys science - whether or not he gets into Emma’s pants). I’ve seen too many postdocs and graduate students who did not enjoy it, yet kept at it, as if science were a dismal relationship preferable only to the distasteful revelations of a break-up. Djerassi at least seems to have a sense of humor about the whole endeavor. If anyone does go see Phallacy, let me know how you liked it.
I’ve been reading more than posting for the past week, and have a collection of odds, ends and lint to pass on.
I have a love/hate relationship with the New Yorker. It’s just too much reading for me to keep up with. I have stacks of New Yorkers dating back to 2003 that I’m trying to absorb and throw out; meanwhile the onslaught of new issues continues. But once in a while an issue like that of Feb. 12 arrives, and I remember why it’s worth the guilt (and magazine-strewn living room). Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland not only dwelt at length on one of my favorite topics, the mind-body problem, it was also the sweetest academic Valentine’s tale. As I recounted to one of my friends, “they work together, they publish together, and they’ve been married forty years. I didn’t know that was possible.” (I have more than one acquaintance who refused to date within her field, because the job prospects for similar pairs dwindle to near-nothing). The Churchland profile was followed by a lovely little fable from Primo Levi which revisits similar themes of language and consciousness and the arcane rituals of scientist families. It couldn’t have been a happier pairing. And then the next article was on Alfred Wallace. I love you, New Yorker. At least today I do.
Unfortunately the Churchland profile isn’t online (update: a pdf is now available - see this post on Neurophilosophy). But I found several promising articles from the Feb 19 issue, which of course I haven’t received (I’m as culturally and geographically remote from New York as it’s possible to get within the mainland US; I never get my copy until the cartoon caption contest is long over. Waah). Anyway, there’s an article on poetry and money by Dana Goodyear, which is not only amusing, it quotes the dad of a guy I knew in high school (I guess one is never all that remote from New York). The poetry angle reminds me of a random opinion piece from yesterday’s NYT, about how WB Yeats’ “Second Coming” lends itself to sound-bytes on Iraq. That’s. . . disturbing.
Back to science. Hop on practicallyanyscience blog to read about the mind-boggling Marcus Ross, a PhD candidate in paleontology who does not (as a young-earth creationist) believe his own thesis. Most of us have at some point doubted our PhD theses, but this guy has a preternatural gift for delusion compartmentalization.
I have defused strict creationists by pointing out that it doesn’t matter in lab if evolution explains biology because evolution actually happened, or because God carefully arranged it so it looks like evolution happened (but it really didn’t). Either way, science works. But I wasn’t, ummmm, serious about that second possibility!
Then of course I’ve been following Edbloggergate. Just depressing, all around. It makes one wonder if it’s safe to be honest on one’s blog - or to blog at all.
Luckily, if one is depressed, or finds oneself using the third person excessively, there’s always Havidol (Side effects may include mood changes, muscle strain, extraordinary thinking, dermal gloss, impulsivity induced consumption, excessive salivation, hair growth, markedly delayed sexual climax, inter-species communication, taste perversion, terminal smile, and oral inflammation. Very rarely users may experience a need to change physicians. Via Boing Boing)
With all this reading to do, it’s no wonder I didn’t finish The Structure of Scientific Revolutions last night (that’s not a joke; Kuhn is surprisingly lucid). More art coming tomorrow, I promise.
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon posted yesterday about a photography firm that offers photo retouching. Their portfolio is yet another reminder that nothing you see in a fashion magazine is real - even beautiful, waif-thin models get the airbrush treatment. Lord knows what they’d do to the rest of us.
Are these photos more attractive after the retouching? If so, are they more attractive in an aesthetic way, or in a sexual way? Why is there a difference between these two questions?
I think the example above was definitely more interesting, and had more personality, before retouching. But that doesn’t mean stylized glamour shots can’t be striking works of art. Many iconic fashion photographs portray completely unrealistic ideals of female beauty. If I object to a photo because it promotes such an unrealistic ideal, must I also reject it as art? Or should art be judged without regard for its social impact? I’m honestly not sure about this one. All I know is, excessive airbrushing creeps me out. And makes me want to eat Cheetos.
I’m really enjoying the archives of this Slate series. I’ve planned to go back and re-read the Bible for some time now, but you know - it’s so darn long. Every page provokes all sorts of questions - why the two versions of Genesis, blah blah blah. I should read a commentary along with it, but which commentary? Agh, the indecision; the infinite number of Amazon reviews to peruse; maybe I’ll do it later. What I really need is a tastily serialized, feed-friendly Bible, and David Plotz has obliged. If you, too, are a little rusty on your begats, and need a low-impact way to remind yourself just what was up with those Edomites, check it out.
Now, a digression. People are often shocked that I, a molecular biologist, have read the Bible at all. Of course I have. It boggles the mind (and not in a happy, word-game kind of way) that an educated person would not be interested in a text that has shaped Western culture so profoundly. Occasionally, it’s other scientists who express surprise (the amazingly efficient ones who are so resistant to superfluous distractions, they publish three papers while you’re still trying to organize your controls). But usually it’s well-meaning evangelicals, who appear to think that if I only would read the Bible, I would instantly reject evolution, cease taking the Lord’s name in vain, and get out of bed on Sunday morning. The fact that I have already read it, and these events did not transpire, puzzles them exceedingly.
Over the holidays, yet another enjoyable conversation veered the way of religion. I should be used to this, given where I live, but I found myself on the defensive. As usual, it was suggested that perhaps I can’t help being irreligious, because I have been repeatedly taught (”brainwashed”) as a scientist to not believe in God. What baloney! I’ve never been taught anything about religion in any of my science courses. I’ve learned about it in my humanities classes, where it belongs.
Unfortunately, there are many people who are willing to put religion into science courses, and further willing to brutally edit biology wherever it contradicts a literal reading of Biblical text. If you saw Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary, and hoped it was excessively hyperbolic, I’m sorry to burst your bubble of comfort. It’s not. If you didn’t see it, just imagine being a biology teacher in this community:
When I have students like this, I tell them they don’t have to believe in evolution to pass my class (I dislike the phrase “believe in evolution,” since it implies faith, not science, but it gets the message across). All I require is that they learn the evidence for evolution, and can explain why all credible biologists support it. And really, the same goes both ways. Whether you think the Bible is divine or not, everyone ought to know what’s in it, and why people will do such astonishing things because of it. Especially when those people are your neighbors.
This is the poster for the 2008 Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA) conference:
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to: Shakespeare and histories and theories of the body, representations of the body, the actor’s body, cultural appropriations, Shakespeare and the senses, phenomenology, embodiment and gender.
Pluses: it’s in New Zealand! Get thee to thy computer and write a proposal, if only so you have an excuse to go there and worship at the shrine of Peter Jackson.
Minuses: if Shakespeare weren’t already dead, I’d be very concerned for his health. I mean, he’s a marble torso with a dollop of entrails. Is it wrong that I find this just as disturbing as anything by Susini?
