Huler’s Defining the Wind

Back in the days when we roamed at video stores looking for something that might pique my interest, my attention would invariably be drawn to any movie that reviewers blurbed as–and publicists dared print on the package–”quirky”. So, when my eyes landed on Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind : The Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry (New York : Crown Publishers, 2004, 290 pages), it looked guaranteed to be quirky. I grabbed it.

As I expected I enjoyed it. What I hadn’t expected was to enjoy it quite so much as I did. The subject is indeed odd, the style idiosyncratic, the topics covered diverse and wide-ranging, but in Huler’s hands it all adds up to a delightful and informative adventure of research and discovery that the author shares vividly with the reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.

Huler is not a scientist but his approach to discovering and understanding the times and circumstances surrounding the creation of Beaufort’s Scale is remarkably scientific; he is aware of this and seems to ascribe it to an awakening of a high-definition awareness of the natural world that resulted from spending so much time contemplating the Beaufort Scale. All this makes the book itself a thing of high scienticity; reading it is to hone one’s intuition about how science actually works.

In fact, the book is akin to what the author came to call a Beaufort Moment: “A Beaufort moment is any moment where instead of merely passing through my surroundings I notice them, notice them in a way that engenders understanding. [p. 242]” I loved this realization that he described late in the book, the summation of his experience as it transcended a mere research project:

And that is what I finally figured out the Beaufort Scale was trying to tell me. The Beaufort Scale is about paying attention. It’s about noticing whether smoke rises vertically or drifts, whether it’s the leaves shaking or the whole branches, whether your umbrella turns inside out or just rattles around some. More, it’s about taking note of those details, filing them away, in memory or, as the Manual of Scientific Enquiry would have it, in the notebook you’d never leave the house without (along, of course, with your pencil and your map and compass). It’s about being able to express what you’ve seen simply and clearly, in as few words as possible, so that others can share it. It’s about the good of sharing that knowledge, of everyone paying attention so that, together, we can all learn as much as possible.

The Beaufort Scale is a manual, a guide for living. It’s like a cross between the Boy Scout Handbook and the Old Farmer’s Almanac: a bunch of cool information that you’ll never be sorry you have, and a general policy of being prepared to deal with it: to notice that information and share it for the good of everybody involved. It’s a philosophy of attentiveness, a religion based on observation: an entire ethos in 110 words. One hundred ten words, that is, and four centuries of backstory. [pp. 237—238]

If, by the way, you need to see a version of the Scale to see what he refers to by the “110 words”, this version from the [UK] Meteorological Office comes the closest to Huler’s original inspiration. (After you’ve read the book you’ll appreciate the futility of trying to define the Beaufort Scale.) Personally, I think my favorite phrase is “umbrellas used with difficulty” (which is, therefore, how I know that the stormy afternoon when I arrived in New York City a few weeks ago was accompanied by Beaufort Scale 6 winds of roughly 25-30 mph).

It’s a book I can recommend most heartily to non-scientists and scientists alike; everyone is certain to find plenty to stimulate their thoughts and refine their perceptions of the natural world.

Lienhard’s Inventing Modern

When I went recently on my cultural trip to New York with Bill, I traveled with a couple of books: reading for the train trip and for those quiet moments at the hotel. One of the books I took was John H. Lienhard’s Inventing Modern : Growing up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003. 292+ix pages). Fortunately I started reading first thing on the train, and I made sure there were enough quiet moments at the hotel for me to finish the book in a couple of days. What a page turner! My book note is here.

Lienhard observes that in the early part of the 20th Century there was a feeling of Modern. It was something more than just modern, more than just new technology or new science–there was some indefinable spirit of adventure, feeling of invention, and optimistic attitude that seemed to dominate American culture. Naturally, given something indefinable like Modern, Lienhard set out to define it.

Lienhard, Anderson Professor of Technology and Culture, Emeritus, at the University of Houston was there for much of the Modern adventure, and his first-hand experiences adds heft to his discussion of the ideas, technology, and cultural currents of the time that met up in Modern.

I had previously read his book How Invention Begins, which impressed me very much, so I was excited to start on this one and I wasn’t disappointed. I did think that Invention had more profound insights on offer, but that doesn’t mean that Inventing Modern was an intellectual lightweight, although its tone was much more personal and somewhat more casual. They are both eminently readable and thoughtful and stimulating, but likely to stimulate different trains of thought.

I admit that there was an extra little frisson from reading about the nearby Empire State Building, which we could see from the street in front of our hotel, and the Chrysler Building, which we could see from the Brooklyn Bridge and which we visited one day. I’m certain however, that readers can enjoy the book without being in Manhattan to read it.

Vogel’s Cat’s Paws and Catapults

More catching up. Months ago I finished reading Steven Vogel’s Cat’s Paws and Catapults : Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People (New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, 382 pages). I enjoyed it immensely. Here’s my book note.

This book comes with a confession on my part, all about judging a book by its cover. I bought my copy of the book at my local library’s book store, for $1. Evidently it had been donated to the library (a name is written inside the cover). Good value and it makes it worth taking the risk that the book might not be top notch. Because of that, and because the title + subtitle seemed a little over the top to me, I feared that the book would be a light-weight, pop-journalism contribution to the currently fashionable topic of biomechanics, or bioengineering, or bio-something-or-other.

Now, pop-journalistic treatments are not a bad thing–at least, I don’t object so long as the pop-journalist pays some attention to scientific accuracy. For instance, I mostly enjoyed reading Peter Forbes’ The Gecko’s Foot : Bio-Inspiration : Engineering New Materials from Nature (book note) and didn’t find it scientifically irritating, although I felt that it could have been more than it was. It would suit other people’s taste quite nicely. I think my fear was that I found the proposed topic quite appealing and worried that the writing might be annoyingly breezy.

Well, I was wrong about Mr. Vogel, so I want to apologize to him here. His book was admirable and met my requirements for outstanding scienticity quite handily. Despite its high density of analytical insight and bioengineering understanding, I found it quite engaging and pleasant to read, just not a fast read.

Now, on to the left-over excerpt. You may recall, if you were paying very close attention, that I have a nostalgic fascination with the “Hedge-Apple”, or “Osage Orange” tree, and wrote about that once. In that piece I came upon the extraordinary statement:

The widespread planting of Osage-orange stopped with the introduction of barbed wire.

and didn’t bother to explain it very thoroughly.

Well, here is Mr. Vogel on the hedge-apple and the introduction of barbed wire, to lay it all out for us:

Barbed Wire. Keeping livestock pinned within hedgerows of thorny plants is an old practice, one especially useful where wood or stone for fencing is in short supply. Settlers of the North American prairies faced an ever-worsening wood shortage as they moved westward. The plant of choice for the Midwest was a shrubby tree native to East Texas and nearby areas–the Osage orange (Maclura pomifera)–and a small industry during the 1860s and 1870s supplied its seeds and seedlings for use farther north. This thorny bush, though, had substantial disadvantages. Growing an effective hedge took about three years, the grapefruit-size but inedible fruits were a nuisance, and the hedge was both immovable and a nuisance to maintain. Michael Kelly’s patent of 1868 for an early form of barbed wire was explicit: “My invention [imparts] to fences of wire a character approximating to that of a thorny hedge. I prefer to designate the fence so produced as a thorny fence.” Indeed, the wire was produced by an enterprise called the Thorn Wire Hedge Company, perhaps advertising its utility by drawing attention to a familiar antecedent. Figure 12.10 shows the similarity of plant thorns such as those ont he Osage orange to this early form of barbed wire.

Kelly barbed wire was eclipsed by two competing brands of cheaper wire after 1874; as with wings, spinnerets, and telephone transmitters [examples previously discussed as inventions inspired by nature], fidelity to nature guarantees no economic magic. Patents for the new types were held by Joseph Glidden and Jacob Haish. With the usual personification of invention, Joseph Glidden is often listed as the inventor of barbed wire. Haish, almost certainly not coincidentally, had a lumberyard that sold Osage orange seed. As the historian George Basalla puts it, “barbed wire was not created by men who happened to twist and cut wire in a peculiar fashion. It originated in a deliberate attempt to copy an organic form that functioned effectively as a deterrent to livestock.” Barbed wire has been an enduring success. Current consumption in the United States runs to well over a hundred thousand tons a year. [pp. 266--267]

On Reading Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee

Recently I finished reading Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, 407 pages). I quite enjoyed it. It’s the third of his books I’ve read. I previously enjoyed Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I didn’t mind that this was a significantly shorter book. Here’s my book note.

In some ways this book rehearses arguments that will appear in the later, larger tomes in much more fleshed-out form, but it’s still its own book. This one’s theme is, more or less, an evolutionary look at what makes humans human. As usual, I found a few excerpts I wanted to share that didn’t quite fit into the note.

In a discussion of sexual selection, the subject of the human penis arises (if you’ll pardon the expression), and the glib answer would say something about the size of the penis’ being selected as a display, implying that the display is directed towards females. But, perhaps not….

While we can agree that the human penis is an organ of display, the display is intended not for women but for fellow men.

Other facts confirm the role of a large penis as a threat or status display toward other men. Recall all the phallic art created by men for men, and the widespread obsession of men with their penis size. Evolution of the human penis was effectively limited by the length of the female vagina: a man’s penis would damage a woman if it were significantly larger. Howerver, I can guess what the penis would look like if this practical constraint were removed and if men could design themselves. It would resemble the penis sheaths (phallocarps) used as male attire in some areas of New Guinea where I do fieldwork. Phallocarps vary in length (up to two feet), diameter (up to 4 inches), shape (curved or straight), angle made with the wearer’s body, color (yellow or red), and decoration (e.g., a tuft of fur at the end). Each man has a wardrobe of several sizes and shapes from which to choose each day, depending on his mood that morning. Embarrassed male anthropologists interpret the phallocarp as something used for modesty or concealment, to which my wife had a succinct answer on seeing a phallocarp: “The most immodest display of modesty I’ve ever seen!” [p. 76]

The discussion moves on to the curious case of concealed ovulation in humans, at least compared to our animal relatives.

So well concealed is human ovulation that we did not have accurate scientific information on its timing until around 1930. Before that, many physicians thought that women could conceive at any point in their cycle, or even that conception was most likely at the time of menstruation. In contrast to the male monkey, who has only to scan his surroundings for brightly swollen lady monkeys, the unfortunate human male has not the faintest idea which ladies around him are ovulating and capable of being fertilized. A woman herself may learn to recognize sensations associated with ovulation, but it is often tricky, even with the help of thermometers and ratings of vaginal mucus quality. Furthermore, today’s would-be mother, who tries in such ways to sense ovulation in order to achieve (or avoid) fertilization, is responding by cold-blooded calculation to hard-won, modern book knowledge. She has no other choice; she lacks the innate, hot-blooded sense of sexual receptivity that drives other female mammals.

Our concealed ovulation, constant receptivity, and brief fertile period in each menstrual cycle ensure that most copulations by humans are at the wrong time for conception. To make things worse, menstrual-cycle length varies more between women, or from cycle to cycle in a given woman, than for other female mammals. As a result, even young newlyweds who omit contraception and make love at maximum frequency have only a 28 percent probability of conception per menstrual cycle. Animal breeders would be in despair if a prize cow had such low fertility, but in fact they can schedule a single artificial insemination so that the cow has a 75 percent chance of being fertilized! [pp. 77--78]

Diamond has spent much of his research career among the people of New Guinea. He talks at length of “first contact”, the strange moment when two tribes of people discover each other, previously knowing nothing of their existence. Remarkable, before 1938, it was thought that the interior of New Guinea was unpopulated. The Archbold Expedition of 1938 unexpectedly found that the Grand Valley was populated by some 50,000 people. (There’s another excerpt about the Archbold Expedition in the book note.) What a shocker! But contact has its price. I found this story particularly poignant.

Take artistic diversity as one obvious example. Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasingly coerced or reduced into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated tribelet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries of unique cultural development (“heathen artifacts,” as the missionary put it) had thus been destroyed in one morning. [p. 231]

On Reading Napoleon’s Buttons

Also a few months back, I read the delightful Napoleon’s Buttons : How 17 Molecules Changed History, by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson (New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, 375 pages). I haven’t run across so many popular chemistry books so far, but this clearly is one of the good ones. I enjoyed the blend of historic anecdote, chemical analysis, introduction of technical vocabulary, and copious molecular diagrams. Yes! A popular-science book with molecular diagrams! At whatever level one reads the diagrams–even if one sees them only as decoration–they enhanced the text in my opinion.

My book note is here. Below is an extra extract on a subject that I find fascinating and unlikely: the discovery of saponification, that magical transformation of fat and ashes that creates some that cleans things! So, here we have some social history of bathing, chemical history of saponification and relsted topics, and some fun facts thrown in to blend the flavors.

(As an aside, this excerpt ends just at the idea of long molecules called “lipids” is introduced. It’s the physical chemistry of lipids that allows soap to wash away grease in water. How that all works and some of the collective properties of lipids doing their job was a hot topic among my fellow condensed-matter physicists in my early research days, although I never worked on it myself.)

In Europe the practice of bathing declined along with the roman Empire, although public baths still existed and were used in many towns until late in the Middle Ages. During the plague years, starting in the fourteenth century, city authorities began closing public baths, fearing that they contributed to the spread of the Black Death. By the sixteenth century bathing had become not only unfashionable but was even considered dangerous or sinful. Those who could afford it covered body odors with liberal applications of scents and perfumes. Few homes had baths. A once-a-year bath was the norm; the stench of unwashed bodies must have been dreadful. Soap, however, was still in demand during these centuries. The rich had their clothes and linens laundered. Soap was used to clean pots and pans, dishes and cutlery, floors and counters. Hands and possibly faces were washed with soap. It was washing the whole body that was frowned upon, particularly naked bathing.

Commercial soap making began in England in the fourteenth century. As in most northern European countries, soap was made mainly from cattle fat or tallow, whose fatty acid content is approximately 48 percent oleic acid. Human fat has about 46 percent oleic acid; these two fats contain some of the highest percentages of oleic acid in the animal world. by comparison, the fatty acids in butter are about 27 percent oleic acid and in whale blubber about 35 percent. In 1628, when Charles I ascended to the throne of England, soap making was an important industry. Desperate for a source of revenue–Parliament refused to approve his proposals for increased taxation–Charles sold monopoly rights to the production of soap. Other soap makers, incensed at the loss of their livelihood, threw their support behind Parliament. Thus it has been said that soap was one of the causes of the the English Civil War of 1642-1652, the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of the only republic in English history. This claim seems somewhat far-fetched, as the support of soap makers can hardly have been a crucial factor; disagreements on policies of taxation, religion, and foreign policy, the major issues between the king and Parliament, are more likely causes. In any event, the overthrow of the king was of little advantage to soap makers, since the Puritan regime that followed considered toiletries frivolous, and the Puritan leader, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, imposed heavy taxes on soap.

Soap can, however, be considered responsible for the reduction in infant mortality in England that became evident in the later part of the nineteenth century. From the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, people flocked to towns seeking work in factories. Slum housing conditions followed this rapid growth of the urban population. In rural communities, soap making was mainly a domestic craft; scraps of tallow and other fats saved from the butchering of farm animals cooked up with last night’s ashes would produce a coarse but affordable soap. City dwellers had no comparable source of fat. Beef tallow had to be purchased and was too valuable a food to be used to make soap. Wood ashes were also less obtainable. Coal was the fuel of the urban poor, and the small amounts of coal ash available were not a good source of the alkali needed to saponify fat. Even if the ingredients were on hand, the living quarters of many factory workers had, at best, only rudimentary kitchen facilities and little space or equipment for soap making. Thus soap was no longer made at home. It had to be purchased and was generally beyond the means of factory workers. Standards of hygiene, not hight to state with, fell even lower, and filthy living conditions contributed to a high infant death rate.

At the end of the eighteenth century, though, a French chemist, Nicolas Leblanc, discovered an efficient method of making soda ash from common salt. The reduced cost of this alkali, an increased availability of fat, and finally in 1853 the removal of all taxes on soap lowered the price so that widespread use was possible. The decline in infant mortality dating from about this time has been attributed to the simple but effective cleansing power of soap and water.

Soap molecules clean because one end of the molecule has a charge and dissolves in water, whereas the other end is not soluble in water but does dissolve in substances such as grease, oil, and fat. [pp. 286--288]

Ball’s Critical Mass

A week or two ago I finally finished reading Philip Ball’s Critical Mass : How One Thing Leads to Another. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. (My book note about it, with different quotations, is here.)

I’ve become quite a fan now of Philip Ball’s writing; previously I was wowed by Bright Earth, and The Ingredients. Happily for me, there are still some of his books that I haven’t read.

This one struck me very personally in a couple of ways. Loosely speaking, it’s about modern attempts to apply modern concepts in condensed-matter physics (encompassing thermodynamics, statistical physics, fluid dynamics, critical phenomena, chaos theory and others) to social systems and the collective behavior of humans. Once upon a time I did experimental research in condensed-matter physics, including several of the disciplines he talks about. Today, with Ars Hermeneutica, I’m quite interested in what I call “appropriate quantification”, or how to apply statistical models to collective human behavior. Thus, there is a lot of resonance here. When I think about how irritating this book could have been had it been written by a less-accomplished science writer, it makes me admire Ball’s talents that much more.

These are some excerpts that I marked to keep here in my common-place book.

To kick things off, here’s an excerpt he quotes from C.P. Snow’s famous book The Two Cultures, about the divide (real or imagined) between the sciences and the humanities. This is all Snow:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s. [p.38 of Critical Mass]

Ball began his discussion by looking at the earliest attempt to make a science of social interaction, Hobbe’s Leviathan. Later on, he wrote about how earlier ideas propagated into today’s economic thinking.

The social contract proposed by Hobbes might sound like a forerunner of those advocated by John Locke (1623–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), but it is instead the reverse. To Locke and Rousseau, the power conferred upon the head of state comes with an obligation to serve the interests of the populace; for Hobbes, the common people are contracted to serve their ruler. For Hobbes, the principal fear was of anarchy; for Locke it was the abuse of power, which is why he saw the need for safeguards to avoid absolutism.

But although apparently a proponent of autocracy, Hobbes also provides arguments that can be used to support both bourgeois capitalism and liberalism. Although he expressed an aversion to the way the mercantile society bred men whose “only glory [is] to grow excessively rich by the wisdom of buying and selling,” which they do “by making poor people sell their labour to them at their own prices,” he saw bourgeois culture as largely inevitable, and sought a system that would accommodate its selfish tendencies without conflict. To this end he left it to the market to assign the value of everything, people included: “The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contracted to give.” This fee-market philosophy found voice in Adam smith’s Wealth of Nations in the following century. Those in Britain and the United States (and indeed elsewhere) who lived through the 1980s will recognize it as an attitude that did not wane with the Age of Enlightenment. [p. 29]

After we’d spent quite a bit of time using scientific models to understand some of the complexity of the market and larger economic systems, suddenly traditional economic theories seems hopelessly naive and more the product of wishful thinking than critical thinking.

So deeply entrenched is the free-market philosophy in American economic theory today (I am talking here about the pundits who exert a real influence–the TV analysts, the Wall Street Journal op-ed columnists, the think-tankists, and all too often the White House advisors–but not the academic economists) that the supporters of this creed are hoping even to ride out the catastrophic stock market collapse that is proceeding at full throttle at the time of writing. They place the blame on a few corrupt CEOs, on government policies, on fickle small investors, on labor unions, on left-wing critics who spread doubt and negative thinking–anywhere but on the market itself. If only all these people would behaved, say the free-marketeers, stocks would keep rising forever. [pp. 224--225]

Later, he moved on to using ideas from critical phenomena to look at systems that can apparently change their states spontaneously and suddenly. The key concept here is that of thermodynamic fluctuations.

One experimental peculiarity that the theory [a late 19th century by physicist van der Waals) did embrace was the extraordinary sensitivity of the critical point. A system near its critical state becomes extremely responsive to disturbances. If you squeeze a substance, it shrinks in volume. The resistance it offers to the is compression is a measure of its so-called compressibility A rubber ball is more compressible than a steel, ball, and a gas is typically much more compressible than a liquid--one can squeeze it more easily. At the critical point of a liquid and gas, the fluid becomes absurdly compressible--in fact, more or less infinitely so. In principle, the gentlest squeeze is sufficient to collapse a critical fluid into invisibility. This sounds absurd, and experimentally one can never observe such extreme behavior, because maintaining a substance exactly at its critical point is too difficult--the critical state is too unstable. but one can see the compressibility start to increase very rapidly as the critical point is approached. [p. 228]

A correction: the fluctuations are unstable only below the critical temperature; above, they are stable and can grow very large if one can contrive to get the fluid close enough to the critical point and keep it there. I once was able to do that. It was such fluctuations that we were studying with our Zeno space-shuttle experiment in the early 90s. We were able to keep a very small fluid sample stably poised some 3-millionths of a Kelvin (i.e., a centigrade degree) above its critical temperature to study the density fluctuations. The compressibility was so high that we had to do this in earth orbit (so called “micro-gravity”) so that gravity itself would not move the fluid away from the critical point.

Still later the topic was networks and how they organize their connections and related topics, including a discussion of the Kevin Bacon degrees-of-separation game. Can all actors be connected to Kevin Bacon in just 6 or fewer steps? Is this deeply significant? Not really.

And what of the must burning issue: Is Kevin Bacon really the center of the movie universe? To answer this, one must calculate the average Bacon Number for the entire network and see how it compares with the equivalent measures for the other actors: the Elvis Number, the Bogart Number, the Brando Number, and so on. If Kevin Bacon really is the most important linchpin in the network, all other actors will, on average, be closer to him than to anyone else.

It turns out that not only is Kevin Bacon not the most important hub of the network, he is not even in the top one thousand (the list of course changes daily as new films are made). Currently up at the top is Rod Steiger (the average Steiger Number is 2.652), followed by Christopher Lee, Dennis Hopper, Donald Pleasence, and Donald Sutherland (who appeared in the movie version of Six Degrees of Separation). Marlon Brando is number 202, Frank Sinatra number 443. By the time we get to Kevin Bacon’s level., the differences in the average Actor Number that separate successive actors in the list are tiny, about 0.0001.

So why was Kevin Bacon picked for this game? The answer contains the entire essence of a small world: in such a network, everyone appears to be at the center. Some are more “central” than others–but not by very much. Even relatively minor actors like Eddie Albert have a comparable network status to major stars. (Donald Pleasence was a fine actor but hardly a superstar.) [pp. 369--370]

Finally, a little quotation from Pericles [quoted on p. 425]:

Even if only a few of us are capable of devising a policy or putting it into practice, all of us are capable of judging it.

A Natural Selection

This week’s beard is worn by none other than Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882), the infamous, the reviled, the namesake of the dreaded Darwinism, author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Quite without my really meaning for it to happen, the past month or more has been my Darwin month: I’ve been reading books with Darwin and Darwinism (or, perhaps more precisely, “post-synthesis neo-Darwinism”) as their themes, and it’s been a rewarding period of Darwinian immersion. The books in question are The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett, and “The Reluctant Mr. Darwin”, by David Quammen. The Dawkins is the only one I’ve finished so far — the others are in progress. Sometime after they’re all finished I expect I’ll write some Book Notes about them.

The Dawkins and the Dennett book both have very similar goals, namely, to elucidate the central idea of Darwinism^* at some length to reduce the mystery, misunderstanding, and hostility that it engenders. They both do a good job in markedly different voices: Dawkins is a high-energy, exuberant acolyte, Dennett a more deliberate and philosophical adherent. Quammen’s book, it seems, intends to be an intellectual biography of how Darwin came to his theory about evolution and what happened when he finally arrived there; I’m still near the beginning but it promises to be a good trip.

In his introduction, Quammen touches on those famous polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center that keeps finding that some 45% of the American people believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”; only 13% agreed that humans have developed from other life forms without any intervention from God! He writes:

Maybe the polls are invalid. Maybe the numbers would be much different in England or Sweden or India. Maybe the same distinctly American mixture of skepticism and evangelicalism that led to the Scopes trial, in 1925, continues to animate many citizens who would simply rather take their biology from scripture than from science. Maybe the question of human evolution is misleading and inordinately touchy; maybe Gallup and Pew should be asking whether God created, let’s say, tree kangaroos in their present form. Or maybe … who knows? I don’t claim to have any definitive explanation for such an extreme level of skepticism and willful antipathy toward such a well-established scientific discovery. Frankly, it mystifies me. But certainly those Gallup results–combined with the continuing political offensive against teaching evolutionary biology in public schools–testify that Charles Darwin isn’t just perennially significant. He’s also urgently relevant to education and governance.

I have agree with Quammen when he says “Frankly, it mystifies me.” Although I didn’t do it because of Darwinism as such, or to fight specifically against creationist incursions, this mystification is certainly part of the reason I founded Ars Hermeneutica, Limited. Now, whether we’ll be able to understand or do anything about the problem is an entirely different animal, but we intend to try.
———-
^*That species are not persistent and unchanging, but that species evolve from other species through the agency of natural selection.

Ascent of Science

I recently finished reading the massive but excellent book The Ascent of Science, by Brian L. Silver (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998). I had noted many passages that caught my eye as I read, and have shared some. As usual, I got behind, so here are the remainders.

Linnaeus, in 1735, commented, “It is remarkable that the stupidest ape differs so little from the wisest man, that the surveyor of nature has yet to be found who can draw the line between them.” [p. 269]

Just as true, it seems, going on 300 years later now that the genes of the chimpanzee have been sequenced.

Now this following example I have yet to see put forth as fundamentalist support for creationist doctrine:

Lamarck’s belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics ws anticipated by Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, and has in fact persisted for centuries. It is part of the folklore of many societies and has been around too long to be killed by ugly facts. One example of the effect on their offspring of what their parents see is about 4000 years old. Genesis 30:37–39 reads: “Jacob then got fresh shoots of poplar, and of almond and plane, and peeled white stripes in them, laying bare the white of the shoots. The rods that he had peeled he set up, in front of the goats, in the troughs, the water receptacles, that the goats came to drink from. The mating occured when they came to drink, and since the goats mated by the rods, the goats brought forth streaked, speckled, and spotted young.” [p. 288]

Einstein’s feelings about relativity and religion — which should not come as a surprise:

Einstein was much concerned with questions of morality and meaning. When asked what effect relativity had on religion, he replied, “None. Relativity is a purely scientific theory, and has nothing to do with religion. Nevertheless, there is a long history of fruitless attempts to relate the specifics of mathematics or physics to man’s religious and moral life. This is the wacky side of the Pythagorean heritage. The most general lesson that man can learn from science is the need to apply the highest standards of reason to those problems to which they can be applied. [p. 400, emphasis in original]

About the events that put Einstein’s name on everyone’s lips:

Einstein’s theory predicted that the path of light would be bent near massive bodies. Newton had also believed that his light corpuscles would be attracted by gravity, and Faraday looked unsuccessfully for the effect of gravity on light. Einstein’s prediciton was tested in 1919, during an eclipse of the Sun. The man who organized the experiment, which involved sending observers to Brazil and Principe, an island in the Gulf of Guinea, was the English cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington, who was an early convert to relativity. [...]

The experiment had been on a grnd scale. An account of the observations was presented at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, in London, and the announcement of the results by the astronomer royal, Sir Frank Watson Dyson, was a dramatic high point in the history of science. The deviations recorded by the two expeditions were 1.61 and 1.98 seconds of arc, although the experimental error was rather large. Einstein had predicted a deviation of 1.74 seconds of arc. The chairman of the meetings, J.J. Thomson, proclaimed, “This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day [and] one of the highest achievements of human thought.” That was on 6 November 1919. The following day there was an announcement in the London Times, and within days Einstein’s name became known to more people at one time than that of anyone else in the history of science. [p. 431]

The heading to Chapter 33 on “Cosmology” [p. 442]:

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.
– Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, early nineteenth-century gastronome

A curious footnote to scientific history and theory that I’d never heard before:

Before Galileo turned his telescope to the night sky in 1610, the universe was a much smaller place. There are fewer than 5000 stars visible to the naked eye, although it must have been assumed that there were many more, in view of the common European belief that each person had his own personal star. [footnote:] In the fifth century, Bishop Eusebius of Alexandria asked if “there were only two sars at the time of Adam and Eve.” [p. 451]

Finally, a remark that has not lost its defining utility:

In the early 1920s the automated production line turned America into an object of mass envy and admiration. Technology, not art or basic science, was confirmed as civilization’s status symbol. Few heeded the words of Dean Inge, in the 1920 Romanes Lecture: “The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.” [p. 488]

Atoms are not Watermelons

A few days back I finished reading How to Write: Advice and Relfections, by Richard Rhodes. Although I’m frequently drawn to read them, books about writing are rarely satisfying, interesting, or useful. Rhodes’ book managed all three, and I can recommend it.

Here are three passages I made note of as I read that I wanted to copy into my blog, which also serves as my commonplace book.

People lost in a wilderness have been known to find their way out guided by the wrong map; orienting is apparently a function only loosely tied to locality.¹ [p. 30]

Not everyone liked the arrangement.² Dixie Lee Ray, the eccentric former chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and governor of the state of Washington, reviewed The Making of the Atomic Bomb for the Washington Times. My war scenes were too graphic, Dr. Ray complained. Everyone knows that war is terrible; why go on about it? Worse, she wrote, the book jumps around. [p. 108, italics in original]

A less global structural problem was deciding at what level to pitch scientific explanation. I’d read enough popular science to be impatient with explanation that depended on fanciful analogies. Besides being condescending, comparing an atom to a watermelon wastes half the analogy. Fortunately, nuclear physics is largely an experimental science. Reading through some of the classic papers in the field, I realized that I could explain a result clearly and simply by describing the physical experiment that produced it: a brass box, the air evacuated, a source of radiation in the box in the form of a vial of radon gas, and so on. Then I and the reader could visualize a process in terms of the manipulation of real laboratory objects, not watermelons, just as the experimenters themselves did, and could absorb the culture of scientific work at the same time–the throb of the vacuum pump, the smell of its oil. [pp. 109--110]

———-
¹He had been discussing memory and the occasional difficulty of coming up with just the right word. He discusses the use of dictionaries and thesauruses to help, and how he frequently finds words that were “just right” but weren’t what he was looking for.

²“The arrangement”, that is, of his masterly The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which he uses historical narrative to follow several threads in science and politics, carrying each one to some stopping point before going to previous times to pick up a thread put down for awhile.