Is science a man's game?

Marie Curie

Yesterday I promised a more thorough rebuttal of Larry Summer's blithe assertion that women were inherently inferior at science, and that this had been convincingly established by behavioral genetics.  One distinctive anecdote from his own speech that he believes illustrates his point is a story about his own daughter.  According to numerous accounts of the talk, the story goes that when his daughter was a toddler, he gave her two trucks to play with (as part of an attempt at "gender neutral" parenting).  He was surprised to see her treat them like dolls, calling one of them the "daddy truck" and the other the "baby truck."  From his perspective, this demonstrated the female tendency to reframe observations within a nurturing, reproductive framework to which they are predisposed, rather than making objective observations about phenomena to construct understanding.  So let's unpack all of that, shall we?

Difference is Real

No one can deny that some part of sexual difference is biological, rather than the result of socialization - breasts, vaginas, and penises for example.  Similarly, since all of those gross anatomical differences come with associated hormonal differences, it's not a controversial argument in my mind to suggest that men's brains and women's brains might also manifest certain differences that might cause them to look at the world differently.  I confess that have a very materialistic view of the world (in the sense that I think that our physical corpus, the matter in our brains, the cocktail of chemicals surging through our bodies are sufficient to explain human behavior without resorting to some kind of indescribable soul or essence); it's also my personal experience that within men and women there exist a tremendous range of personalities, tendencies, and world views, and that any generalization will fail to capture many peoples' experiences.  However, I think that the statistical, epidemiological level, one could observe differences in the behavior patterns of men and women that could be attributed to genetic, biological differences.  So I suppose you could say that I don't object per se to the explicit premise of Summers's argument: in the big picture, there are real biological differences between the ways men and women see the world.

Objectivity is a myth

HOWEVER - what I find extremely objectionable is the implied premise that follows: that the way

Rachel Carson.  She's the reason we're
not all getting cancer from DDT.

men look at the world is somehow inherently better, and therefore when women engage in scientific pursuits, they do so with an inherent disadvantage.  I've blogged before about Paul Feyerabend's argument that an exclusionist attitude towards the production of knowledge is foolish and counterproductive, and Summers's attitude is a prime example of how a representative of the dominant group attempts to preserve dominance by privileging his own perspective, at the expense of the oppressed group in particular and of society more generally.  Summers' tacit conceit that there's a right way and a wrong way to do science and that men do it the right way is a not-so-subtle entrenchment of patriarchal elitism that tells men that what comes most naturally to them is best and what comes most naturally to women is inherently less valuable.  To put it more simply - I don't think it's wrong to point out differences between men and women, but the attachment a value statements to tendencies associated with one gender or the other should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

But what about all the awesome stuff that we've gotten from science?

That's what you might be asking about now.  If Summers is suggesting that the male way of doing science is best, perhaps its because it has yielded such tremendous technological dividends.  Well, here's a few quick thoughts on that point.

1. The goods of the status quo aren't an argument against doing things differently, and particularly doing them more inclusively.  We have no matriarchal alternate universe to compare with our own that might help us understand what the scientific world might look like if it were dominated by female knowledge production.  In any case, Feyerabend's original argument emphasizes inclusion: any practice, any approach that yields useful insights for life or inquiry has value and validity, and we'd all be better off if we could take an instrumental, "all of the above" approach to our understanding of the world.
2. Science has done plenty of horrible things as well.  Summers critiqued his daughter for the nurturing attitude she took towards her toy trucks; perhaps that ethical dimension might have diminished the likelihood of the invention or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or fostered more attention to environmental and resource preservation at an earlier stage in human technological development.  One might argue, in fact, that to the extent that typically "masculine" traits are manifested in science, they've endangered the survival of the human race and the entire ecosphere.  That's a consequence worth considering.
3. The idea that there is a proper "methodology" is really a myth that's deployed to silence voices that the dominant group finds threatening.  Feyerabend's entire book centers around an analysis of Galileo's challenge to the heliocentric theory, and systematically demonstrates that he disregards nearly all aspects of the process that has been enshrined as the "scientific method."

Perhaps I could have summed this post up much more succinctly with the following statement and question.  "Larry Summers thinks women are bad at science.  But who gets to decide what good science is?"

Long Live the Pirate Metropolis

Many of you know I'm a high school debate coach.  Last year's topic focused on economic development of the oceans, and one of the arguments I most enjoyed developing was a critique of a particular policy action that would map the United States' exclusive economic zone.  The argument, based largely on the work of Antonis Balasopoulos, wasn't focused on the instrumental questions of mapping, nor on how the mapping of territory facilitates imperial control and resource extraction.  Instead, it centered on the symbolic effect of taking an unknown space and bringing it under the hegemony of ordered knowledge.

Balasopoulos took it for granted that efforts to map the ocean would not be the crucial logistical battles to propping up imperial order; we can all recognized how entrenched all of our modern institutions are.  The significance of ocean mapping, from his perspective, lie more in the Ocean's power as a symbol, a referrant that exists in opposition to the fixed structures that define modern political units.  Consider the shifting terrain of the rolling waves to the fixed arrangement of mountains and valleys, or the overlapping jurisdictions that govern human behavior in our terrestrial lives versus the lawlessness of international waters.  Indulging in a blend of historical anecdote and fiction, Balasopoulos spins tales about pirate metropolises that existed outside the laws of states and espoused egalitarian, anarchist frameworks for organizing their micro-societies.

Perhaps such places never existed, but there's something about the open Ocean and its inviting possibilities that calls to our imagination, and Balasopoulos argues that the imaginative act of envisioning such a society and contemplating its potentiality could provide such a shock, such a tremendous juxtaposition against our status quo, that it could inspire us to challenge contemporary political orders and reject utilitarian argument for constantly pursuing the unknown in the name of quantifying it and exploiting its measurable value.

I can't say exactly why this argument found its way back into my head, but I think it has something to do with the synergy it expresses with my entry from last week, The Imagination Cycle.  I'm enchanted by the idea that our creative mind is something that we can cultivate and harness to motivate meaningful changes in the world.  Balasopoulos is arguing that certain spaces have unique value because of the analogical role they play in that creative process.

The Imagination Cycle

I've had quite a few conversations with friends and family and a number of significant personal experiences in the last few years that have reaffirmed one of the major pillars of my worldview: that the perspective we bring to each moment in our lives has a profound impact on the content that fills up each day.  Put another way, life isn't a series of events occurring independently that we simply react to and form emotional perspectives on, but rather our own emotional perspectives strongly influence the outcomes of situations we encounter in life.  The two aspects ("objective" external reality and "subjective" internal experience) are impossible to separate, and continuously influence each other in a dynamic cycle.

Well, I've been reading this wonderful little book called Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, which is exactly what the title promises.  Chapter after chapter dives into brilliantly imagined thought experiments that explore the nature of time.  Einstein was renowned for proposing and exploring these gedanken experiments (German, not the most elegant language, right?), and I think that book at least implies that such imaginative exploration were essential to the groundbreaking challenges Einstein went on to make to our notions of space-time.  Considered against the backdrop of the other personal reflections I've had this year, the idea that the terrain we let our imagination tread might significantly impact our understanding of the world was really compelling.

And it got me thinking - maybe the world would be a much better place if each of us started our day with a meditation where we imagined the world as we wished it were.  If we visualized walking through our day being kind to everyone we met and receiving that kindness in return, considering the consequences of our choices and wrapped in the comfort of knowing we exist in a world of social relations that we each value and protect... it might make us more likely to make choices that push that world closer to existence.

So I'm issuing a call to anyone who's interested seeing the world become a nicer, happier, more loving place: start your day with five minutes of meditation on what you want the world to be, and see if the rest of your day feels any different.  I'd love to document anecdotes that anyone is willing to share.

Against Method

While we're on the subject of science this week, I'd love to cast a spotlight on one of my favorite scholars of science, the twentieth century epistemologist out of Berkley, Paul Feyerabend (here's another look back at scientific epistemology vs. religion, for those interested).

His seminal work, Against Method, came out in 1975 and serves as a counterpoint view to Thomas Kuhn's narrative of gradual waves of mounting revolutions in understanding.  By contrast, Feyerabend's view is anarchic, unstructured, and all encompassing.  He challenges the very epistemological narrative of the singular scientific method which produces steady increases in the body of human knowledge through repeated, inductive observations.

His alternative proposal - anything goes.  No method for producing knowledge should be preferred over any other, and in the swirling marketplace of ideas that would inevitably result, unpredictable synergies, interpretations of events that could radically expand our understanding of the Universe might be attained that would never be accessible if we constantly privilege one mode of knowledge production.

His case is persuasive; he builds his argument against privileging the scientific method by critically analyzing one of the seminal cases often presented as a victory of scientific methodology: Galileo's heliocentric theory.

For instance, one of the hallmarks of the classical narrative of scientific progress through continuous induction is the claim that as we refine our understanding of the Universe, we will be able to make more accurate predictions.  Except Galileo's predictions of astronomical trajectories were less accurate than those made with the prevailing geocentric models of the time.

Another example - replicability.  There are numerous documented cases of Galileo making claims of observations made through his telescope which other observers could not distinguish when gazing through his instruments.

A third - that scientific arguments propagate and succeed based on sound logical defense.  Galileo was largely successful in propagating his theories because he relied on his own cult of personality and a slew of fallacies that persuaded the unschooled layperson.  Galileo employed arguments he knew to be false in order to build support for his theory which he intuitively believed to be true.

And in the long view, history has vindicated Galileo.  Neither is Feyerbend's argument isn't that we should condemn Galileo.  On the contrary, he raises Galileo's tremendous success as proof positive that when we don't slavishly adhere to one version of creating and interpreting truth, that we might open our minds to considerably deeper understanding.

Jesus v. Heisenberg

Kaleidoscopic Inspiration in Notre Dame.  trefpool.com

For those of you who may not know, I am a science teacher.  I work at a school with some religious affiliations, and for the last two years, I've offered a seminar that explored a tension point that divides our society and inspires a colorful collection epithets lobbed between the two camps:

Science vs. Religion.

Most people begin this conversation by advocating for the truth and importance of one of the contenders, which misses the point entirely.  The ideological conflict between these two institutions remains unresolved for most because neither side accepts the basic arguments made by other - there's no way to begin the conversation.  This is happening because people want to start their conversations in the middle, rather than at the beginning.

HERE is where the conversation begins: Science and Religion are both epistemological lenses - ways take the information around you and filter it into an interpretation of what the world really "is".  They have some important things in common, and some very important differences.

What could science and religion possibly share, you might ask? Most crucially, both are based on assumptions that can never be proven to be true.  Everything you've ever seen has been filtered through your eyes.  Everything you've ever heard has been filtered through your ears.  You have no way of verifying whether or not the images you see in front of you correspond to some kind of objective reality that actually exists.  Neither does anyone else - assuming other people actually do exist.  You don't know if you're plugged into the Matrix, or just a figment in the imagination of God.

This is a millennia-old philosophical quandary known as solipsism - the idea that we can't know what

Jesus power.  trefpool.com

is "real" because we can never look at reality from the outside, so to speak.  There is even a mathematical basis for solipsism: Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates quite clearly that it is mathematically impossible to build a coherent, logical system without starting from basic, unprovable assumptions.  We glaze over these assumptions in our everyday lives because they're convenient, but convenience isn't the same thing as truth.

Did you hear that, militant atheists that belittle religious people for believing things?  Whether or not you realized it, your entire worldview is based on fundamental assumptions about the Universe that you will never, ever be able to prove, any more than a religious person can prove the existence of God.  We're all taking it on faith.  We all just believe whatever feels the most true to us.

Just some food for thought.