At DrugMonkey, PhysioProf explores the rules of engagement between grad students in journal club and seminar presentations (building off of interesting explorations of this question from A Lady Scientist, Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde, and Acmegirl — all of which you should click through to read in their entirety). I’m late to the party, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the balance here between the intellectual aspects and the human aspects of questioning within the tribe of science.
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
Some thoughts on ‘Aetogate’
Brian reminds us not to mistake the lull in the action in “Aetogate” (the charges of unethical conduct by Spencer Lucas and colleagues) for a resolution to the matter. We’re still waiting for the ruling from the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology ethics committee. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts on the “verdict” from the inquiry conducted by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. (There is a 40+ page PDF of Spencer Lucas’s written responses to the allegations and of the inquiry’s findings here.)
Facts and their interpretation.
Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf has written a post on the relative merits of “correct” and “interesting”, at least as far as science is concerned. Quoth PhysioProf:
It is essential that one’s experiments be “correct” in the sense that performing the same experiment in the same way leads to the same result no matter when the experiment is performed or who performs it. In other words, the data need to be valid.
But it is not at all important that one’s interpretation of the data–from the standpoint of posing a hypothesis that is consistent with the data–turns out to be correct or not. All that matters is that the hypothesis that is posed be “interesting”, in the sense of pointing the way to further illuminating experiments.
I spend a lot of time with my trainees on this distinction, because some of them tend to be so afraid of being “wrong” in their interpretations that they effectively refuse to interpret their data at all, and their hypotheses are nothing more than restatements of the data themselves. This makes it easy to be “correct”, but impossible to think creatively about where to go next.
Some tend in the opposite direction, going on flights of fancy that are so unmoored from the data as to result in hypotheses that are also useless in leading to further experiments with a reasonable likelihood of yielding interpretable results.
I think this is a really good description of a central feature of scientific activity.
A message about science worth communicating to the public.
In light of all the recent discussion about the “framing” of the Expelled! expulsion, it occurs to me that maybe part of the reason that the argument seems so unproductive is that the parties involved haven’t really agreed on what, exactly, they’re trying to communicate to the public at large.
Here’s my suggestion for a message worth communicating clearly: science isn’t politics.
Scientists call for public action in support of research with animals.
For those who have been following the activities of “animal rights” activists, including their attacks of the homes of researchers — and the reticence of the public in the face of such violent attacks — a recent Commentary in Biological Psychiatry [1] will be of interest. In it, a number of scientists call on their scientific peers to actively engage in dialogue with the public about what scientific research with animals actually involves and why it is important.
From the commentary:
Science and belief.
Given that in my last post I identified myself as playing for Team Science, this seems to be as good a time as any to note that not everyone on the team agrees about every little thing. Indeed, there are some big disagreements — but I don’t think these undermine our shared commitment to scientific methodology as a really good way of understanding our world.
I’m jumping into the fray of one of the big disagreements with this repost of an essay I wrote for the dear departed WAAGNFNP blog.
There’s a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to as “faith”, that “rational” habits of mind and “magical thinking” cannot coexist in the same skull without leading to a violent collision.
We are not talking about worries that one cannot sensibly reconcile one’s activities in a science which relies on isotopic dating of fossils with one’s belief, based on a literal reading of one’s sacred texts, that the world and everything on it is orders of magnitude younger than isotopic dating would lead us to conclude. We are talking about the view that any intellectually honest scientist who is not an atheist is living a lie.
I have no interest in convincing anyone to abandon his or her atheism. However, I would like to make the case that there is not a forced choice between being an intellectually honest scientist and being a person of faith.
The women who taught me science.
Since March is Women’s History Month, I thought it might be appropriate to recognize some women who were a part of my history — namely, the women who taught me chemistry and physics. (This shouldn’t be interpreted as a slight against the women who taught me biology — I simply don’t remember them as well — nor against the men who taught me science. They made an impact on me, but this post isn’t about them.)
Recommended reads on women in math, science, engineering.
They’re both by men, but sometimes it happens that way.
- Mark Chu-Carroll ridicules Vox Day’s ridiculous claim that women are too dumb to do long division, let alone program computers. While Day’s claim was silly from the get-go, Mark’s take-down in really nice.
- A friend from the three-dimensional world (specifically math camp), Jonathan Kulick, who cannot hide from the blogosphere even in Tbilisi, examines claims that women are underrepresented in science for reasons other than bias. Will it surprise you to hear that Christina Hoff Sommers may be dismissing research she doesn’t like out of hand?
If you want to share links to other things we ought to be reading on this subject or others, leave them in the comments.
If the science pipeline breaks, the rest of us get hurt, too.
A bunch of other bloggers are discussing the recent statement A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk (PDF). I thought I’d say something about the complexities of the situation, and about why non-scientists (whose tax dollars support scientific research funded by the NIH and other government agencies) should care.
The general idea behind funding scientific research with public monies is that such research is expected to produce knowledge that will benefit society. There are problems that non-scientists cannot solve on their own, so we pony up the resources so that scientists can apply their expertise to solving them. As we’ve discussed before, tax-payers seem most interested in the payoff of the research — the knowledge with practical application.
But you can’t get that payoff without scientists.
Why more racial diversity in the science blogosphere would be a good thing
Since Alice and Sciencewoman and DrugMonkey and Razib are discussing it (and because Zuska has discussed it before, including in real life), I wanted to say something about my reaction to the observation that science blogosphere in general, and ScienceBlogs in particular, seems pretty white:
I’d noticed that, too! And I’d like it a lot if there were more racial diversity among the science bloggers and the blogging scientists.
There would be some clear benefits to achieving more diversity — but there might also be costs, and looking at who would bear those costs seems pretty important.