Numbers, Science, Words

This was initially going to be a comment in response to Amelia's post, but as I started writing I realized it would be a ridiculously long comment, and that practically no one reads the comments (otherwise there would be more than one or two comments per post, for sure).

So. Science and Play.

If we're going to talk about science, do we start with numbers or observation? Either way, aren't we endeavoring to describe? The general public likes to think of math and science as completely objective. Most people like to believe that there are things we can know. One oxygen plus two hydrogens is water, force = mass times acceleration, the Earth orbits the sun, gravity keeps us stuck to the ground, genes are translated into proteins. But good scientists will say that they can never know.

We like to think that numbers are more precise than language, that they afford certainty. 1=1. But 0.99999(and so on) also equals one. Imaginary numbers are important, but they don't exist in nature. We like to believe that numbers are extrinsic: "my kitty has 2 eyes and 4 legs and one tail." But as this article explains, numbers, like language, are something we made up. Does my kitty know that two bowls of ice cream (my kitty likes ice cream) is more than one bowl of ice cream? Sure. But I doubt she thinks of them as "one" and "two."

Science, especially biology, is often descriptive and highly variable. We strive for repeatability in experiments, especially in a clinical setting, but repeatability and certainty are not the same. Correlation and causation are not the same. For example, you may have heard that Lancet, an eminent medical journal, published a study that linked vaccines to autism. This led to mass hysteria and conspiracy theories galore. Some parents took the dangerous, stupid (sorry, I plan to be a public health professional, so it's difficult not to judge this behavior)step of refusing to vaccinate their children. This is how previously eradicated diseases make their way back into the population. The author of the study has since been discredited and Lancet has retracted the article.

You were probably taught about kingdoms in high school bio, right? Well, that system of classification was just that: a system. And, like the system of language Derrida describes, once you look a little closer, the system breaks down. There are organisms that don't fit neatly into the phylogeny proposed by the kingdom model.

At this point, biologists classify organisms as prokaryotes and eukaryotes: lacking nuclei and having nuclei. Even this is not sufficient, because it doesn't tell the whole story. The prokaryotes can be broken down into the bacteria and the archaea. And the archaea are more closely related to eukarya than they are to bacteria! We name things so that we can think about them and talk to others about them. The names we assign may have very little to do with what something is.

Further, individuals perform scientific experiments. Their conclusions about their results are subjective. Whether or not they public their work is often an individual choice, and in many fields negative results (in which the tested hypothesis is not supported) are less likely to be published than positive results, skewing the body of scientific literature available to other researchers and the general public.

Once a paper is published, the results of an important study often make their way to the general public via the news media. Why are news stories about scientific studies so much more sensational than the studies themselves? Why do they so often misinterpret results or present them in a misleading context? Language! There is a break down, an unfilled gap, between the language of science and the language of popular culture. We return again to the outrageous sensationalization of the "link" between vaccines and autism.

There's so much more that could be said about this topic, and I'm itching to stick with the biology-meets-literary theory track, but I think this is turning rambly already.