Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi once made the pithy observation that "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought."
I think that's really what sets apart the scientists from the rest of us -- that ability to go from "wow, that's weird!" to "... and here's how I think it works." But there's another piece, too, that has unfortunately been lost over time through the sad fact of increasing specialization within the sciences.
And that's the ability to be conversant in a great many different disciplines, and the capacity for drawing connections between them.
Another accurate observation -- this one, I haven't been able to find an attestation for -- is that "Researchers these days are learning more and more about less and less, until finally they're going to know everything about nothing." One of my mentors, science educator Roger Olstad, called this "focusing on one cubic millimeter of the universe," and said that generalists make better teachers, because they can draw on information from lots of disparate fields in order to make sense of their subject for students. Fortunately for me; I'm an inveterate dabbler. I'd have been a lousy candidate for a doctoral program, because I don't seem to be able to keep my mind locked on one thing for five minutes, much less the five years or more you have to focus in order to research and write a dissertation.
What's kind of sad, though, is that it hasn't always been this way. Before the twentieth century, scientists were almost all polymaths; it behooves us all to remember that the word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, which simply means "knowledge." Consider, for example, the following advances, all made in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Do you know who was responsible for each?
Made the first accurate measurements of motion of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, allowing the astronomer Giovanni Cassini to calculate the planet's rotational period
Deduced the law of elasticity -- that for springs (or other elastic objects), the linear extension is directly proportional to the force exerted
Made the first-ever drawing of a microorganism (the fungus Mucor)
Figured out that the optimum shape for a weight-bearing dome is exactly the same as the curve of a hanging chain, only upside-down (the inverted catenary), revolutionizing architecture
Was the first to note that venous and arterial blood differ in appearance, pressure, and composition
Determined that the force of gravitation is an inverse-square law
Figured out (through microscopic analysis) that petrified wood retains the cellular structure of the living wood it came from
Studied waves in two-dimensional plates, and was the first to observe their nodal patterns (now called Chladni figures after an eighteenth-century physicist who did an extensive analysis of them)
Built the first balance-spring pocketwatch
Coined the term cell after seeing the microscopic holes in thin slices of cork, and likening them to the monks' quarters (celluli) in a monastery
Concluded, from studying lunar craters, that the Moon must have its own gravity
Was the first to analyze schlieren, the streaks caused when two transparent fluids with different indices of refraction mix (such as heat shimmer over a hot roadway, or when you stir simple syrup into water)
Speculated that there was a specific component of air that allowed for respiration in animals -- and that both respiration and combustion gradually removed whatever that component was
Developed the first clockwork drive for telescopes, allowing them to compensate for the Earth's rotation and track the movement of astronomical objects
You're probably on to me by now, and figured out that these advances in diverse fields weren't made by different people. They were all made by one man.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
His name was Robert Hooke. He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635 to an Anglican priest and his wife, and because of frail health wasn't given much in the way of formal education. But his mechanical aptitude was evident from a really young age. He was especially fascinated with clocks, and after studying the workings of a brass pendulum clock in his father's study, he went off and built himself one out of wood.
It worked.
He got the rudiments of drawing from a short-lived apprenticeship with painter Peter Lely, but once again his health interfered; according to an 1898 biography, "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution, increasing his Head-ache to which he was ever too much subject." So he went on to more generalized study, first at the Westminster School and then at the University of Oxford, from which he graduated in 1662.
Three years later, he'd accomplished so much he was appointed Curator for Life to the newly-founded Royal Society of London.
It's hard to exaggerate Hooke's contribution to Enlightenment science. He was interested in everything. And damn good at pretty much all of it. The misses he had -- not beating Newton to the Universal Law of Gravitation, for example -- were more because he stopped pursuing a line of inquiry too soon, usually because he went on to some other pressing interest.
Hooke got a reputation for being prickly -- one biographer called him "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful" -- for his determination to get credit for his many discoveries. This picture of Hooke as having a sour, grasping personality comes mainly from his conflict with two people; Christiaan Huygens (another remarkable polymath, who tangled with Hooke over who had the right to the patent for the balance-spring pocketwatch), and none other than Isaac Newton.
Newton was not a man to piss off. Not only was he brilliant in his own right, he was apparently "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful." He and Hooke started out at least on speaking terms, and exchanged some information with each other, but it very rapidly devolved into a vicious rivalry. Newton, for his part, never did acknowledge that Hooke had any role in the development of the Universal Law of Gravitation. In a 1680 letter, Newton wrote, "yet am I not beholden to [Hooke] for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipses, which inclined me to try it ..."
There's an allegation -- disputed by some historians -- that when Newton was appointed president of the Royal Society at Hooke's death in 1703, Newton had all of Hooke's portraits destroyed. The one surviving painting supposedly of Hooke is almost certainly not him, but of Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont. In fact, all we have left of Hooke's likeness for certain is an unflattering description of him from his friend John Aubrey: "He is but of midling stature, something crooked, pale-faced, and his face but little below, but his head is lardge, his eie full and popping, and not quick; a grey eie. He has a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle. He is and ever was temperate and moderate in dyet."
His odd posture and appearance -- as well as his ongoing health problems -- are now thought to be due to the degenerative spine disease Scheuermann's kyphosis, which eventually led to his death at the age of 67. But what he accomplished despite his physical handicaps is somewhere beyond remarkable.
Now, imagine if Hooke's career had begun in a typical Ph.D. program where he was told, "focus on one thing only."
Don't misunderstand me; I'm grateful for experts. The current anti-expert bias in what passes for a government in my country is nothing short of idiotic. It amounts to, "I'm going to discount this person who has spent her/his entire adult life studying this topic, in favor of some crank with a website." But there's also room for the generalists -- people who aren't afraid to delve into whatever takes their fancy, and bring that breadth of experience to whatever they undertake.
People like the extraordinary polymath Robert Hooke.
There's an ongoing war of words between people who consider themselves generalists and those who consider themselves specialists.
I recall being in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Washington -- a placement that only lasted a semester, for a variety of reasons -- and my advisor sneeringly referring to generalists as "people who lack the focus, drive, and brains to stay with something long enough to learn it thoroughly." Countering this is the quip that specialists are "learning more and more about less and less, until finally they'll know everything about nothing."
Although I am squarely in the generalist camp, I'm strongly of the opinion that we need both. The specialists' depth and the generalists' breadth should be complementary, not in contention. The focus of specialists has given us most of our detailed knowledge of science and technology; the wide-ranging interest of generalists -- who, in a kinder time, were called polymaths rather than dilettantes or dabblers -- allow them to draw connections between disparate fields, and bring that curiosity and wonder to others.
I'm hoping this doesn't come across as self-defensive, given my B.S. in physics, attempted/abortive M.S. in oceanography, final M.A. in historical linguistics, and teaching certification in biology. Perhaps my long-ago advisor wasn't entirely incorrect; my "oh look something shiny!" approach to learning would likely have made a Ph.D. in anything unattainable. But it does have the distinct advantage that I'm still unendingly curious about the world, and almost on a daily basis stumble on cool things in a vast array of disciplines that I didn't know about.
Take, for example, the fact that yesterday I learned about a language I'd never heard of before, belonging to an entire language family I'd never heard of before. Illustrating, perhaps, that even at the master's degree level, my study of linguistics had already narrowed to the point of excluding all but a tiny fraction of what's out there (my study focused primarily on Scandinavian and Celtic languages; my only real work in a non-Indo-European language has been my recent attempts to learn some Japanese). But this odd language I found out about has a curious history -- and a possible connection to another language family, on the opposite side of the world.
The language is called Ket, and is spoken by a small number -- estimates are between fifty and two hundred -- people in the remote region of Krasnoyarsk Krai in central Siberia. It is the sole surviving member of the Yeniseian language family; the last speaker of the related language called Yugh died in 1970, and other members of the Yeniseian family, Kott, Arin, Assan, and Pumpokol, were all extinct by the mid-nineteenth century.
A Ket family, circa 1900 [Image is in the Public Domain]
Here's where it gets interesting, though. There's some evidence that Ket and the other Yeniseian languages are related to the language spoken by the Xiongnu Confederation, a group of interrelated nomadic peoples who dominated the east Eurasian steppes -- what are now parts of Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China -- from the third century B.C.E. to the first century C.E. And one hypothesis is that when the Xiongnu Confederation fell to pieces, in part because of a climatic shift that led to severe drought, they upped stakes and moved west, where they became known to history as...
... the Huns.
So an obscure language currently spoken by under two hundred people may be the closest surviving cousin of the language spoken by one of the most feared warrior people ever, who made it all the way to what is now eastern France before finally being defeated.
But it gets weirder still. Because linguistic analysis has suggested one other possible relative of Ket -- the Na Dene languages of western North America, including Athabaskan, Tlingit, Eyak, and Navajo. Linguist Bernard Comrie calls it "the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative historical linguistics." Supporting this is a study by Edward Vajda of Western Washington University finding that the Q1 Y-chromosome haplogroup is extremely common in Na Dene speakers, and close to universal amongst the Ket -- but is found almost nowhere else in Eurasia.
How the Ket (and the other Yeniseian speakers) got where they are is a matter of conjecture. One possibility is that the ancestors of the Yeniseians (including, possibly, the Xiongnu and the Huns) were left behind when the ancestors of today's North American Na Dene speakers crossed Beringia into Alaska during the last Ice Age. Other anthropologists believe that the split occurred later, as some of the North American migrants crossed back into what is now Siberia, and got stranded there when the seas rose. It's hard to imagine what evidence could settle this conclusively; but the relationship between the Yeniseian languages and the Na Dene languages, along with the highly suggestive DNA connection, seems to support a relationship between those two now-widely-separated groups. However the walkabout happened, it's left its fingerprint in three different continents.
So there you have it. A link between the Huns, the Navajo, and a tiny and declining group of Siberians. That's our excursion into linguistics for today. Tomorrow it might be astronomy or geology or archaeology or meteorology or, perhaps, ghosts and Bigfoots or whatnot. You never know. I presume you must on some level enjoy my random musings, or you wouldn't be here. Even if I might well "lack focus, drive, and brains," I still have more fun jumping from topic to topic than I would if I'd buckled down and focused on one cubic centimeter of the universe.
Last week a gardener friend and I were talking about the fact that some plants are extreme specialists -- they only thrive in a very narrow range of conditions.
The classic example of this are orchids. Virtually all orchid species only do well if you can somehow replicate the exact conditions of temperature, soil pH, soil mineral content, sunlight, and so on that they need. Some also require the presence of symbiotic fungi (such as mycorrhizae) that infiltrate the orchid's roots and aid in nutrient and water uptake. All of this is why if you ever are lucky enough to see an orchid growing in the wild, resist the temptation of digging it up and bringing it home for your garden. The chances are nearly one hundred percent that all you'll succeed in doing is killing it in short order. (Also, if you live in a place with laws against harming endangered species, you might be looking at serious fines if you get caught.)
It's an interesting question to consider why such extreme specialization evolves. On first glance, it seems like it'd be better for all species to evolve toward becoming generalists -- able to handle a wide range of conditions. The thing is that while generalists (like dandelions and crabgrass) do thrive just about everywhere, giving them a competitive edge in disturbed habitats (like cities) where not much else grows, they get beaten by the specialists in old, stable ecosystems. The specialists have evolved to tolerate those specific conditions better than anything else.
It's why in old-growth rain forests, just about everything you see -- plant and animal -- is a specialist. Along roadside ditches, they're all generalists.
Some recent research suggests that this drive toward specialization in stable habitats is very old. A study of the distribution of animals in Ediacaran (very late Precambrian) sandstone in Australia found that some of the peculiar animals characteristic of these ecosystems showed a distinct preference for particular parts of the habitat -- a clear hallmark of specialization.
The researchers focused on a handful of species that have no living descendants, including Obamus coronatus (which looks like a French cruller) and the hubcap-like Tribrachidium heraldicum, one of the only known animals to have triradial symmetry.
Both animals were grazers, feeding on the microbial mat on the seafloor, but their habitat choices differed. Obamus turned out to have a distinct preference for places where the mat was thickest; Tribrachidium was much more evenly dispersed. And since both animals were of very low mobility -- similar to modern barnacles -- this didn't just reflect the chance arrangement of where they were when the a layer of sediment, probably stirred up by a storm or landslide, buried them for eternity.
This was a habitat choice -- and the first known example of specialization in the natural world.
"We think about the very oldest animals and maybe you wouldn't expect them to be so picky," said Mary Droser of the University of California - Riverside, who co-authored the study. "But Obamus only occurs where there is a thick mat, and it's a pretty sophisticated way of making a living for something so very old... There are a limited number of reproductive strategies, especially for animals like these. There are more strategies today, and they're more elaborate now. But the same ones used today were still being used 550 million years ago."
"It's not like studying dinosaurs, which are related to birds that we can observe today," said Phillip C. Boan, also of UC - R, and lead author of the new study. "With these animals, because they have no modern descendants, we're still working out basic questions about how they lived, such as how they reproduced and what they ate... This is really the first example of a habitat-selective Ediacaran creature, the first example of a macroscopic animal doing this. But how did they get where they wanted to go? This is a question we don't yet know the answer to."
It's fascinating that we can get some insight into the behavior of a species that lived so long ago, during a time where there was no life at all on land. Imagine it -- everything alive is in the sea, and the continents were vast, barren expanses of rock, sand, and dust. The first land-dwelling plants and animals wouldn't exist for another fifty million years (and even then, they were clustered around bodies of water; the central parts of the continents would have been lifeless for a great deal longer).
But despite how alien this landscape would have seemed, organisms were already evolving through natural selection to have many of the same traits we see today -- including the fact that some of them, like modern orchids, know exactly where they want to be.
