Tearing down the roadblocks

I wonder if you've heard of Marie Tharp.  I hope you have, but suspect you haven't.  Even in scientific circles, her name is not exactly a household word.

It should be.

Back in 1912, a German geologist and climatologist named Alfred Wegener noticed correspondences that seemed too great to be coincidences.  First, there was the thing that just about everyone wonders about in grade school -- the puzzle-piece contours of Europe and Africa with North and South America.  Then there was the fact that the fossil record of those two regions are similar until about two hundred million years ago, and afterward gradually diverge.  And last, he observed that the Appalachian, Pennine, and Scandinavian Mountains are geologically similar and seem to have formed at around the same time.  As you undoubtedly know, Wegener put all that together and proposed that they were all explained by continental drift -- that the land masses were all united at one point, then broke up and drifted apart, splitting what had been a single continent with a contiguous mountain range into widely-separated pieces.

The main reason this wasn't well-received was not only, or even mainly, because of hidebound scientists clinging to old models; it was that Wegener couldn't explain how, or why, it had occurred.  He proposed no mechanism to account for continents "drifting" in what appeared to be solid rock.  So while it's a pity for poor Wegener that he'd landed on the correct answer and got no recognition for it (he died at age fifty in 1930 on an expedition to Greenland, thirty years before plate tectonics was proposed), his theory's poor reception is honestly understandable.

What happened to Marie Tharp in the 1950s is less forgivable.

Tharp was an oceanographer who fell into the profession almost by accident.  She was fascinated with science, but women back then were actively discouraged from pursuing careers in scientific fields; they were frequently given helpful advice like "it's extremely difficult for women to compete as scientists," with few of the (male) advisors and supervisors asking themselves the question of why that was, and more importantly, if maybe, just maybe, it was a problem they should work on fixing.  During World War II, though, when a lot of college-age men were overseas fighting, colleges started actively recruiting -- well, just about anyone, even those from groups that had been previously excluded.  Tharp took a geology class and was fascinated by the subject, so she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, completing a master's degree in petroleum geology in 1944.

After that, though, she ran into the difficulty that geology and related sciences rely on field work, and nearly all of the companies that hired geologists didn't allow women to work in the field.  So Tharp was relegated to analyzing data -- especially mapping data -- that had been collected and brought back by her male colleagues.

Tharp in 1968 [Image is in the Public Domain]

It was when she was working on a project to map the deep parts of the Atlantic she noticed something odd.  For a decade, ships had been crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean using sounding devices to map the topography of the ocean floor, initially as a way of locating downed aircraft and ships.  But as she was creating contour maps, Tharp found that there was a huge mountain range running all the way down the center, from north to south -- and that mountain range had a narrow, deep, v-shaped valley right down the middle.  Then she started plotting the epicenters of submarine earthquakes onto the map, and found they coincided almost perfectly with the ridge and valley.

As soon as she saw this, she knew Wegener had been right.

The rift, she claimed, was where the motive force arose that was forcing the continents apart.  It was seismically active, and (she rightly predicted) should be characterized by newly-formed igneous rock, as the split between the continents widened and lava from the mantle bubbled up and froze on contact with cold seawater.  She told her supervisor, geologist Bruce Heezen, who promptly laughed at her, characterizing her explanation as "girls' talk."

Tharp, fortunately, was not so easily dissuaded.  She kept at it, and after several years had enough data amassed that the evidence was absolutely incontrovertible.  Even Heezen finally gave in.  Those ridges and valleys were eventually found to be a network of rifts encircling the globe like the stitching on a baseball, and her idea that they were responsible for plate tectonics was absolutely spot-on.  But it's significant that of the many papers about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and plate tectonics that Heezen and others published in the 1960s and 1970s, Tharp's contributions were acknowledged on exactly zero of them.  The person who was credited with discovering the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone, and proposing its role in continental drift, was...

... you guessed it...

... Bruce Heezen.

She was eventually recognized for her brilliance and hard work, but like a lot of women scientists, didn't receive it until quite late in her career.  She was awarded the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal in 1978, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Mary Sears Woman Pioneer in Oceanography Award in 1999, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Heritage Award in 2001, five years before her death at the age of 86.

It's certainly easier for women in science now, in part due to indomitable women like Marie Tharp.  But the fact that it's not equally easy for men and women -- which it still very much isn't -- illustrates that we have a long way to go in welcoming women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people into every career avenue.  If you're one of those people who has ridiculed DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) drives in education, business, and industry, then maybe you should be working harder to create a world where we don't need them any more.

Odd how those who are most vocally against DEI seldom have any cogent arguments why they think it's appropriate or fair to set up roadblocks that result in wasting over half of the potential talent, drive, passion, and genius we have at our fingertips.

Most people who are interested in geology have heard of Wegener, and pioneers like Drummond Matthews, Frederick Vine, and Harry Hess.  Far fewer have heard of Marie Tharp, who overcame tremendous personal and professional hurdles to revolutionize our understanding of how the Earth's geological systems work.

Hearing about her struggles won't undo the unfairness and misogyny she dealt with during her entire professional life, but maybe it will assure that this generation of women scientists don't have to endure the same thing.

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The necessity of representation

This past weekend, I got into two apparently unrelated conversations with online acquaintances that at their basis amount to the same thing.

The first revolved around the one and only television series I am at all dedicated to, which is Doctor Who.  I've been a near-fanatical Whovian since my wife persuaded me a few years ago to watch a selection of iconic episodes like "Blink," "Silence in the Library," "Turn Left," and "Empty Child," resulting in my being hooked for life.  The conversation I got into, which honestly crossed the line into a heated argument, had to do with the choice three years ago of Jodie Whittaker for the Thirteenth Doctor, replacing Peter Capaldi (and a string of eleven other white males stretching back to the series's beginnings in 1963).

The topic came up because of rumors (thus far unsubstantiated, as far as I've seen) that Jodie Whittaker may be leaving the show at the end of this season.  I mentioned how disappointed I'd be if this was true, and how much I liked her portrayal of the character -- that she'd be in my top three Doctors ever -- and this brought up the same "the Doctor is male" nonsense I first saw popping up all over the place when she was chosen.

The choice of a woman, this fellow said, was "virtue signaling."  So, actually, was the choice of an American-born Black actor (Tosin Cole) to play one of the Doctor's current companions, Ryan Sinclair, and British people of Indian descent both for another companion, Yasmin Khan (played by Mandip Gill) and also the most recent regeneration of the Doctor's arch-enemy, the Master (played with brilliantly insane glee by Sacha Dhawan).  The whole thing, said the man I was talking to, amounted to the writers of Doctor Who saying "Look at us, how enlightened we are, having a bunch of people of different races in prominent roles."

My response was that Doctor Who has long been on the cutting edge of representing people of all configurations -- three early examples being in 2005 the character of Captain Jack Harkness giving new meaning to the word "pansexual," two years later the Tenth Doctor pairing up with Dr. Martha Jones (Freema Agyewan) as companion, and a bit after that, the fantastically badass couple Vastra and Jenny, not only a lesbian romance but an interspecies one.

Nope, he said.  That was virtue signaling too.

At that point I told him I thought all he was doing was making excuses for maintaining the illusion of a straight white male hegemony despite the fact that it doesn't accurately reflect the reality of who is actually out there, and he told me to "fuck off with my leftist agenda" and the conversation ended.

The other, marginally less frustrating conversation centered around my novel released a year ago, Whistling in the Dark.  I was asked a question about Dr. Will Daigle, one of the main characters both in this book and in its sequel Fear No Colors (scheduled for release in March).  The reader said she liked the character just fine, but why did I "choose to make him gay?"  It had nothing particular to do with the plot, she said; nothing he does in the book couldn't equally well be done by a heterosexual person.  Then she asked the question that made me realize immediately the parallel with my earlier discussion with the disgruntled Doctor Who fan: "Did you feel like you had to include a gay character to be politically correct?"

Whenever I'm asked about why I wrote a character a particular way, my usual reaction is to say, "I didn't make the character that way.  The characters come to me the way they are, and I just write it down."  But I realized that the reader's question went way deeper than that, that she wasn't asking me why I gave the character of Aaron Vincent green eyes or the character of Rose Dawson long gray hair she wore in a braid.  She was asking me about inclusion and representation, not just how I visualize characters.

So I said to her, "Okay, tell me some reasons why Dr. Will shouldn't be queer."  And she sputtered around a bit and said, "Well, I didn't mean that, of course."  But having already had my blood pressure spiked by a bigot earlier that day, I decided I'd made my point and withdrew from battle.

I found the whole thing profoundly frustrating, both because of the self-righteousness of the people I was talking to (especially the first one), and because they were seemingly blind to two things.  First, representing diversity isn't just "nice;" it's reality.  As far as the choice of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor, I'm reminded of the wonderful quote from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "When I'm sometimes asked, 'When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]?' and I say 'When there are nine,' people are shocked.  But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

Second, representation is important.  How many of us have looked up to characters from fiction, especially ones we found as children, and formed our attitudes of what is right and wrong, normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, based upon their actions?  Being a white guy I can't speak to the racial and sexist aspects of this, and wouldn't presume to claim a visceral understanding of those perspectives; but as someone who is queer and who hid it (literally) for decades, I can say with some assurance what a difference it would have made to me if there had been positive LGBTQ role models in the books, television, and movies I'd been exposed to when I was a teenager.  Honestly, the only LGBTQ character I can remember from those days is the character of Jodie Dallas (played by Billy Crystal) from the brilliant sitcom Soap, but those of you who recall the show will probably remember that Jodie's homosexuality was almost always played off as a joke -- it never came up in any other context than generating a laugh.

Hardly something that would establish queer identity as normal and positive in the eyes of a bisexual fifteen-year-old boy growing up in a conservative, religious culture.

Myself, I've had just about enough of the phrases "politically correct" and "virtue signaling."  In what context is it wrong to avoid being offensive, to include people of all races, ethnic origins, religions (and lack thereof), and sexual orientations?  To create fictional characters who represent the length and breadth of diversity that actually exist in the world?  To break stereotypes like "white men have to be in charge" and "queer people should stay hidden"?

If you want to ask why when the time comes the Fourteenth Doctor should be played as (for example) a Black lesbian woman, you better be prepared to answer the question of why the character shouldn't be.

Anyhow, those are some early-morning thoughts about representation and inclusion.  I wish I'd thought to say all this to the people I was arguing with, but I tend not to be a very fast thinker (thus would make a lousy debater).  It took me a couple of days to let it all stew, and I decided instead to write about it here.

But maybe I'll send a link to this post to my two adversaries, if later on I'm feeling like kicking a hornets' nest.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The Wall Street Journal strikes back

On Monday I wrote in response to Joseph Epstein's commentary about Dr. Jill Biden's Ed.D., in which he called it "comical" and "fraudulent."  The snarky, smirking, dismissive editorial was little more than a message that women who get uppity need to be put in their place and not rise above their station.  I ended by recommending that the Wall Street Journal issue a retraction and an apology, that such a sexist, patronizing screed was far beneath what should be acceptable in a major publication, even in the "Opinion" section.

I wasn't the only one.  Criticism was leveled at the WSJ and Epstein from a variety of sources.  Most of them included some kind of appeal that the WSJ repudiate the stance Epstein took, and hoped that its leaders would recognize the ugly message it was sending.

We should have known better.

Yesterday Paul Gigot, the chief editor of the WSJ's editorial page, wrote a rebuttal to the people who had criticized Epstein and the WSJ's choice to publish his piece, and predictably doubled down on his being justified in doing so.  In the process, he comes off sounding nearly as smug and chauvinistic as Epstein himself.  A particularly blatant example:

Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?  My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power.  There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.  It’s the left’s version of Donald Trump’s “enemy of the people” tweets.

There's a lot to unpack in this short paragraph.  

First, the dismissal of women and minorities in academia is hardly a "minor issue."  Easy, perhaps, for it to seem minor to rich white men like Gigot and Epstein; but if you want a different perspective, all you'd have to do is talk to one of the many women and/or minorities who have had to fight with everything they have in order to achieve and maintain their positions.  Even once they've succeeded, women (not only in academia but in the corporate world) face sexism and outright sexual harassment, the majority of which goes unreported.

Like I said: ask a woman who's risen to the top of her field.  I'd bet cold hard cash she'd corroborate what I'm saying.

Paul Gigot [Image licensed under the Wikimedia Commons Grant Wickes from Plano, TX (Dallas), USA, Paul Gigot in 2015, CC BY 2.0]

Second, it's really convenient that Gigot ascribes the criticism to "the Biden team," as if the only way anyone could object to what Epstein said was if (s)he was some kind of Biden operative.  (If that's the case, I should put it out there that I still haven't received my Shill Check™ from the team.)  It might be hard for you to imagine, Mr. Gigot, but people sometimes have well-considered opinions that have nothing to do with political posturing.

Then there's the whole "cancel culture" and "race or gender card" thing.  Those phrases (and also "politically correct") have become dogwhistles that at their heart mean "I should be able to say any damn thing I want, however demeaning or offensive, and be immune to criticism for it."  It's a perversion of the First Amendment; "free speech" doesn't mean "freedom from any consequences for what I say."  If you say something bigoted, you don't nullify any criticism you receive by dismissing it as "cancel culture."

Then there's his equating the criticism of Epstein's article with Donald Trump's "enemy of the people" tweets.  If Mr. Gigot sees an equivalence between people objecting to one editorial in one journal as demeaning and offensive, and Trump's calling media and journalists as a whole "the enemy of the people," it's probably pointless to try to explain it to him, so I'll leave it at pointing out that Trump's wholesale condemnation of any media pointing any criticism in his direction led to indiscriminate violence and threats against journalists.  Honestly, Trump's "enemy of the people" tweets are in spirit far less like the people who criticized Epstein than they are like Gigot's defense of him.

At the end of his rebuttal, Gigot wrote something that made me laugh out loud, and simultaneously wonder how anyone could take him seriously:

Many readers said Mr. Epstein’s use of "kiddo" is demeaning, but then Joe Biden is also fond of that locution.  In his 2012 Democratic convention speech he even used it to refer to his wife in the context of his many proposals of marriage: "I don’t know what I would have done, kiddo, had you on that fifth time said no."

So he honestly sees no difference between how a man refers to his spouse and how others refer to her?  My wife calls me "sweetie" and "honey," but I'd rightly be a little perturbed (not to mention puzzled) if someone wrote a newspaper article about me and used those terms.  As I pointed out on Monday, we have here a turn of phrase that no one would dream of directing at a cis/het white male, and yet is supposed to be A-OK when a cis/het white male directs it toward a woman.  Once again, I'd ask you to talk to any women you know who are in academia or the corporate world, and ask them if they've been talked down to in this fashion -- and how it makes dismissal of their opinions and accomplishments seem somehow acceptable.

Like I said, it was probably a forlorn hope that Gigot (or anyone else at the WSJ) would back down on their decision to publish Epstein's article.  I thought maybe, just maybe, someone in charge would recognize that it's time we call out such condescending and patronizing attitudes as deserving of relegation to the dustbin along with racism and homophobia and any of the other ways that cis/het white males have maintained the power differential in their favor.

All Gigot proved in his rebuttal is that we've still got a very long way to go.

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Stretching the boundaries

Be honest, can you tell me anything about the following people?

• Annie Jump Cannon
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt
• Willamina Fleming
• Maria Mitchell
• Ruby Payne-Scott
• Nancy Roman
• Vera Rubin

Okay, what about the following?

• Nikolaus Copernicus
• Johannes Kepler
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson
• Stephen Hawking
• William Herschel
• Christiaan Huygens
• Carl Sagan
• Edwin Hubble

My guess is that the typical reader recognized six or seven people on the second list, and could probably have named a major contribution for at least five of them.  I'd also wager that the average recognition for the first list is one or two -- and that most people couldn't tell you what the accomplishments were for the ones they did recognize.

Okay, I admit, it's pretty obvious what I'm driving at, here.  I'm not known for my subtlety.  And lest you think I'm deliberately comparing some chosen-to-be-minor female astronomers with a list of male Big Names, here are the major contributions for the women on the first list.

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) is responsible for the current stellar classification system, in which stars are categorized by their spectral output and temperature -- an achievement that was critical for our understanding of stellar evolution.  So when you're watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and Commander Data says, "It is a typical M-class star" -- yeah, that was Annie Jump Cannon's invention.  Oh, and did I mention that she wasn't just female in a time when women were virtually prohibited from becoming scientists, but she was almost completely deaf?  Remember that when you think about the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals and dreams.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who was responsible for the discovery and explanation of pulsars in 1967.  Her claim that they were rapidly-rotating neutron stars was at first dismissed -- some scientists even derided the data itself, calling her discovery of the flashing star "LGM" (Little Green Men) -- and she wasn't included in the 1974 Nobel Prize awarded to scientists involved in the research that confirmed her hypothesis.  (Her other awards, though, are too numerous to list here, and she showed her typical graciousness in accepting her exclusion from the Nobel, but it pissed off a slew of influential people and opened a lot of eyes about the struggles of women in science.)

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) was an American astronomer who discovered a seemingly trivial fact -- that the bright/dark periodicity of a type of variable star, Cepheid variables, is directly proportional to its intrinsic brightness.  She very quickly realized that this meant Cepheids could be used as "standard candles" -- a light source with a known actual brightness -- to allow astronomers to figure out how far away stars are.  This understanding was half of the solution to the question of the age of the universe, which added to red shift proved that the universe is expanding, and ultimately led to the Big Bang theory.

Willamina Fleming (1857-1911) was a Scottish astronomer who discovered (literally) thousands of astronomical objects, including the now-famous Horsehead Nebula.  She was one of the founding members of the "Harvard Computers," a group of women who took on the task of doing mathematical calculations using data from the Harvard Observatory -- after Fleming noted that the work their male counterparts had been doing could have been bettered by her housekeeper.

Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) was an American astronomer whose accomplishments were so many and varied that I could go on for pages just about her.  She was the first female professor of astronomy at an American college (Vassar), the first female editor of a column in Scientific American, was director of Vassar's observatory for twenty years, came up with the first good explanation for sunspots, pioneered investigations into stellar composition, and discovered (among other things) a comet before it was visible to the naked eye.  She was an incredibly inspiring teacher -- twenty-five of her students went on to be listed in Who's Who.  "I cannot expect to make astronomers," she once said to her class, "but I do expect that you will invigorate your minds by the effort at healthy modes of thinking.  When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests."

Ruby Payne-Scott (1912-1981) was an Australian scientist who became the first female radioastronomer, who was responsible for linking the appearance of sunspots with radio bursts from the Sun and was also instrumental in developing radar for detecting enemy planes during World War II.  She was not only an astronomer but a gifted physicist and electrical engineer, and made use of all three in her research -- but opportunities for women in science were so limited that in 1963 she resigned as an astronomer and became a secondary school teacher.  But she never ceased fighting for women's voices in science, and in 2008 the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization began the Payne-Scott Award in her honor to support women in science, especially those returning to the research world after taking time for maternity leave.

Nancy Roman (1925-2018) was an American astronomer who was one of the first female executives at NASA, and who has been nicknamed the "Mother of Hubble" for her instrumental role in developing the Hubble Space Telescope.  She did pioneering work in the calculation of stellar velocities -- all this despite having been actively discouraged from pursuing a science career, most notably by a high school counselor when she suggested she'd like to take algebra instead of Latin.  The counselor sneered, "What kind of lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?"  Well, this lady would, and went on to be the recipient of four honorary doctorates (as well as the one she earned), received an Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal from NASA and a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was the recipient of many other awards.

Vera Rubin (1928-2016) was an American astronomer whose observation of anomalies in galactic rotation rates led to what might be the weirdest discovery in physics in the last hundred years -- "dark matter."  Her work, according to the New York Times, "usher[ed] in a Copernican-style change in astronomy," and the Carnegie Institute said after her death that the United States had "lost a national treasure."

Honestly, it's Rubin who got me thinking about all of this gender inequity, because I found out that last month the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and when I posted on social media how awesome this was, I had several people respond, "Okay, cool, but who is she?"  We like to pride ourselves on how far we've come in terms of equity, but man, we have a long way to go.  Famous straight white male scientists become household names; equally prestigious scientists who are women, LGBTQ, or people of color often become poorly-recognized footnotes.

Don't you think it's time for this to change?

The amazing Vera Rubin in 2009 [Image is in the Public Domain]

I know this is a battle we won't win overnight, but the dominance of straight white males in science has resulted in the stifling of so incredibly much talent, hope, and skill that we ought to all be working toward greater access and opportunity regardless of our own gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.  My little exercise in considering some female astronomers probably won't count for that much, but I'm hoping that it might open a few eyes, invert a few stereotypes, and stretch a few boundaries -- and whatever motion we can have in that direction is nothing but positive.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Defeating the trolls

I'm a firm believer in the idea that most people, most of the time, are trying as hard as they can to do the right thing.

Yes, we often differ about what that right thing is.  Yes, sometimes we try and fail.  But my point is, we are usually working to do the best we can for ourselves and our loved ones.

But.

There is a minority of people who, to put it bluntly, are assholes.  These are the people who can't stand it if others get recognition, are furious when their pet ideas turn out to be wrong, or are simply spiteful and nasty.  And that ugly minority can, unfortunately, be extremely loud at times.

Look at what happened last week to Dr. Katie Bouman, the astrophysicist who spearheaded the project to generate the world's first actual photograph of a black hole.

You'd think that anyone with a scientific bent would have been thrilled, both for her and because of the extraordinary image she helped create.  And honestly, most of us were.  But there was a handful of trolls who couldn't stand the fact that she was getting accolades for her work -- and that she showed great modesty in highlighting the work of the rest of her team.

"No one algorithm or person made this image," Dr. Bouman wrote.  "It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.  It has been truly an honor, and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you all."

So said trolls decided that this was Dr. Bouman's way of admitting she really hadn't had much to do with the research, and set out to destroy her reputation.

Fake Twitter accounts and YouTube channels started popping up, all with the aim of casting doubt on her role in the project.  Many of them focused on her colleague Andrew Chael, who it was implied had done nearly all the research, which was then swiped by Bouman.  Chael himself was having none of it; he posted on Twitter a complete disavowal of the claim, and a demand that the attacks on Dr. Bouman stop.

The trolls then created a fake account in Chael's name and accelerated the nastiness.

Nota bene: if your opinion about something is on such shaky ground that in order to get people to believe it, you have to create a fake Twitter account, impersonate someone else, and then lie outright, you might want to consider whether you're right in the first place.

Twitter, to its credit (a credit that it must be said it often doesn't deserve), pulled the fake accounts as fast as it could, but not before there were thousands of people who had followed them, and tens of thousands of times that the false messages had been retweeted.  As with most false claims, it's damn hard to fix the damage once the claim is out there, regardless of how many times it's debunked, retracted, or deleted.  Witness the ongoing anti-vaxx idiocy, due largely to Andrew Wakefield, whose "studies" were withdrawn and whose work has been shown to be worthless.  Witness "chemtrails," whose genesis was due to a misquoted number on a Louisiana news broadcast.  Witness the ten thousand (literally) public lies Donald Trump has uttered in the last three years.

Undoing all that would be about as easy as putting toothpaste back into a tube.

As far as why anyone would be such a complete dick as to attack Dr. Bouman, most people are attributing it to sexism -- that the trolls couldn't believe that a woman had made such an achievement, and set out to prove that she'd relied on her male colleagues and then stole their glory.  Sadly, this explanation for the trolls' behavior is entirely plausible.  Despite considerable advances, it's still difficult for women to succeed in science.  Consider the 2017 study that showed teams led by women only receive 7% of the total grant money allocations, and a team led by a woman receives on average 40% of the money that a similar project receives if led by a man.  These figures are appalling, even if you take into account that only 17% of working scientists in physics and engineering are female -- the fields with the lowest diversity.

Which is itself appalling.

So this disgusting episode is yet another reason to be careful about what you believe online.  Double, triple, quadruple-check your sources before you pass along links.  That is especially true if the link supports something you're already inclined to believe; we all fall prey to confirmation bias.

Despite all this, I still think that humanity is, in the majority, good.  But being good means you speak up against the ugly minority who are determined to attack, demean, and degrade others.  Defeating the trolls takes an effort by all of us.  To paraphrase Edmund Burke (the paraphrase is to remove the sexist verbiage, the irony of which does not escape me): "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that the good do nothing."

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]