A fight over teeth

It may seem like a trivial thing to gripe about, but I am absolutely sick unto death of people taking some completely ordinary scientific discovery, and shrieking, "This will completely rewrite every textbook on the subject!", or worse, "This invalidates everything we thought we knew about X!"

I know a bit about the history of scientific inquiry.  I'm no expert, but I'm definitely Better Than The Average Bear.  And when it comes to real, honest-to-Galileo scientific revolutions, I can only think of a few:

• The Copernican idea of the planets (including the Earth) going around the Sun, further modified by Kepler, who found out they weren't moving in perfect circles
• Isaac Newton's theories of force, motion, and gravitation
• Charles Darwin's explanation of the mechanism of evolution
• The elucidation of electricity and magnetism by James Clerk Maxwell and others
• The discovery of the gene as the fundamental unit of heredity, followed by a century and a half of refinement of our understanding of how DNA produces traits
• The discovery of radioactivity, which directly led to our understanding of atomic structure and quantum mechanics -- a discovery, it must be said, that immediately followed the eminent physicist Lord Kelvin stating, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.  All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
• The discovery of plate tectonics as a driver for geological processes, by Alfred Wegener, Harry Hess, J. Tuzo Wilson, and others

And that's about it.  Oh, there were other big developments.  The invention of the computer, for example, has changed our experience about as much as anything I can think of.  But it really wasn't an overturning of our understanding of how the world works; it was more a new and clever application of known physical laws to the problem of computation and information storage.

So what stands out about real scientific revolutions is how uncommon they are.  And given the precision of our tools, and the level of our inquiry in the past century, the chances of our having missed something fundamental is pretty slim.

Which is why I rolled my eyes and said a very bad word when I saw an article over at Inverse entitled, "9.7 Million-Year-Old Teeth Found In Germany Could Recast Human History."  The discovery, which is actually fairly cool, is that a team led by Herbert Lutz, director of the Natural History Museum of Mainz, Germany discovered some hominin teeth in a dig near the Rhine River.  It is an unusual find; most of the hominin fossils of that age have been confined to Africa.  But it certainly doesn't "rewrite human history."  The fact that there might have been a branch of hominins that made it to Europe ten-odd million years ago is interesting, but doesn't really overturn anything.  It just adds a branch to our family tree (and one that almost certainly isn't our director ancestor, anyhow).

One of the Eppelsheim teeth [image courtesy of the Mainz Natural History Museum]

Lutz himself didn't help matters any by his statement to the press.  "It’s something completely new, something previously unknown to science," Lutz said.  "It’s a complete mystery where this individual came from, and why nobody’s ever found a tooth like this somewhere before."

I can put this reaction down to a scientist being understandably excited about his own work.  But when the media hears the words "unknown to science" and "mystery," they picture scientists sitting around with befuddled looks on their faces, then standing up and throwing away all of the textbooks and journals on the subject in question.

Which is a far sight from the truth, as Michael Greshko of National Geographic states.  "Do these teeth, as many news outlets have proclaimed, 'rewrite human history?'" Greshko writes.  "In a word, no."

In fact, there's still a lot of argument amongst paleontologists over whether the teeth are actually from a hominin, as Lutz believes.  Bence Viola of the University of Toronto, a world-renowned expert on the structure of hominin and hominoid teeth, is doubtful.  "I think this is much ado about nothing," Viola said.  "The second tooth (the molar), which they say clearly comes from the same individual, is absolutely not a hominin, [and] I would say also not a hominoid."

Viola suspects that the teeth are from some kind of pliopithecoid, a branch of primates only distantly related to humans, and which are known to have lived in Europe and Asia between seven and seventeen million years ago.

Viola's colleague, paleoanthropologist David Begun, is even more dismissive.  "The 'canine' looks to me like a piece of a ruminant tooth," Begun said.  "It has a funny break that makes it look a bit like a canine, but it is definitely not a canine, nor is it [from] a primate."

So not only do the teeth not "rewrite human history," there isn't even agreement about what animal the teeth were from.  So if you were thinking we were going to add an eighth scientific revolution to the seven I mentioned above based on Lutz's discovery, I fear you are destined for disappointment.

And the problem only gets worse when you're talking about a field in which people have a vested interest to disbelieve.  I can't tell you the number of times I've seen headlines like, "Paleontologist Finds Bone in a Dig Site -- Evolutionists Baffled!" or "Blizzard On the Way -- Climate Change Supporters Fumble for Explanation."  Trust me on this: no one's baffled or fumbling, and they're not rewriting the textbooks.  What the scientists are doing is adding another bit to our understanding of the universe.

Because that's how science works.

The cult of ignorance -- and "do-it-yourself braces"

In his wonderful essay "The Cult of Ignorance," Isaac Asimov wrote something that still resonates, 36 years after it appeared in Newsweek: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

This tendency on the part of Americans to assume that democracy means that all ideas are equal, and everyone's utterances equally valid, often drives us to do ridiculous things.  We discount the conclusions of scientists, preferring instead the evidence-free declarations of politicians, actors, and athletes.  The criticism "they don't understand the common, working-class people" is frequently lobbed in the direction of the intelligent.   This sense that the well-educated are either impractical or else actively evil leads us to elect the unqualified because they "seem like regular folks," even though you'd think we'd all want our leaders to be selected from the best and smartest we have.  But somehow there's this sense that being smart, well-educated, and thoroughly trained gives the experts an ivory-tower insulation from the rest of us slobs, and probably leaves them immoral as well.

What it actually accomplishes, though, is to give your average guy the idea that he knows a great deal more than he really does.  Called the Dunning-Kruger effect, it makes the unskilled overestimate their knowledge and underestimate their ineptitude.  And just yesterday, I ran into a new phenomenon that illustrates that amazingly well: do-it-yourself orthodonture.

I'm not making this up.  Put off by the high costs of orthodontic treatment, the inconvenience of having braces (sometimes for years), and the mystery of how a few brackets and wires could straighten out crooked teeth, people have said, "Hey, I could do that."  Now that 3-D printing is easy and cheap, people print themselves out resin brackets, affix them to their teeth with glue, and start yanking.  Lured by testimony that such a course of treatment could reduce the costs to under $100 and shorten the duration of brace-wearing from three years to as little as sixteen weeks, the idea has been spreading like wildfire.

[image courtesy of photographer Jason Regan and the Wikimedia Commons]

But folks -- orthodontists have to go through extensive training for a reason.  It's not enough to peer in a friend's mouth and try to replicate the friend's orthodontic hardware on your own teeth.  One of the DIY-ers, a fellow named Amos Dudley, has posted pictures of his changed smile on the internet, an alteration that took only four months.  But orthodontist Stephen Belli says that looks can deceive:

I’d like to see an X-ray, because he’s probably caused some irreparable harm.  He moved these teeth in only 16 weeks.  You can cause a lot of problems with that.  If you move a tooth too fast, you can actually cause damage to the bone and gums.  And if you don’t put the tooth in the right position, you could throw off your bite.

And why did Dudley take on his own orthodontic work?  "Because," he said, "I wanted to stick it to the dental appliance industry."

A stance that apparently gave him the impression that he knew enough to start shoving around his own teeth.

I find this attitude impossible to understand.  I consider myself reasonably intelligent, but I know I'm not smart enough to be responsible for my own medical care.  Similarly, I know I don't have the training to understand the latest scientific findings in most fields, nor to come up with solutions to the nation's economic problems and foreign policy.  This is why we have experts.

Which is why it really pisses me off when someone comes up with the latest pseudo-clever meme about how to fix everything, such as this one:

When I first saw this one -- and it's been posted far and wide -- my first thought was, "Can't you do simple arithmetic?"  If you don't see what I mean, try this: let's raise the salaries of the soldiers and seniors to, say, $50,000 a year.  Accepting the numbers they've quoted here, this would require an extra $12,000 for each soldier and an extra $38,000 for each senior.  Multiply each of these by the number of active-duty soldiers (1,388,000) and seniors on Social Security (59,000,000) in the United States, respectively, to see how much money we'd need.

Then, using a similar calculation, figure out how much we'd save yearly by cutting the wages of retired presidents (of which there are currently four -- Carter, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr.  You can even be generous and throw in Obama if you like), the House and Senate members (535 of them), the Speaker of the House (1), and the Majority and Minority leaders of each branch of congress (4), down to $50,000 each.  See how much you save.

Falls a little short, doesn't it?

I mean, for cryin' in the sink, people.  If it was that easy, don't you think someone would have thought of this by now?

Which may seem a long way from do-it-yourself braces, but it's all the same thing, really; the attitude that a completely untrained individual is just as good as an expert at solving complex problems.  The cult of ignorance is still thriving here in the United States.  But despite our desire to think that everyone's ideas are on equal footing, ignorance will never be as good as knowledge.