Photosynthesis illuminating a plant? (Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)
Analogies, metaphors and similes are used in communication to help make the unfamiliar familiar by suggesting that some novel idea or phenomena being introduced is in some ways like something the reader/listener is already familiar with. Analogies, metaphors and similes are commonly used in science teaching, and also in science writing and journalism.
An analogy maps out similarities in structure between two phenomena or concepts. This example, from a radio programme, compared the COVID pandemic with photosynthesis.
"So, what we were particularly aiming to do, was to understand the collision between a range of different political economic factors of a pre-2020 world, and how they were sort of reassembled and deployed to cope with something which was without question unprecedented.
We used this metaphor of photosynthesis because if you think about photosynthesis in relation to plants, the sun both lights things up but at the same time it feeds them and helps them to grow, and I think one of the things the pandemic has done for social scientists is to serve both as a kind of illumination of things that previously maybe critical political economists and heterodox scholars were pointing to but now became very visible to the mainstream media and to mainstream politics. But at the same time it also accentuated and deepened some of those tendencies such as our reliance on various digital platforms, certain gender dynamics of work in the household, these sort of things that became acute and undeniable and potentially politicised over the course of 2020, 2021."
Prof. Will Davies, talking on 'Thinking Allowed' 1
Will Davies, Professor in Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London was talking to sociologist Prof. Laurie Taylor who presents the BBC programme 'Thinking Aloud' as part of an episode called 'Covid and change'
A scientific idea used as analogue
Prof. Davies refers to using "this metaphorof photosynthesis". However he goes on to suggest how the two things he is comparing are structurally similar – the pandemic has shone a light on social issues at the same time as providing the conditions for them to become more extreme, akin to how light both illuminates plants and changes them. A metaphor is an implicit comparison where the reader/listener is left to interpret the comparison, but a metaphor or simile that is explicitly developed to explain the comparison can become an analogy.
Often science concepts are introduced by analogy to more familiar everyday ideas, objects or events. Here, however, a scientific concept, photosynthesis is used as the analogue – the source used to explain something novel. Prof. Davies assumes listeners will be familiar enough with this science concept for it to helpful in introducing his research.
Mischaracterising photosynthesis?
A science teacher might not like the notion that the sun feeds plants – indeed if a student suggested this in a science class it would likely be judged as an alternative conception. In photosynthesis, carbon dioxide (from the atmosphere) and water (usually absorbed from the soil) provide the starting materials, and the glucose that is produced (along with oxygen) enables other processes – such as growth which relies on other substances also being absorbed from the soil. (So-called 'plant foods', which would be better characterised as plant nutritional supplements, contain sources of elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). Light is necessary for photosynthesis, but the sunlight is not best considered 'food'.
One might also argue that Prof. Davies has misidentified the source for his analogy, and perhaps he should rather have suggested sunlight as the source metaphor for his comparison as sunlight both illuminates plants and enables them to grow. Photosynthesis takes place inside chloroplasts within a plant's tissues, and does not illuminate the plant. However, Prof. Davies' expertise is in political economy, not natural science, and it was good to see a social scientist looking to use a scientific idea to explain his research.
Faster-than-light electrons race from a sitting start and are baked to give off light brighter than millions of suns that can be used to image tiny massage balls: A case of science communication
Keith S. Taber
(The pedantic science teacher)
Ockham's razor
Ockham's razor (also known as Occam's razor) is a principle that is sometimes applied as a heuristic in science, suggesting that explanations should not be unnecessarily complicated. Faced with a straightforward explanation, and an alternative convoluted explanation, then all other things being equal we should prefer the former – not simply accept it, but to treat is as the preferred hypothesis to test out first.
Ockham's Razor is also an ABC radio show offering "a soap box for all things scientific, with short talks about research, industry and policy from people with something thoughtful to say about science". The show used to offer recorded essays (akin to the format of BBC's A Point of View), but now tends to record short live talks.
I've just listened to an episode called The 'science donut' – in fact I listened several time as I thought it was fascinating – as in a few minutes there was much to attend to.
I approached the episode as someone with an interest in science, of course, but also as an educator with an ear to the ways in which we communicate science in teaching. Teachers do not simply present sequences of information about science, but engage pedagogy (i.e., strategies and techniques to support learning). Other science communicators (whether journalists, or scientists themselves directly addressing the public) use many of the same techniques. Teaching conceptual material (such as science principles, theories, models…) can be seen as making the unfamiliar familiar, and the constructivist perspective on how learning occurs suggests this is supported by showing the learner how that which is currently still unfamiliar, is in some way like something familiar, something they already have some knowledge/experience of.
Science communicators may not be trained as teachers, so may sometimes be using these techniques in a less considered or even less deliberate manner. That is, people use analogy, metaphor, simile, and so forth, as a normal part of everyday talk to such an extent that these tropes may be generated automatically, in effect, implicitly. When we are regularly talking about an area of expertise we almost do not have to think through what we are going to say. 1
Science communicators also often have much less information about their audience than teachers: a radio programme/podcast, for example, can be accessed by people of a wide range of background knowledge and levels of formal qualifications.
One thing teachers often learn to do very early in their careers is to slow down the rate of introducing new information, and focus instead on a limited number of key points they most want to get across. Sometimes science in the media is very dense in the frequency of information presented or the background knowledge being drawn upon. (See, for example, 'Genes on steroids? The high density of science communication'.)
A beamline scientist
Dr Emily Finch, who gave this particular radio talk, is a beamline scientist at the Australian Synchrotron. Her talk began by recalling how her family visited the Synchrotron facility on an open day, and how she later went on to work there.
She then gave an outline of the functioning of the synchrotron and some examples of its applications. Along the way there were analogies, metaphors, anthropomorphism, and dubiously fast electrons.
The creation of the god particle
To introduce the work of the particle accelerator, Dr Finch reminded her audience of the research to detect the Higgs boson.
"Do you remember about 10 years ago scientists were trying to make the Higgs boson particle? I see some nods. They sometimes call it the God particle and they had a theory it existed, but they had not been able to prove it yet. So, they decided to smash together two beams of protons to try to make it using the CERN large hadron collider in Switzerland…You might remember that they did make a Higgs boson particle".
This is a very brief summary of a major research project that involved hundreds of scientists and engineers from a great many countries working over years. But this abbreviation is understandable as this was not Dr Finch's focus, but rather an attempt to link her actual focus, the Australian Synchrotron, to something most people will already know something about.
However, aspects of this summary account may have potential to encourage the development of, or reinforce an existing, common alternative conception shared by many learners. This is regarding the status of theories.
In science, theories are 'consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world', yet students often understand theories to be nothing more than just ideas, hunches, guesses – conjectures at best (Taber, Billingsley, Riga & Newdick, 2015). In a very naive take on the nature of science, a scientist comes up with an idea ('theory') which is tested, and is either 'proved' or rejected.
This simplistic take is wrong in two regards – something does not become an established scientific theory until it is supported by a good deal of evidence; and scientific ideas are not simply proved or disproved by testing, but rather become better supported or less credible in the light of the interpretation of data. Strictly scientific ideas are never finally proved to become certain knowledge, but rather remain as theories. 2
In everyday discourse, people will say 'I have a theory' to mean no more that 'I have a suggestion'. A pedantic scientist or science teacher might be temped to respond: "no you don't, not yet,"
This is sometimes not the impression given by media accounts – presumably because headlines such as 'research leads to scientist becoming slightly more confident in theory' do not have the same impact as 'cure found', 'discovery made, or 'theory proved'.
The message that could be taken away here is that scientists had the idea that Higgs boson existed, but they had not been able to prove it till they were able to make one. But the CERN scientists did not have a Higgs boson to show the press, only the data from highly engineered detectors, analysed through highly complex modelling. Yet that analysis suggested they had recorded signals that closely matched what they expected to see when a short lived Higgs decayed allowing them to conclude that it was very likely one had been formed in the experiment. The theory motivating their experiment was strongly supported – but not 'proved' in an absolute sense.
The doughnut
Dr Finch explained that
"we do have one of these particle accelerators here in Australia, and it's called the Australian Synchrotron, or as it is affectionately known the science donut
…our synchrotron is a little different from the large hadron collider in a couple of main ways. So, first, we just have the one beam instead of two. And second, our beam is made of electrons instead of protons. You remember electrons, right, they are those tiny little negatively charged particles and they sit in the shells around the atom, the centre of the atom."
One expects that members of the audience would be able to respond to this description and (due to previous exposure to such representations) picture images of atoms with electrons in shells. 'Shells' is of course a kind of metaphor here, even if one which with continual use has become a so-called 'dead metaphor'. Metaphor is a common technique used by teachers and other communicators to help make the unfamiliar familiar. In some simplistic models of atomic structure, electrons are considered to be arranged in shells (the K shell, the L shell, etc.), and a simple notation for electronic configuration based on these shells is still often used (e.g., Na as 2.8.1).
However, this common way of talking about shells has the potential to mislead learners. Students can, and sometimes do, develop the alternative conception that atoms have actual physical shells of some kind, into which the electrons are located. The shells scientists refer to are abstractions, but may be misinterpreted as material entities, as actual shells. The use of anthropomorphic language, that is that the electrons "sit in the shells", whilst helping to make the abstract ideas familiar and so perhaps comfortable, can reinforce this. After all, it is difficult to sit in empty space without support.
The subatomic grand prix?
Dr Finch offers her audience an analogy for the synchrotron: the electrons "are zipping around. I like to think of it kind of like a racetrack." Analogy is another common technique used by teachers and other communicators to help make the unfamiliar familiar.
Dr Finch refers to the popularity of the Australian Formula 1 (F1) Grand Prix that takes place in Melbourne, and points out
"Now what these race enthusiasts don't know is that just a bit further out of the city we have a race track that is operating six days a week that is arguably far more impressive.
That's right, it is the science donut. The difference is that instead of having F1s doing about 300 km an hour, we have electrons zipping around at the speed of light. That's about 300 thousand km per second.
There is an interesting slippage – perhaps a deliberate rhetoric flourish – from the synchrotron being "kind of like a racetrack" (a simile) to being "a race track" (a metaphor). Although racing electrons lacks a key attraction of an F1 race (different drivers of various nationalities driving different cars built by competing teams presented in different livery – whereas who cares which of myriad indistinguishable electrons would win a race?) that does not undermine the impact of the mental imagery encouraged by this analogy.
This can be understood as an analogy rather than just a simile or metaphor as Dr Finch maps out the comparison:
[Many in the audience would have known that the Melbourne Grand Prix takes place on a 'street circuit' that is only set up for racing one weekend each year.]
racing electrons
racing 'F1s' (i.e., Grand Prix cars)
at the speed of light
at about 300 km an hour
An analogy between the Australian Synchrotron and the Melbourne Grand Prix circuit
So, here is an attempt to show how science has something just like the popular race track, but perhaps even more impressive – generating speeds orders of magnitude greater than even Lewis Hamilton could drive.
They seem to like their F1 comparisons at the Australian Synchrotron. I found another ABC programme ('The Science Show') where Nobel Laureate "Brian Schmidt explains, the synchrotron is not being used to its best capability",
"the analogy here is that we invested in a $200 million Ferrari and decided that we wouldn't take it out of first gear and do anything other than drive it around the block. So it seems a little bit of a waste"
Brian Schmidt (Professor of Astronomy, and Vice Chancellor, at Australian National University)
A Ferrari being taken for a spin around the block in Melbourne (Image by Lee Chandler from Pixabay )
How fast?
But did Dr Finch suggest there that the electrons were travelling at the speed of light? Surely not? Was that a slip of the tongue?
"So, we bake our electrons fresh in-house using an electron gun. So, this works like an old cathode ray tube that we used to have in old TVs. So, we have this bit of tungsten metal and we heat it up and when it gets red hot it shoots out electrons into a vacuum. We then speed up the electrons, and once they leave the electron gun they are already travelling at about half the speed of light. We then speed them up even more, and after twelve metres, they are already going at the speed of light….
And it is at this speed that we shoot them off into a big ring called the booster ring, where we boost their energy. Once their energy is high enough we shoot them out again into another outer ring called the storage ring."
So, no, the claim is that the electrons are accelerated to the speed of light within twelve metres, and then have their energy boosted even more.
But this is contrary to current physics. According to the currently accepted theories, and specifically the special theory of relativity, only entities which have zero rest mass, such as photons, can move at the speed of light.
Electrons have a tiny mass by everyday standards (about 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 g), but they are still 'massive' particles (i.e., particles with mass) and it would take infinite energy to accelerate a single tiny electron to the speed of light. So, given our current best understanding, this claim cannot be right.
I looked to see what was reported on the website of the synchrotron itself.
The electron beam travels just under the speed of light – about 299,792 kilometres a second.
Strictly the electrons do not travel at the speed of light but very nearly the speed of light.
The speed of light in a vacuum is believed to be 299 792 458 ms-1 (to the nearest metre per second), but often in science we are working to limited precision, so this may be rounded to 2.998 ms-1 for many purposes. Indeed, sometimes 3 x 108 ms-1 is good enough for so-called 'back of the envelope' calculations. So, in a sense, Dr Finch was making a similar approximation.
But this is one approximation that a science teacher might want to avoid, as electrons travelling at the speed of light may be approximately correct, but is also thought to be physically impossible. That is, although the difference in magnitude between
(i) the maximum electron speeds achieved in the synchrotron, and
(ii) the speed of light,
might be a tiny proportional difference – conceptually the distinction is massive in terms of modern physics. (I imagine Dr Finch is aware of all this, but perhaps her background in geology does not make this seem as important as it might appear to a physics teacher.)
Dr Finch does not explicitly say that the electrons ever go faster than the speed of light (unlike the defence lawyer in a murder trial who claimed nervous impulses travel faster than the speed of light) but I wonder how typical school age learners would interpret "they are already going at the speed of light….And it is at this speed that we shoot them off into a big ring called the booster ring, where we boost their energy". I assume that refers to maintaining their high speeds to compensate for energy transfers from the beam: but only because I think Dr Finch cannot mean accelerating them beyond the speed of light. 3
The big doughnut
After the reference to how "we bake our electrons fresh in-house", Dr Finch explains
And so it is these two rings, these inner and outer rings, that give the synchrotron its nick name, the science donut. Just like two rings of delicious baked electron goodness…
So, just to give you an idea of scale here, this outer ring, the storage ring, is about forty one metres across, so it's a big donut."
So, there is something of an extended metaphor here. The doughnut is so-called because of its shape, but this doughnut (a bakery product) is used to 'bake' electrons.
If audience members were to actively reflect on and seek to analyse this metaphor then they might notice an incongruity, perhaps a mixed metaphor, as the synchrotron seems to shift from being that which is baked (a doughnut) to that doing the baking (baking the electrons). Perhaps the electrons are the dough, but, if so, they need to go into the oven.
But, of course, humans implicitly process language in real time, and poetic language tends to be understood intuitively without needing reflection. So, a trope such as this may 'work' to get across the flavour (sorry) of an idea, even if under close analysis (by our pedantic science teacher again) the metaphor appears only half-baked.
Perverting the electrons
Dr Finch continued
"Now the electrons like to travel in straight lines, so to get them to go round the rings we have to bend them using magnets. So, we defect the electrons around the corners [sic] using electromagnetic fields from the magnets, and once we do this the electrons give off a light, called synchrotron light…
Now electrons are not sentient and do not have preferences in the way that someone might prefer to go on a family trip to the local synchrotron rather than a Formula 1 race. Electrons do not like to go in straight lines. They fit with Newton's first law – the law of inertia. An electron that is moving ('travelling') will move ('travel') in a straight line unless there is net force to pervert it. 4
If we describe this as electrons 'liking' to travel in straight lines it would be just as true to say electrons 'like' to travel at a constant speed. Language that assigns human feelings and motives and thoughts to inanimate objects is described as anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism is a common way of making the unfamiliar familiar, and it is often used in relation to molecules, electrons, atoms and so forth. Sadly, when learners pick up this kind of language, they do not always appreciate that it is just meant metaphorically!
Whether the radiation is 'captured' is a moot point, as it no longer exists once it has been detected. But what caught my attention here was the claim that the synchrotron radiation was brighter than a million suns. Not because I necessarily thought this bold claim was 'wrong', but rather I did not understand what it meant.
The statement seems sensible at first hearing, and clearly it means qualitatively that the radiation is very intense. But what did the quantitative comparison actually mean? I turned again to the synchrotron webpage. I did not find an answer there, but on the site of a UK accelerator I found
"These fast-moving electrons produce very bright light, called synchrotron light. This very intense light, predominantly in the X-ray region, is millions of times brighter than light produced from conventional sources and 10 billion times brighter than the sun."
Sunlight spreads out and its intensity drops according to an inverse square law. Move twice as far away from a sun, and the radiation intensity drops to a quarter of what it was when you were closer. Move to ten times as far away from the sun than before, and the intensity is 1% of what it was up close.
The synchrotron 'light' is being shaped into a beam "like a LASER". A LASER produces a highly collimated beam – that is, the light does not (significantly) spread out. This is why football hooligans choose LASER pointers rather than conventional torches to intimidate players from a safe distance in the crowd.
Comparing light with like
This is why I do not understand how the comparison works, as the brightness of a sun depends how close you are too it – a point previously discussed here in relation to NASA's Parker solar probe (NASA puts its hand in the oven). If I look out at the night sky on a clear moonlight night then surely I am exposed to light from more "than a million suns" but most of them are so far away I cannot even make them out. Indeed there are faint 'nebulae' I can hardly perceive that are actually galaxies shining with the brightness of billions of suns. 5 If that is the comparison, then I am not especially impressed by something being "brighter than a million suns".
How bright is the sun? it depends which planet you are observing from. (Images by AD_Images and Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
We are told not to look directly at the sun as it can damage our eyes. But a hypothetical resident of Neptune or Uranus could presumably safely stare at the sun (just as we can safely stare at much brighter stars than our sun because they are so far away). So we need to ask :"brighter than a million suns", as observed from how far away?
How bright is the sun? That depends on viewing conditions (Image by UteHeineSch from Pixabay)
Even if referring to our Sun as seen from the earth, the brightness varies according to its apparent altitude in the sky. So, "brighter than a million suns" needs to be specified further – as perhaps "more than a million times brighter than the sun as seen at midday from the equator on a cloudless day"? Of course, again, only the pedantic science teacher is thinking about this: everyone knows well enough what being brighter than a million suns implies. It is pretty intense radiation.
Applying the technology
Dr Finch went on to discuss a couple of applications of the synchrotron. One related to identifying pigments in art masterpieces. The other was quite timely in that it related to investigating the infectious agent in COVID.
"Now by now you have probably seen an image of the COVID virus – it looks like a ball with some spikes on it. Actually it kind of looks like those massage balls that your physio makes you buy when you turn thirty and need to to ease all your physical ailments that you suddenly have."
Coronavirus particles and massage balls…or is it… (Images by Ulrike Leone and Daniel Roberts from Pixabay)
Again there is an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar. These microscopic virus particles are a bit like something familiar from everyday life. Such comparisons are useful where the everyday object is already familiar.
By now I've seen plenty of images of the coronavirus responsible for COVID, although I do not have a physiotherapist (perhaps this is a cultural difference – Australians being so sporty?) So, I found myself using this comparison in reverse – imagining that the "massage balls that your physio makes you buy" must be like larger versions of coronavirus particles. Having looked up what these massage balls (a.k.a. hedgehog balls it seems) look like, I can appreciate the similarity. Whether the manufacturers of massage balls will appreciate their products being compared to enormous coronavirus particles is, perhaps, another matter.
Work cited:
Taber, K. S., Billingsley, B., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2015). English secondary students' thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just 'an idea someone has'. The Curriculum Journal, 1-34. doi: 10.1080/09585176.2015.1043926
Notes:
1 At least, depending how we understand 'thinking'. Clearly there are cognitive processes at work even when we continue a conversation 'on auto pilot' (to employ a metaphor) whilst consciously focusing on something else. Only a tiny amount of our cognitive processing (thinking?) occurs within conscousness where we reflect and deliberate (i.e., explicit thinking?) We might label the rest as 'implicit thinking', but this processing varies greatly in its closeness to deliberation – and some aspects (for example, word recognition when listening to speech; identifying the face of someone we see) might seem to not deserve the label 'thinking'?
2 Of course the evidence for some ideas becomes so overwhelming that in principle we treat some theories as certain knowledge, but in principle they remain provisional knowledge. And the history of science tells us that sometimes even the most well-established ideas (e.g., Newtonian physics as an absolutely precise description of dynamics; mass and energy as distinct and discrete) may need revision in time.
3 Since I began drafting this article, the webpage for the podcast has been updated with a correction: "in this talk Dr Finch says electrons in the synchrotron are accelerated to the speed of light. They actually go just under that speed – 99.99998% of it to be exact."
4 Perversion in the sense of the distortion of an original course
5 The term nebulae is today reserved for clouds of dust and gas seen in the night sky in different parts of our galaxy. Nebulae are less distinct than stars. Many of what were originally identified as nebulae are now considered to be other galaxies immense distances away from our own.
Organisations use advertising to make claims about their products and services – but how are we meant to understand such claims? (I wonder in particular how people on the autism spectrum are expected to make sense of them.)
Knowledge claims about knowledge claims
As someone who has been professionally concerned with how we understand 'knowledge' (what is it?, what counts as knowledge?) and how we identify it (can it be measured?, can we ever be sure quite what someone else knows?) I've recently been rather irritated by some rather blatantly naive claims made in adverts that I have been repeatedly exposed to when settling down for some relaxing evening viewing. These were not about a product as such, but about the apparently exceptional expertise of the company staff.
I live in a state where there is an advertising standards authority (the ASA) to which consumers can make complaints, and which can take action on misleading advertising.
Here are some selected points from the regulator's website (accessed 21st May, 2022) regarding misleading advertisements:
• The ASA will take into account the impression created by advertisements as well as specific claims. It will rule on the basis of the likely effect on consumers, not the advertiser's intentions.
• Advertisements must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.
• Advertisements must not mislead consumers by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
• Subjective claims must not mislead the audience; advertisements must not imply that expressions of opinion are objective claims.
• Advertisements must state significant limitations and qualifications.
• Advertisements must not mislead by exaggerating the capability or performance of a product or service.
• Advertisements must not suggest that their claims are universally accepted if a significant division of informed or scientific opinion exists.
Given these points, I feel that some rather specific and unequivocal claims made by an organisation called 'Carpetright' are extremely dubious.
However, I should also note another significant statement which potentially undermines the ASA's ability to apply such principles strictly:
"Obvious exaggerations ('puffery') and claims that the average consumer who sees the advertisement is unlikely to take literally are allowed provided they do not materially mislead."
So, this seems to suggest that claims can be made which are not actually true as long as the 'average consumer' will recognise them as not meant to be trusted and believed. Hm.
At one level, this makes sense. If an advertiser hires an actor to dress up in aluminium foil and announce "I am Thor, God of Thunder, and I will bring my wrath upon you all, except those wearing Taber raincoats who are protected from my powers" then clearly they are not expecting the audience to believe they are seeing a supernatural entity with Godly powers of destruction from which they can be protected by buying the right rainwear. They are expected to interpret this along the lines "our raincoats are pretty effective at keeping you dry when it is raining". As there is no intent to deceive, and as a reasonable person (perhaps that 'average consumer') is unlikely to perceive this as an objective knowledge claim, then this is no more a lie than when an actor plays a part in a fictional play or film.
It seems widely accepted that advertising claims operate in a register rather different from clear, honest claims with relevant caveats. But then how does the 'average consumer' know which statements are meant to be taken seriously as knowledge claims? (Thor Image by Nico Wall from Pixabay; Clothing image by Any_Banany_Style from Pixabay)
But I am worried about this 'get-out clause' as it potentially offers a defence for all kinds of claims that cannot be objectively supported.
Who knows the most?
I have been seeing the particularly irritating advertisements regularly for some time now, and had been so grated by the claims in them – in particular by the extremely implausible nature of them when considered collectively – that when I sat down to watch a programme yesterday I actually made a note of the claims in a succession of small sponsor's advertisements positioned at the start and end of each commercial break. (I usually record programmes and fast-forward through such breaks, but these 'sponsoring' adverts are directly segued to the programme content so hard to completely avoid. That said, when you do not use the fast-forward they do offer an obvious indication when to press the mute button as the programme has paused or is just about to recommence.) During the programme the set of claims were cycled through twice (and one of the claims was slightly different in nature to the others and I will leave aside).
The first commercial break was announced with the claim that
"no one knows more about floors than Jeff"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
This is presented as an unqualified and objective statement.
For anyone who has undertaken research to explore the knowledge of learners, this raises a whole array of questions.
What is meant by knowledge in this claim?
Traditionally knowledge is meant to be true justified belief. That is, Jeff has knowledge about floors to the extent that he has beliefs about floors that are are both justified and true.
Justified belief
What would be a justified belief?
Well there might be differences of opinion here. Some might suggest that Jeff's beliefs are only justified if they are based on well interpreted empirical evidence. He has been down on floors getting his hands dirty investigating them. Alternatively, others might feel the main source of knowledge is rational reflection – so Jeff needs to have undertaken some careful and valid philosophical investigation into floors to have worthwhile knowledge. These two sources are sometimes seen as opposed – empiricists versus rationalists.
For a scientist, knowledge is based on an ongoing enquiry where rational thought and reflection, and empirical investigation, are employed iteratively. (That is, science uses a bit of both, tending to shift between the two to build up understanding over time.)
Another source of knowledge might be authority. Perhaps Jeff has been to 'floor' college and been taught by acknowledged experts? Perhaps he has carefully studied the top texts on floors and regularly tops up his expertise on professional development courses.
The founders of the Royal Society of London suggested that scientists should take no one's word for things, but rather test things out for themselves. Whilst that is a fine sentiment, it is totally impractical today, as science would never progress if all novice scientists were expected to check for themselves every piece of theory they might apply in their work. They would unlikely ever get to do anything new before retirement. Rather they can accept, on authority, that hydrogen is an element, that current in a metal wire is due to a flow of electrons, that all frogs have hearts 1, and so on. They do this on authority of their teachers and the texts they read.
Of course, this raises the problem of who can be taken as an authority.
Science is a community activity which largely works by consensus but allowing enough room for dissent to hopefully ensure it does not become dogmatic. (Sometimes it fails, but this combination of authority, logical thought, and empirical investigation is surely the best way anyone has yet come up with of finding out about the natural world.)
What is a true belief?
There is of course a distinction between a truly held belief, and a true belief. Some people truly believe they have been abducted by aliens, who having come all this way, have nothing better to do than borrow people overnight and probe them a little before returning them to their beds. No matter how much these people genuinely believe this to have happened it is not a true belief unless they really have been molested by aliens that have the technology to travel galactic distances, abduct people from inside their homes without raising the alarm, and medically examine humans without leaving any traces; but sadly have not yet found a way to do this without sufficiently anaesthetising their victims to ensure they are unaware.
A truly held belief is not necessarily true (Image by Dantegráfico from Pixabay)
Perhaps this is actually the case. If this truly happens, then someone who genuinely strongly believes they have been a victim, and has sufficient grounds to be justified in that belief (whatever we might decide would count here), can be said to have true knowledge.
But only if we know this is indeed what happened. But there is a clear danger of a vicious circle in making that judgement. We can only decide someone has genuine knowledge because we have genuine knowledge and their beliefs match our knowledge. But we can only be said to have such knowledge, if we have a true, justified, belief, which surely requires someone else to check our beliefs are true. And that some has to be someone who knows the truth – i.e., can be judged to have the knowledge.
One this basis only God or someone arrogant enough to think themselves similarly incapable of error can make this call.
Do scientists have knowledge?
It would seem that if we apply the notion of true, justified, belief strictly, then we can never claim to have knowledge. Then 'human knowledge' would only exist as some kind of idea, like an ideal gas or a canonical concept (Taber, 2019), which is a useful referent to compare things against, but not something we can ever expect to have.
That would be a reasonable way to use the word – but in actual public discourse knowledge is talked about as if it is obtainable – so experts are said to have expert knowledge (not just expert beliefs or expert opinions).
It is widely accepted that scientific knowledge claims are NOT claiming knowledge in that ideal sense – not absolute, certain knowledge, but provisional knowledge: knowledge as our best current understanding, considered to be a sufficient basis for action in the world, but always open to review.
As one philosopher of science noted:
"Assume somebody points out that certainty is an essential part of knowledge in the sense that the meaning of the word 'knowledge' contains the idea of certainty. The answer is very simple: we have decided against the idea of certainty … We have thereby also decided against knowledge in the sense alluded to. If certainty is part of knowledge, then we simply do not want to know in this sense."
So, scientific knowledge is evidence-based, rationally argued, and developed within an authoritative background tradition, and so considered to be reliable and trustworthy – but is strictly something other than true, justified, belief. Indeed, arguably we should not consider scientific knowledge as beliefs: scientists commit to certain ideas as well supported and worthy of provisional assent – but not as beliefs.
In science education, the teacher's job is not to persuade students to believe in scientific ideas (whether seemingly controversial, such as natural selection, the big bang, or well-established such as combustion being usually a reaction with oxygen), but rather to understand why scientists have adopted certain ideas as provisional knowledge whilst remaining critical and open to new evidence or interpretations (Taber, 2017).
Assessing knowledge
If we accept that people do have knowledge (an ontological judgement), this does not imply we can easily investigate it (an epistemological matter). Science teachers assess students' science knowledge all the time, so in practice we assume that (i) in principle we can identify/examine someone else's knowledge, and that (ii) we can do this in a sufficiently valid and reliable way that we think it is morally acceptable for teachers and examiners to score and grade learners for their knowledge.
I am not disputing that is so in practice, BUT undertaking research into learners' science knowledge makes us very aware of the limitations to processes of eliciting and assessing other people's knowledge. We need probes (e.g., questions) that are understood as intended, participants motivated to reveal their thinking, and the ability to interpret responses. I am not suggesting this is impossible, but, as with any research to measure something, it relies on valid and well-calibrated instrumentation, appropriate background theory, and is always subject to limits on precision.
This is disguised sometimes in the kind of 'shorthand' used in many research reports which can include bland summary statements (of the kind '76% of the participants had a good understanding of acidity, but 12% held a common misconception') that tends to sound more absolute and precise than is possible, and which often clump together considerable diversity of knowledge and understanding within a single class such as 'misconception' or 'sound knowledge' (Taber, 2013).
In my doctoral research I studied students' understanding of chemical bonding in depth, and this reinforced the idea that each of us has unique and idiosyncratic knowledge. I found much commonality in student thinking and indeed something of a 'common' alternative conceptual framework , yet when one investigates thinking in depth (rather than just using a questionnaire with objective questions) it become clear that even in the same class, no two students have precisely the same knowledge of a topic. That certainly applied to 'chemical bonding' and I would expect it applies equally as well to other domains – including floors!
Can knowledge be quantified?
But given that everyone's knowledge is unique, with its own nuances, gaps, and deviations from some ideal canonical account, does it even make sense to try to quantity knowledge? When we appreciate some of the qualitative variation between individual epistemic agents (i.e., 'knowers') it starts to look rather questionable whether it makes sense to be satisfied with any quantitative score meant to reflect relative levels of knowledge (like test scores). This makes a claim like "no one knows more about floors than Jeff" seem, at best, a little simplistic.
A barely plausible coincidence
Yet, at the end of the first commercial break, the same sponsor made another claim:
"no one knows more about floors than Roger"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
As of itself, this claim seems just as dubious as the claim about Jeff.
But it is when they are taken together, that they really stretch credibility. It we treat these claims at face value:
No one knows more about floors than Roger. So, this includes Jeff. Jeff does not know more about floors than Roger.
Yet we are also told no one knows more about floors than Jeff. And this must include Roger. So, Roger does not know more about floors than Jeff.
Clearly the only way to accept both these claims is to assume that Roger and Jeff know exactly as much about floors as each other.
We have to assume here then that it makes sense to quantify domain knowledge (in the floors domain at least) and that sufficiently accurate measurements of domain knowledge can be made to confidently conclude that Roger and Jeff know precisely equal amounts.
We are not told they know everything about floors. Perhaps each only knows 10% of what it is possible to know about floors, in which case we might wonder to what extent their knowledge overlaps or is complementary. If Jeff knows 10% of all that could be known about floors, and Roger also knows 10% of all that could be known about floors, then between them they must know between 10-20% of the total domain knowledge.
Stretching credulity further
I had barely had time to ponder all this when the next commercial break arrives with a new claim:
"no one knows more about floors than Donald"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
So, an even more unlikely scenario is presented.
No one knows more about floors than Donald. So, this includes Jeff. Jeff does not know more about floors than Donald.
And this also includes Roger. Roger does not know more about floors than Donald.
Yet we are also told no one knows more about floors than Jefff. And this must include Donald. So, Donald does not know more about floors than Jeff.
And no one knows more about floors than Roger. So, this also includes Donald. Donald does not know more about floors than Roger.
Clearly the only way to accept all these claims is to assume that Donald and Roger and Jeff know exactly as much about floors as each other.
How likely is it that there are three people in the world who equally know so much about floors that no one else in the world knows more about floors than them?
I guess this deepens on just how complex a domain floor knowledge is. In many distributions that occur 'naturally' there is something of a bell-curve where a lot of people clump around the middle of the distribution, so they are fairly typical or average in that regard, and just a few people fall at the extremes.
A 'normal' distribution (Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)
The more possible states there are in the distribution, the more likely that the highest occupied state will have relatively low occupancy. Yet if there are only a small number of states, there will be less options and higher frequencies in specific states. That is, there will be what is known as a 'ceiling' effect. A ceiling effect occurs in tests if the questions are too easy allowing many candidates to obtain the maximum score. Such a test does not discriminate well between the most capable and less capable candidates.
There are billions of people on earth, so perhaps it is not so surprising there might be three people tied for top rating in the area of floor domain knowledge – or even more than three – so it is not impossible that these three (Jeff, Roger, Donald) all work for the same company that have highly trained them within the domain.
Beyond belief?
But then at the end of the commercial break we are told
"no one knows more about floors than Shirley"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
So, I will not go through all the argument again as clearly we are being told that no one knows more about floors than Shirley, but there are other people (Jeff, Roger, Donald) who also are not exceeded in their domain knowledge, so we conclude that there are at least four people in the world who have equal domain knowledge to each other, whilst not being exceeded in domain knowledge by anyone else.
Yet there are further commercial breaks, and further bold claims:
"no one knows more about floors than Michael"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
and
"no one knows more about floors than Johnny"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
and
"no one knows more about floors than Kate"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
and
"no one knows more about floors than Tess"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
and
"no one knows more about floors than Denise"
Claim made by 'Careptright'
So, it seems that there are at least nine people working for this one organisation who are not exceeded in their domain knowledge by anybody else in the world. So, in the domain of floors
And no one knows more about floors than any of them.
This seems pretty unlikely – even fantastic, perhaps.
There are several ways to interpret this.
It is an advert meant to persuade simple people, so impressive claims are made to deceive them given that the advertisers assume their audience are too stupid to think critically and so appreciate they are being lied to.
Alternatively, perhaps as an advert, this is knowingly making nonsense claims that the audience are meant to see through, knowing that the point of the advert is to plant an idea and brand in the mind; and the audience are not expected or required to believe it. It is not deception, but what ASA call 'puffery' – something so obviously silly that no one is expected to take it seriously (or spend time critically analysing it for a blog). Who knows, perhaps there are no such people as Jeff and his colleagues, and their parts are played by actors!
But there is a third possibility.
Shoot high, aim low
There is one way that we might reasonably expect that a large number of people might be said to have such domain knowledge that it is not exceeded by any one else (and therefore have equal degrees of domain knowledge).
Consider a domain that is extremely simple and restricted.
We might imagine a knowledge domain with a very small number of possible knowledge elements. We can certainly imagine an artificial case – such as regarding one of those manufactured concepts used in some psychological research into concept formation.
For example consider the knowledge domain of recirgres
An example of a recirgre
Let us consider that a recirgre is a red circle on a green background. Perhaps there are only three things to be known about recirgres:
they are circular
they are red
the are found on green backgrounds
There are only eight basic knowledge states here, offering four quantitative levels of domain knowledge (making a ceiling effect likely):
knowing none of the three elements
knowing only one of the elements (three options)
knowing two of the three elements (three options)
knowing all three elements
The researcher in me would point out that even here there is more potential diversity in knowledge (e.g., one person may know only that recirgre are red; another may know recirgres are red and believe they are square; another may may know recirgres are red and think they may be any oval shape including circles…but here all such options count as having one element of domain knowledge; then again, perhaps someone thinks recirgres are red circles on green backgrounds and that putting one on a North facing wall in every room of a house will bring good luck; and someone else that recirgres are red circles on green backgrounds, but they used to be princesses before they were turned into recirgres by evil stepmothers – but in either case that's just the same maximum score of 3/3 in this assessment).
If we examined the knowledge of a large number of people that had studied the topic of recirgres we might find many top scorers of whom we could say "no one knows more about recrigres than…"- because of the low ceiling in this limited knowledge domain.
Some areas of expertise involve more complex and extensive knowledge domains than others (Images by Ahmad Ardity and Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay )
So perhaps the same is true of floors. Perhaps there's not actually that much that can be known about floors, so quite a few people who work in floors and are trained up in the trade know at least as much as anyone else does. It does not take long for someone who works in floors to hit the ceiling.
Perhaps. I'd rather think that than that my viewing is being interrupted by a successions of claims that I am simply meant to dismiss as fictions that are acceptable because they are "obvious exaggerations" ("puffery") and "claims that the average consumer who sees the advertisement is unlikely to take literally" because consumers know that claims made by advertisers like 'Carpetright' are not supposed to be truthful and taken seriously. So, perhaps the advertisers do not think we are stupid, but rather that we are clever enough to know their claims are not meant to have any genuine substantive content.
But if that is so, they are not trying to deceive us, but rather to manipulate us more insidiously.
1 Perhaps these examples seem like 'facts' rather than theories, but they can only be facts within a given theoretical context. So, to call hydrogen an element one needs a theoretical perspective on what an element is.
I've used the frog heart example to illustrate how scientific knowledge is not just as matter of being able to generalise from having examined some examples (induction):
"We might imagine a natural scientist, a logician, and a sceptical philosopher, visiting the local pond. The scientist might proclaim, "see that frog there, if we were to dissect the poor creature, we would find it has a heart". The logician might suggest that the scientist cannot be certain of this as she is basing her claim on an inductive process that is logically insecure. Certainly, every frog that has ever been examined sufficiently to determine its internal structure has been found to have a heart, but given that many frogs, indeed the vast majority, have never been specifically examined in this regard, it is not possible to know for certain that such a generalisation is valid. (The sceptic, is unable to arbitrate as he simply refuses to acknowledge that he knows there is a frog present, or indeed that he can be sure he is out walking with colleagues who are discussing one, rather than perhaps simply dreaming about the whole episode.)
The use of induction here, assumed by the logician to be the basis of the scientist's claim, might take the form:
1. a great many frogs have been examined, at different times and places, in sufficient detail to know if they have hearts;
2. each and everyone of these frogs,without exception, has been found to have a heart;
3. therefore, we can assume all frogs have hearts;
4. this, in front of us, is a frog,
5. therefore, it has a heart.
A key question then seems to be: under what circumstances can it be assumed that a property measured for some instance or specimen (something conceptualised as a member of some type or class) also applies to all other instances of the same type? …
The response is that we are not actually here using a process of induction that assumes if we look at sufficient examples we can make a generalisation across the class: rather we are using theoretical considerations. We assume that 'frog' is a kind or type such that as part of its essence (related to what makes it a frog) it necessarily has a heart. …
Frogs are a type of animal that is part of a larger group that share the same kind of circulatory system based on blood vessels and a heart to pump the blood around. We do not have to test every frog, because this type of anatomy and physiology is necessary (essential) to being a frog: it is part of the essence, the very nature, of frogness. So, the hypothetical scientist was arguing that the frog is a natural kind: a particular type of thing that exists in nature and that has certain necessary aspects, such that as long as we know we have a frog, we know these aspects will be found. So, the logical chain is something like:
1. frogs are recognised as making up a natural kind;
2. one of the necessary features of frogs is the presence of a heart;
3. therefore, we can assume all frogs have hearts;
The point is NOT that there has not been a generalisation from examining other specimens of frog, but rather that this by itself is insufficient unless located in a particular theoretical perspective.
One of the supposed features of scientific knowledge is that it is always, strictly speaking, provisional. Science seeks generalisable, theoretical knowledge – and no matter how strong the case for some general claim may seem, a scientist is supposed to be open-minded, and always willing to consider that their opinion might be changed by new evidence or a new way of looking at things.
Perhaps the strongest illustration of this is Newtonian physics that seemed to work so well for so many decades that for many it seemed unquestionable. Yet we now know that it is not a precise account that always fits nature. (And by 'we know' I mean we know in the sense of having scientific knowledge – we think this, and have very strong grounds to think this, but reserve the right to change our minds in the light of new information!)
When science is presented in the media, this provisional nature of scientific knowledge – with its inbuilt caveat of uncertainty – is often ignored. News reports, and sometimes scientists when being interviewed by journalists, often imply that we now know…for certain… Science documentaries are commonly stitched together with the trope 'and this can only mean' (Taber, 2007) when any scientist worth their salt could offer (even if seemingly less feasible) alternative scenarios that fit the data.
One might understand this as people charged with communicating science to a general audience seeking to make things as simple and straightforward as possible. However it does reinforce the alternative conception that in science theories are tested allowing them to be straightforwardly dismissed or proved for all time. What is less easy to understand is why scientists seeking to publish work in academic journals to be read by other scientists would claim to know anything for certain – as that is surely likely to seem arrogant and unscientific to editors, reviewers, and those who might read their published work
Science that is indisputable
So, one of two things that immediately made me lack confidence in a published paper about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the infectious agent considered responsible for the COVID pandemic (Sehgal, 2021), was that the first word was 'Undisputedly'. Assuming the author was not going to follow up with Descartes' famous 'Cogito' ("Undisputedly… I think, therefore I am"), this seemed to be a clear example of something I always advised my own research students to avoid in their writing – a hostage to fortune.
A bold first sentence for this article in a supposedly peer-reviewed research journal
The good scientist learns to use phrases like "this seems to suggest…" rather than "I have therefore proved beyond all possible doubt…"!
Prestigious research journals are selective in what they publish – and reject most submissions, or at least require major revisions based on reviewer evaluations. Predatory journals seek to maximise their income from charging authors for publication; and so do not have the concern for quality that traditionally characterised academic publishing. If some of the published output I have seen is a guide, some of these journals would publish virtually anything submitted regardless of quality.
Genetic relatedness of bats and viruses
Now it would be very unfair to dismiss a scientific article based purely on the first word of the abstract. Even if 'undisputedly' is a word that does not sit easily in scientific discourse, I have to acknowledge that writing a scientific paper is in part a rhetorical activity, and authors may sometimes struggle to balance the need to adopt scientific values (such as always being open to the possibility of another interpretation) with the construction of a convincing argument.
"Undisputedly, the horseshoe bats are the nearest known genetic relatives of the Sars-CoV-2 virus."
Sehgal, 2021, p.29 341
Always start a piece of writing with a strong statement
Closest genetic relatives?
Okay, I was done.
I am not a biologist, and so perhaps I am just very ignorant on the topic, but this seemed an incredible claim. Our current understanding of the earth biota is that there has (probably) been descent from a common ancestor of all living things on the planet today. So, just as I am related, even if often only very distantly, to every other cospecific specimen of Homo sapiens on the planet, I am also related by descent from common ancestors (even more distantly) to every chimpanzee, indeed every primate, every mammal, every chordate; indeed every animal; plus all the plants, fungi, protists and monera.
But clearly I share a common ancestor with all humans in the 'brotherhood of man' more recently than all other primates, and that more recently than all other mammals. And when we get to the non-animal kingdoms we are not even kissing cousins.
And viruses – with their RNA based genetics? These are often not even considered to be living entities in their own right.
There is certainly a theory that there was an 'RNA world', a time when some kind of primitive life based on RNA genes existed from which DNA and lifeforms with DNA genomes later evolved, so one can stretch the argument to say I am related to viruses – that if one went back far enough, both viruses and humans (or viruses and horseshoe bats, more to the point of the claim in this article) around today could be considered to be derived from a common ancestor, and that this is reflected in patterns that can be found in their genomes today.
The nearest genetic relative to SARS-CoV-2 virus?
The genome of a virus is not going to be especially similar to the genome of a mammal. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a single stranded RNA virus which will be much more genetically similar to other such viruses that to organisms with double stranded DNA. It is famously a coronavirus – so surely it is most likely to be strongly related to other coronaviruses? It is called 'SARS-CoV-2' because of its similarity to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome): SARS-CoV. These seems strong clues.
And the nearest genetic relative to horseshoe bats are…
And bats are mammals. The nearest relatives to any specific horseshoe bat are other bats of that species. And if we focus at the species level, and ask what other species would comprise the nearest genetic relatives to a species of horseshoe bats? I am not an expert, but I would have guessed other species of horseshoe bat (there are over a hundred such species). Beyond that family – well I imagine other species of bat. Looking on the web, it seems that Old World leaf-nosed bats (and not viruses) have been mooted from genetic studies (Amador, Moyers Arévalo, Almeida, Catalano & Giannini, 2018) as the nearest genetic relatives of the horsehoe bats.
Annotated copy of Figure 7 from Amador et al., 2018
So, although I am not an expert, and I am prepared to be corrected by someone who is, I am pretty sure the nearest relative that is not a bat would be another mammal – not a bird, not a fish, certainly not a mollusc or insect. Mushrooms and ferns are right out of contention. And, no, not a virus. 1
Judge me on what I mean to say – not what I say
Perhaps I am being picky here. A little reflection suggests that surely Sehgal (in stating that "the horseshoe bats are the nearest known genetic relatives of the Sars-CoV-2 virus") did not actually mean to imply that "the horseshoe bats are the nearest known genetic relatives of the Sars-CoV-2 virus", but rather perhaps something along the lines that an RNA virus known to infect horseshoe bats was the nearest known genetic relative of the Sars-CoV-2 virus.
Perhaps I should have read "the horseshoe bats are the nearest known genetic relatives of the Sars-CoV-2 virus" as "the horseshoe bats are hosts to the nearest known genetic relatives of the Sars-CoV-2 virus"? If I had read on, I would have found reference to a "bat virus RaTG13 having a genome resembling the extent of 98.7% to that of the Sars-CoV-2 virus" (p.29 341).
Yet if a research paper, that has supposedly been subject to rigorous peer review, manages to both misrepresent the nature of science AND make an obviously factually incorrect claim in its very first sentence, then I think I can be forgiven for suspecting it may not be the most trustworthy source of information.
Work cited
Amador, L. I., Moyers Arévalo, R. L., Almeida, F. C., Catalano, S. A., & Giannini, N. P. (2018). Bat Systematics in the Light of Unconstrained Analyses of a Comprehensive Molecular Supermatrix. Journal of Mammalian Evolution, 25(1), 37-70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10914-016-9363-8
Sehgal, M.L. (2021) Origin of SARS-CoV-2: Two Schools of Thought, Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research, July, 2020, Volume 37, 2, pp 29341-29356
1 It is perfectly possible logically for organism Y (say a horseshoe bat) to be the closest genetic relative of organism X (say a coronavirus) without organism X being the closest genetic relative of organism Y. (By analogy, someone's closest living genetic relative could be a grandchild whose closest genetic relative is their own child or their parent that was not a child of that grandparent.) However, the point here is that bat is not even quite closely related to the virus.
One of the recurring themes in this blog is the way science is communicated in teaching and through media, and in particular the role of language choices, in effective communication.
I was listening to a podcast of the BBC Science in Action programme episode 'Radioactive Red Forest'. The item that especially attracted my attention (no, not the one about teaching fish to do sums) was summarised on the website as:
"Understanding the human genome has reached a new milestone, with a new analysis that digs deep into areas previously dismissed as 'junk DNA' but which may actually play a key role in diseases such as cancer and a range of developmental conditions. Karen Miga from the University of California, Santa Cruz is one of the leaders of the collaboration behind the new findings."
They've really sequenced the human genome this time
The introductory part of this item is transcribed below.
Being 'once a science teacher, always a science teacher' (in mentality, at least), I reflected on how this dialogue is communicating important ideas to listeners. Before I comment in any detail, you may (and this is entirely optional, of course) wish to read through and consider:
What does a listener (reader) need to know to understand the intended meanings in this text?
What 'tactics', such as the use of figures of speech, do the speakers use to support the communication process?
Roland Pease (Presenter): "Good news! They sequenced, fully sequenced, the human genome.
'Hang on a minute' you cry, you told us that in 2000, and 2003, and didn't I hear something similar in 2013?' Well, yes, yes, and yes, but no.
A single chromosome stretched out like a thread of DNA could be 6 or 8 cm long. Crammed with three hundred million [300 000 000] genetic letters. But to fit one inside a human cell, alongside forty five [45] others for the complete set, they each have to be wound up into extremely tight balls. And some of the resulting knots it turns out are pretty hard to untangle in the lab. and the genetic patterns there are often hard to decode as well. Which is what collaboration co-leader Karen Miga had to explain to me, when I also said 'hang on a minute'."
Karen Miga: "The celebrated release of the finished genome back in 2003 was really focused on the portions that we could at the time map and assemble. But there were big persistent gaps. Roughly about two hundred million [200 000 000] bases long that were missing. It was roughly eight percent [8%] of the genome was missing."
"And these were sort of hard to get at bits of genome, I mean are they like trying to find a coin in the bottom of your pocket that you can't quite pull out?"
"These regions are quite special, we think about tandem repeats or pieces of sequences that are found in a head-to-tail orientation in the genome, these are corners of our genome where this is just on steroids, where we see a tremendous amount of tandem repeats sometimes extending for ten million [10 000 000] bases. They are just hard to sequence, and they are hard to put together correctly and that was – that was the wall that the original human genome project faced."
Introduction to the item on the sequencing of what was known as 'junk DNA' in the (a) human genome
I have sketched out a kind of 'concept map' of this short extract of dialogue:
A mapping of the explicit connections in the extract of dialogue (ignoring connections and synonyms that a knowledgeable listener would have available for making sense of the talk)
In educational settings, teachers' presentations are informed by background information about the students' current levels of knowledge. In particular, teachers need to be aware of the 'prerequisite knowledge' necessary for understanding their presentations. If you want to be understood, then it is important your listeners have available the ideas you will be relying on in your account.
A scientist speaking to the public, or a journalist with a public audience, will be disadvantaged in two ways compared to the situation of a teacher. The teacher usually knows about the class, and the class is usually not as diverse as a public audience. There might be a considerable diversity of knowledge and understanding among the members of, say, the 13-14 year old learners in one school class, or the first year undergraduates on a university course – but how much more variety is found in the readership of a popular science magazine or the audience of a television documentary or radio broadcast.
Here are some key concepts referenced in the brief extract above:
bases
cells
chromosome
DNA
sequencing
tandem repeats
the human genome
To follow the narrative, one needs to appreciate relationships among these concepts (perhaps at least that chromosomes are found in cells; and comprised of DNA, the structure of which includes a number of different components called bases, the ordering of which can be sequenced to characterise the particular 'version' of DNA that comprises a genome. 1 ) Not all of these ideas are made absolutely explicit in the extract.
The notion of tandem repeats requires somewhat more in-depth knowledge, and so perhaps the alternative offered – tandem repeats or pieces of sequences that are found in a head to tail orientation in the genome – is intended to introduce this concept for those who are not familiar with the topic in this depth.
The complete set?
The reference to "A single chromosome stretched out…could be 6 or 8 cm long…to fit one inside a human cell, alongside forty five others for the complete set…" seems to assume that the listener will already know, or will readily appreciate, that in humans the genetic material is organised into 46 chromosomes (i.e., 23 pairs).
Arguably, someone who did not know this might infer it from the presentation itself. Perhaps they would. The core of the story was about how previous versions of 'the' [see note 1] human genome were not complete, and how new research offered a more complete version. The more background a listener had regarding the various concepts used in the item, the easier it would be to follow the story. The more unfamiliar ideas that have to be coordinated, the greater the load on working memory, and the more likely the point of the item would be missed.2
Getting in a tangle
A very common feature of human language is its figurative content. Much of our thinking is based on metaphor, and our language tends to be full [sic 3] of comparisons as metaphors, similes, analogies and so forth.
So, we can imagine 'a single chromosome' (something that is abstract and outside of most people's direct experience) as being like something more familiar: 'like a thread'. We can visualise, and perhaps have experience of, threads being 'wound up into extremely tight balls'. Whether DNA strands in chromosomes are 'wound up into extremely tight balls' or are just somewhat similar to thread wound up into extremely tight balls is perhaps a moot point: but this is an effective image.
And it leads to the idea of knots that might be pretty hard to untangle. We have experience of knots in thread (or laces, etc.) that are difficult to untangle, and it is suggested that in sequencing the genome such 'knots' need to be untangled in the laboratory. The listener may well be visualising the job of untangling the knotted thread of DNA – and quite possibly imaging this is a realistic representation rather than a kind of visual analogy.
Indeed, the reference to "some of the resulting knots it turns out are pretty hard to untangle in the lab. and the genetic patterns there are often hard to decode as well" might seem to suggest that this is not an analogy, but two stages of a laboratory process – where the DNA has to be physically untangled by the scientists before it can be sequenced, but that even then there is some additional challenge in reading the parts of the 'thread' that have been 'knotted'.
Reading the code
In the midst of this account of the knotted nature of the chromosome, there is a complementary metaphor. The single chromosome is "crammed with three hundred million genetic letters". The 'letters' relate to the code which is 'written' into the DNA and which need to be decoded. An informed listener would know that the 'letters' are the bases (often indeed represented by the letters A, C, G and T), but again it seems to be assumed this does not need to be 'spelt out'. [Sorry.]
But, of course, the genetic code is not really a code at all. At least, not in the original meaning of a means of keeping a message secret. The order of bases in the chromosome can be understood as 'coding' for the amino acid sequences in different proteins but strictly the 'code' is, or at least was originally, another metaphor. 4
Hitting the wall
The new research had progressed beyond the earlier attempts to sequence the human genome because that project had 'faced a wall' – a metaphorical wall, of course. This was the difficulty of sequencing regions of the genome that, the listener is told, were quite special.
The presenter suggests that the difficulty of sequencing these special regions of "hard to get at bits of genome" was akin to" trying to find a coin in the bottom of your pocket that you can't quite pull out". This is presumably assumed to be a common experienced shared by, or at least readily visualised by, the audience allowing them to better appreciate just how "hard to get at" these regions of the genome are.
We might pause to reflect on whether a genome can actually have regions. The term region seems to have originally been applied to a geographical place, such as part of a state. So, the idea that a genome has regions was presumably first used metaphorically, but this seems such a 'natural' transfer, that the 'mapping' seems self-evident. If it was a live metaphor, it is a dead one now.
Similarly, the mapping of the sequences of fragments of chromosomes onto the 'map' of the genome seems such a natural use of the term may no longer seem to qualify as a metaphor.
Repeats on steroids
These special regions are those referred to above as having tandem repeats – so parts of a chromosome where particular base sequences repeat (sometimes a great many times). This is described as "pieces of sequences that are found in a head to tail orientation" – applying an analogy with an organism which is understood to have a body plan that has distinct anterior and posterior 'ends'.
Not only does the genome contain such repeats, but in some places there are a 'tremendous' number of these repeats occurring head to tail. These places are referred to as 'corners' of the genome (a metaphor that might seem to fit better with the place in a pocket where a coin might to be hard to dislodge – or perhaps associated with that wall), than with a structure said to be like a knotted, wound-up, ball of thread.
It is suggested that in these regions, the repeats of the same short base sequences can be so extensive that they continue for billions of bases. This is expressed through the simile that the tandem repeating "is just on steroids" – again an allusion to what is assumed to be a familiar everyday phenomenon, that is, something familiar enough to people listening to help then appreciate the technical account.
Many people in the audience will have experience of being on steroids as steroids are prescribed for a wide variety of inflammatory conditions – both acute (due to accidents or infections) and chronic (e.g., asthma). Yet these are corticosteroids and 'dampen down' (metaphorically, of course) inflammation. The reference here is to anabolic steroid use, or rather abuse, by some people attempting to quickly build up muscle mass. Although anabolic steroids do have clinical use, abusers may take doses orders of magnitude higher than those prescribed for medical conditions.
I suspect that whereas many people have personal experience or experience of close family being on corticosteroids, whereas anabolic steroid use is rarer, and is usually undertaken covertly – so the metaphor here lies on cultural knowledge of the idea of people abusing anabolic steroids leading to extreme physical and mood changes.
Making a good impression
That is not to suggest this metaphor does not work. Rather I would suggest that most listeners would have appreciated the intended message implied by 'on steroids', and moreover the speaker was likely able to call upon the metaphor implicitly – that is without stopping to think about how the metaphor might be understood.
Metaphors of this kind can be very effective in giving an audience a strong impression of the scientific ideas being presented. It is worth noting, though, that what is communicated is to some extent just that, an impression, and this kind of impressionist communication contrasts with the kind of technically precise language that would be expected in a formal scientific communication.
Language on steroids
Just considering this short extract from this one item, there seems to be a great deal going on in the communication of the science. A range of related concepts are drawn upon as (assumed) background and a narrative offered for why the earlier versions of the human genome were incomplete, and how new studies are producing more complete sequences.
Along the way, communication is aided by various means to help 'make the unfamiliar familiar' by using both established metaphors as well as new comparisons. Some originally figurative language (mapping, coding, regions) is now so widely used it has been adopted as literally referring to the genome. Some common non-specific metaphors are used (hitting a wall, hard to access corners), and some specific images (threads, knots and tangles, balls, head-tails) are drawn upon, and some perhaps bespoke comparisons are introduced (the coin in the pocket, being on steroids).
In this short exchange there is a real mixture of technical language with imagery, analogy, and metaphor that potentially both makes the narrative more listener-friendly and helps bridge between the science and the familiar everyday – at last when these figures of speech are interpreted as intended. This particular extract seems especially 'dense' in the range of ideas being orchestrated into the narrative – language on steroids, perhaps – but I suspect similar combinations of formal concepts and everyday comparisons could be found in many other cases of public communication of science.
An alternative concept map of the extract, suggesting how someone with some modest level of background in the topic might understand the text (filling in some implicit concepts and connections). How a text is 'read' always depends upon the interpretive resources the listener/reader brings to the text.
At least the core message was clear: Scientists have now fully sequenced the human genome.
Although, I noticed when I sought out the scientific publication that "the total number of bases covered by potential issues in the T2T-CHM13 assembly [the new research] is just 0.3% of the total assembly length compared with 8% for GRCh38 [The human genome project version]" (Nurk et al., 2022) , which, if being churlish, might be considered not entirely 'fully' sequenced. Moreover "CHM13 lacks a Y chromosome", which – although it is also true of half of the human population – might also suggest there is still a little more work to be done.
Work cited:
Nurk, S., Koren, S., Rhie, A., Rautiainen, M., Bzikadze, A. V., Mikheenko, A., . . . Phillippy, A. M.* (2022). The complete sequence of a human genome. Science, 376(6588), 44-53. doi:doi:10.1126/science.abj6987
Notes
1 We often talk of DNA as a substance, and a molecule of DNA as 'the' DNA molecule. It might be more accurate to consider DNA as a class of (many) similar substances each of which contains its own kind of DNA molecule. Similarly, there is not a really 'a' human genome – but a good many of them.
2Working memory is the brain component where people consciously access and mentipulate information, and it has a very limited capacity. However, material that has been previously learnt and well consolidated becomes 'chunked' so can be accessed as 'chunks'. Where concepts have been integrated into coherent frameworks, the whole framework is accessed from memory as if a single unit of information.
3 Strictly only a container can be full – so, this is a metaphor. Language is never full -as we can always be more verbose! Of course, it is such a familiar metaphor that it seems to have a literal meaning. It has become what is referred to as a 'dead' metaphor. And that is, itself, a metaphor, of course.
4 Language changes over time. If we accept that much of human cognition is based on constructing new ways of thinking and talking by analogy with what is already familiar (so the song is on the 'top' of the charts and it is a 'long' time to Christmas, and a 'hard' rain is going to fall…) then language will grow by the adoption of metaphors that in time cease to be seen as metaphors, and indeed may change in their usage such that the original reference (e.g., as with electrical 'charge') may become obscure.
In education, teachers may read originally metaphorical terms in terms of teir new scientific meanings, whereas learners may understand the terms (electron 'spin', 'sharing' of electrons, …) in terms of the metaphorical/analogical source.
*This is an example of 'big science'. The full author list is:
Sergey Nurk, Sergey Koren, Arang Rhie, Mikko Rautiainen, Andrey V. Bzikadze, Alla Mikheenko, Mitchell R. Vollger, Nicolas Altemose, Lev Uralsky, Ariel Gershman, Sergey Aganezov, Savannah J. Hoyt, Mark Diekhans, Glennis A. Logsdon,p Michael Alonge, Stylianos E. Antonarakis, Matthew Borchers, Gerard G. Bouffard, Shelise Y. Brooks, Gina V. Caldas, Nae-Chyun Chen, Haoyu Cheng, Chen-Shan Chin, William Chow, Leonardo G. de Lima, Philip C. Dishuck, Richard Durbin, Tatiana Dvorkina, Ian T. Fiddes, Giulio Formenti, Robert S. Fulton, Arkarachai Fungtammasan, Erik Garrison, Patrick G. S. Grady, Tina A. Graves-Lindsay, Ira M. Hall, Nancy F. Hansen, Gabrielle A. Hartley, Marina Haukness, Kerstin Howe, Michael W. Hunkapiller, Chirag Jain, Miten Jain, Erich D. Jarvis, Peter Kerpedjiev, Melanie Kirsche, Mikhail Kolmogorov, Jonas Korlach, Milinn Kremitzki, Heng Li, Valerie V. Maduro, Tobias Marschall, Ann M. McCartney, Jennifer McDaniel, Danny E. Miller, James C. Mullikin, Eugene W. Myers, Nathan D. Olson, Benedict Paten, Paul Peluso, Pavel A. Pevzner, David Porubsky, Tamara Potapova, Evgeny I. Rogaev, Jeffrey A. Rosenfeld, Steven L. Salzberg, Valerie A. Schneider, Fritz J. Sedlazeck, Kishwar Shafin, Colin J. Shew, Alaina Shumate, Ying Sims, Arian F. A. Smit, Daniela C. Soto, Ivan Sović, Jessica M. Storer, Aaron Streets, Beth A. Sullivan, Françoise Thibaud-Nissen, James Torrance, Justin Wagner, Brian P. Walenz, Aaron Wenger, Jonathan M. D. Wood, Chunlin Xiao, Stephanie M. Yan, Alice C. Young, Samantha Zarate, Urvashi Surti, Rajiv C. McCoy, Megan Y. Dennis, Ivan A. Alexandrov, Jennifer L. Gerton, Rachel J. O'Neill, Winston Timp, Justin M. Zook, Michael C. Schatz, Evan E. Eichler, Karen H. Miga, Adam M. Phillippy
Some spider monkeys like a little something extra with "all this fruit"
Keith S. Taber
(Photograph by by Manfred Richter from Pixabay)
"oh heck, what am I going to do, I'm faced with all this fruit with no protein and I've got to be a spider monkey"
Primatologist Adrian Barnett getting inside the mind of a monkey
I was listening to an item on the BBC World Service 'Science in Action' programme/podcast (an episode called 'Climate techno-fix would worsen global malaria burden').
This included an item with the title:
Primatologist Adrian Barnett has discovered that spider monkeys in one part of the Brazilian Amazon seek out fruit, full of live maggots to eat. Why?
The argument was that the main diet of monkeys is usually fruit which is mostly very low in protein and fat. However, often monkeys include figs in their diet which are an exception, being relatively rich in protein and fats.
The spider monkeys in one part of the Amazon, however, seem to 'seek out' fruit that was infested with maggots – these monkeys appear to actively choose the infected fruits. These are the fruits a human would probably try to avoid: certainly if there were non-infested alternatives. Only a proportion of fruit on the trees are so infested, yet the monkeys consume a higher proportion of infested fruit and so seem to have a bias towards selecting fruit with maggots. At least that was what primatologist Dr Adrian Barnett's analysis found when he analysed the remains of half-eaten fruit that reached the forest floor.
The explanation suggested is that this particular area of forest has very few fig trees, therefore it seems these monkeys do not have ready access to figs, and it seems they instead get a balanced diet by preferentially picking fruit containing insect larvae.
Who taught the monkeys about their diet?
A scientific explanation of this might suggest natural selection was operating.
Even if monkeys had initially tended to avoid the infested fruit, if this then led to a deficient diet (making monkeys more prone to disease, or accidents, and less fertile) then any monkeys who supplemented the fruit content of their diet by not being so picky and eating some infested fruit (whether because of a variation in their taste preferences, or simply a variation in how careful they were to avoid spoilt fruit) would have a fitness advantage and so, on average, leave more offspring.
To the extent their eating habits reflected genetic make-up (even if this was less significant for variations in individual behaviour than contingent environmental factors) this would over time shift the typical behaviours in the population. Being willing to eat, or perhaps even enjoying, maggotty fruit was likely to be a factor in being fertile and fecund, so eventually eating infested fruit becomes the norm – at least as long as the population remains in a habitat that does not have other ready sources of essential dietary components. Proving this is what happened would be very difficult after the fact. But an account along these lines is consistent with our understanding of how behaviour tends to change.
An important aspect of natural selection is that it is an automatic process. It does not require any deliberation or even conscious awareness on behalf of the members of the population being subject to selection. Changes do not occur in response to any preference or purpose – but just reflect the extent to which different variants of a population match their environment.
This is just as well, as even though monkeys are primates, and so relatively intelligent animals, it seems reasonable to assume they do not have a formal concept of diet (rather, they just eat), and they are not aware of the essential need for fat and protein in the diet; nor of the dietary composition of fruit. Natural selection works because where there is variation, and differences in relative fitness, the fittest will tend to leave more offspring (as by fittest we simply mean those most able to leave offspring!)
Now he's thinking…
I was therefore a little surprised when the scientist being interviewed, Adrian Barnett, explained the behaviour:
"So, suddenly the monkey's full of, you know, squeaking the monkey equivalent of 'oh heck, what am I going to do, erm, I'm faced with all this fruit with no protein and I've got to be a spider monkey'."
At first hearing this sounds like anthropomorphism, where non-humans are assigned human feelings and cognitions.
Anthropomorphic language refers to non-human entities as if they have human experiences, perceptions, and motivations. Both non-living things and non-human organisms may be subjects of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism may be used deliberately as a kind of metaphorical language that will help the audience appreciate what is being described because of its similarly to some familiar human experience. In science teaching, and in public communication of science, anthropomorphic language may often be used in this way, giving technical accounts the flavour of a persuasive narrative that people will readily engage with. Anthropomorphism may therefore be useful in 'making the unfamiliar familiar', but sometimes the metaphorical nature of the language may not be recognised, and the listener/reader may think that the anthropomorphic description is meant to be taken at face value. This 'strong anthropomorphism' may be a source of alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') of science.
Why 'at first hearingthis seems like an example of anthropomorphism'? Well, Dr Barnett does not say the monkey actually has these thoughts but rather squeaks the monkey equivalent of these words. This leaves me wondering how we are to understand what the monkey equivalent actually is. I somehow suspect that whatever thoughts the monkey has they probably do not include any direct equivalents of either being a spider monkey or protein.
I am happy to accept the monkey has a concept somewhat akin to our fruit, as clearly the monkey is able to discriminate particular regularities in its environment that are associated with the behaviour of picking items from trees and eating them – regularities that we would class as fruit. It is interesting to speculate on what would be included in a monkey's concept map of fruit, were one able to induce a monkey to provide the data that might enable us to produce such a diagram. Perhaps there might be monkey equivalents of such human concepts as red and crunchy and mushy…but I would not be expecting any equivalents of our concepts of dietary components or nutritional value.
So, although I am not a primatologist, I wonder if the squeaking Dr Barnett heard when he was collecting for analysis the partially eaten fruit dropped by the spider monkeys was actually limited to the monkey equivalent of either "yummy, more fruit" or perhaps "oh, fruit again".
Can we be certain about something that happened half a million years ago?
Keith S. Taber
What was going on in Java when Homo erectus lived there? (Image by Kanenori from Pixabay )
About half a million years ago a hominid, of the Homo erectus species, living in Java took a shell and deliberately engraved a mark on it. Now, I was not there when this happened, so my testimony is second hand, but I can be confident about this as I was told by a scientist that she was sure that this definitely happened.
"…we knew for sure that it must have been made by Homo erectus"
But how can we be so sure about something alleged to have occurred so long ago?
"A long time ago [if not] in a galaxy far, far away…." the skull of a specimen of Homo erectus (Image by Mohamed Noor from Pixabay ) [Was this an inspiration for the Star Wars stormtrooper helmet?]
I doubt Fifi would be convinced.1 Fifi was a Y12 student (c.16 years old) interviewed as part of the LASAR project who had reservations about palaeontology as it did not provide certain scientific knowledge,
"I like fossils though, I think they're interesting but I don't think I'd really like [working as a palaeontologist]…I don't think you could ever really know unless you were there… There'll always be an element of uncertainty because no matter how much evidence you supply there will always be, like, doubt because of the fact that you were never there…there'll always be uncertainty."
Learners can have alternative conceptions of the nature of science, just as much as they often do for forces or chemical bonding or plant nutrition. They often think that scientific knowledge has been 'proved', and so is certain (e.g., Taber, Billingsley, Riga & Newdick, 2015). An area like palaeontology where direct observation is not possible may therefore seem to fall short of offering genuine scientific knowledge.
The uncertain nature of scientific knowledge
One key feature of the nature of science is that it seeks to produce general or theoretical knowledge of the natural world. That is, science is not just concerned with providing factual reports about specific events but with developing general accounts that can explain and apply to broad categories of objects and events. Such general and theoretical knowledge is clearly more useful than a catalogue of specific facts – which can never tell us about the next occasion or what might happen in hypothetical situations.
However, a cost of seeking such applicable and useful knowledge is that it can never be certain. It relies on our ways of classifying objects and events, the evidence we have collected so far, our ability to spot the most important patterns -and the deductions this might support. So, scientific knowledge is always provisional in the sense that it is open to revision in response to new data, or new ways of thinking about existing data as evidence.
Yet often reports of science in the media give the impression that science has made absolute discoveries. Some years ago I wrote about the tendency in science documentaries for the narrative to be driven by links that claimed "...this could only mean…" when we know that in science the available data always underdetermines theory (Taber, 2007). Or, to put it another way, we could always think up other ways of explaining the data. Sometimes these alternatives might seem convoluted and unlikely, but if we can suggest a possible (even when unconvincing) alternative, then the available data can never "only mean" any one particular proposed interpretation.
The scientist concerned was J.C.A (José) Joordens who is Professor in Hominin Paleoecology and Evolution, at Maastricht University. Prof. Joordens holds the Naturalis Dubois Chair in Hominin Paleoecology and Evolution. The reference to Dubois relates to the naturist responsible for finding a so-called 'missing link' in the chain of descent to modern humans,
"One of the most exciting episodes of palaeoanthropology was the find of the first transitional form, the Pithecanthropus erectus, by the Dutchman Eugène Dubois in Java during 1891-1892. …Besides the human remains, Dubois made a large collection of vertebrate fossils, mostly of mammals, now united in the so-called Dubois Collection."
de Vos, 2004
The Java man species, Pithecanthropus erectus (an upright ape/mokey-man), was later renamed as Homo erectus, the upright man.
On an edition of BBC Radio 4's 'In Our Time' taking 'Homo erectus' as its theme, Prof. Joordens explained how some fossil shells collected by Dubois as part of the context of the hominid fossils had remained in storage for over a century ("The shells had been, well, shelved…"!), before a graduate student set out to photograph them all for a thesis project. This led to the discovery that one of the shells appeared to have been engraved.
This could only mean one thing…
This is what Prof. Joordens told the host, Melvyn Bragg,
"One shell that had a very strange marking that we could not understand how it ended up there…
It was geometric, like a W, and this is of course something that animals don't produce. We had to conclude that it must have been made by Homo erectus. And it must have been a very deliberate marking because of, we did experimental research trying to replicate it, and then we actually found it was quite hard to do. Because, especially fresh shells, they have a kind of organic exterior, and it's hard to push some sharp objects through and make those lines, so that was when we knew for sure that it must have been made by Homo erectus."
We may consider this claim to be composed of a number of components, such as:
There is a shell with some 'very strange' markings
The shell was collected in Java in the nineteenth century
The shell had the markings when first collected
The markings were not caused by some natural phenomenon
The markings were deliberate not accidental
The markings were made by a specimen of Homo erectus
A sceptic might ask such questions as
How can we be sure this shell was part of the original collection? Could it have been substituted by mistake or deliberately?
How do we know the marks were not made more recently? perhaps by someone in the field in Java, or during transit form Java to the Netherlands, or by someone inspecting the collection?
Given that even unusual markings will occur by chance occasionally, how can we be certain these markings were deliberate? Does the mark really look like a 'W 'or might that be an over-interpretation. 2
And so forth.
It is worth bearing in mind that no one noticed these markings in the field, or when the collection was taken back to the Netherlands – indeed Prof. Joordens noted she had carried the shell around in her backpack (could that have been with an open penknife?) unaware of the markings
Of course, Prof. Joordens may have convincing responses to many of these questions – but a popular radio show is not the place to detail all the argument and evidence. Indeed, I found a report in the top journal Nature ('Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving') by Prof. Joordens and her team 3, claiming,
"One of the Pseudodon shells, specimen DUB1006-fL, displays a geometric pattern of grooves on the central part of the left valve [*]. The pattern consists, from posterior to anterior, of a zigzag line with three sharp turns producing an 'M' shape, a set of more superficial parallel lines, and a zigzag with two turns producing a mirrored 'N' shape. Our study of the morphology of the zigzags, internal morphology of the grooves, and differential roughness of the surrounding shell area demonstrates that the grooves were deliberately engraved and pre-date shell burial and weathering"
It may seem most likely that the markings were made by a Homo erectus, as no other explanation so far considered fits all the data, but theory is always under-determined – one can never be certain another scenario might be found which also fits the known facts.
Strictly, Prof. Joordens' contradicts herself. She claims the marks are "something that animals don't produce" and then claims an animal is responsible. She presumably meant that no non-hominid animal makes such marks. Even if we accept that (and, as they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence 4), can we be absolutely certain some other hominid might not have been present in Java at the time, marking the odd shell? As the 'In Our Time' episode discussed, Homo erectus often co-existed with other hominids.
Probably not, but … can we confidently say absolutely, definitely, not?
As Fifi might say: "I don't think you could ever really know unless you were there".
My point is not that I think Prof. Joordens is wrong (she is an expert, so I think she is likely correct), but just that her group cannot be absolutely certain. When Prof. Joordens says she knows for sure I assume (because she is a scientist, and I am a scientist) that this means something like "based on all the evidence currently available, our best, and only convincing, interpretation is…" Unfortunately lay people often do not have the background to insert such provisos themselves, and so often hear such claims literally – science has proved its case, so we know for sure. Where listeners already think scientific knowledge is certain, this misconception gets reinforced.
Meanwhile, Prof. Joordens continues her study of hominids in Java in the Studying Homo erectus Lifestyle and Location project (yes, the acronym is SHeLL).
Joordens, J., d'Errico, F., Wesselingh, F. et al. Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving. Nature 518, 228-231 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13962
Taber, K. S., Billingsley, B., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2015). English secondary students' thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just 'an idea someone has'. The Curriculum Journal, 1-34. doi: 10.1080/09585176.2015.1043926
Notes
1 As is usual practice in such research, Fifi is an assumed name. Fifi gave permission for data she contributed to the research to be used in publications on the assumption it would be associated with a pseudonym. (See: 'Using pseudonyms in reporting research'.)
2 No one is suggesting that the hominid deliberately marked the shell with a letter of the Roman alphabet, just that s/he deliberately made a mark that represented a definite and deliberate pattern. Yet human beings tend to spot patterns in random data. Could it just be some marks that seem to fit into a single pattern?
3 Josephine C. A. Joordens, Francesco d'Errico, Frank P. Wesselingh, Stephen Munro, John de Vos, Jakob Wallinga, Christina Ankjærgaard, Tony Reimann, Jan R. Wijbrans, Klaudia F. Kuiper, Herman J. Mücher, Hélène Coqueugniot, Vincent Prié, Ineke Joosten, Bertil van Os, Anne S. Schulp, Michel Panuel, Victoria van der Haas, Wim Lustenhouwer, John J. G. Reijmer & Wil Roebroeks.
4 At one time there was no evidence of 'noble' gases reacting. At one time there was no evidence of ozone depletion. At one time there was no evidence of superconductivity. At one time there was no evidence that the blood circulates around the body. At one time there was no evidence of any other planet having moons. At one time there was no evidence of protons being composed of even more fundamental particles. At one time there was no evidence of black holes. At one time there was no evidence that smoking tobacco was harmful. At one time there was no evidence of … [fill in your choice scientific discovery!]
Scientific literacy and desk accessories in science fiction
Keith S. Taber
Is the principle of conservation of mass that is taught in school science falsified all the time?
I am not really a serious sci-fi buff, but I liked Star Trek (perhaps in part because it was the first television programme I got to see in colour 1) and I did enjoy Blakes7 when it was broadcast by the BBC (from 1978-1981).
Logo of the BBC television series 'Blakes7' with (a) home desk equipment or (b) manual control lever for the most advanced spaceship in the galaxy (Image by Francis Ray from Pixabay).
Blakes7 was made with the same kind of low budget production values of Dr Who of the time. Given that space scenes in early episodes involved what seemed to be a flat image of a spacecraft moving across a star field with no sense of depth or perspective (for later series someone had built a model), and in one early episode the crew were clearly given angle-poise lamps to control the craft, it was certainly not a case of 'no expense spared'. So, it was never quite clear if the BBC budget had also fallen short of a possessive apostrophe in the show title credits or Blakes7 was to be read in some other way.
After all, it was not made explicit who was part of Blake's 7 if that was what the title meant, and no one referred to "Blake's 7" in the script (perhaps reflecting how the doctor in Dr Who was not actually called Dr Who?).
The Blakes7 team on the flight desk of the Liberator – which was the most advanced spaceship in the galaxy (and was, for plot purposes, conveniently found drifting in space without a crew) – at least until they forgot to clean the hull once too often and it corroded away while they were on an away mission.
Blake's group was formed from a kind of prison break and so Blake was something of a 'rough-hero' – but not as much as his sometime unofficial lieutenant, sometime friend, sometime apparent rival, Avon, who seemed to be ruled by self-interest (at least until the script regularly required some act of selfless heroism from him). 'Rough-heroes' are fictional characters presented in the hero role but who have some traits that the audience are likely to find morally questionable if not repugnant.
As well as Blake (a rebel condemned as a traitor, having 'recovered' from brainwashing-supported rehabilitation to rebel again) and Avon (a hacker convicted of a massive computer fraud intended to make himself extremely rich) the rest of the original team were a smuggler, a murderer and a petty thief, to which was added a terrorist (or freedom fighter if you prefer) picked up on an early mission. That aside, they seemed an entirely reasonable and decent bunch, and they set out to rid the galaxy of 'The Federation's tyrannical oppression. At least, that was Blake's aspiration even if most of his companions seemed to see this as a stop-gap activity till they had decided on something with more of a long-term future.
At the end of one season, where the fight with the Federation was temporarily put aside to deal with an intergalactic incursion, Blake went AWOL (well, intergalactic wars can be very disruptive) and was assumed dead/injured/lost/captured/?… for much of the remaining run without affecting the nature of the stories too much.
Among its positive aspects for its time were strong (if not exactly model) roles for women. The main villain, Servalan, was a woman – Supreme Commander of the Federation security forces (and later Federation president).
As the ruthless Supreme Commander of the Federation security forces, Servalan got to wear whatever she liked (a Kid Creole, or Mel and Kim, look comes to mind here) and could insist her staff wore hats that would not upstage hers
In Blake's original team (i.e., 7?), his pilot is a woman. (Reflecting other SciFi series, the spacecraft used by Blakes7 require n crew members to operate effectively, where n is an integer that varies between 0 and 6 depending on the specific plot requirements of an episode.) In a later series, after Avon has taken over the role of 'ipso facto leader-among-equals', the group recruits a female advanced weapons designer/technologist and a female sharpshooter.
The Blakes7 team later in the run. (Presumably they are checking the monitor and having a quick recount.) Was Soolin (played by Glynis Barber, far right) styled as a subtle reference to the 'Seven Samurai'?
When I saw Blakes7 was getting a rerun recently I re-watched the series I had not seen since it was first aired. Despite very silly special effects, dodgy story-lines, and morally questionable choices (the series would make a great focus for a philosophy class) the interactions between the main characters made it an enjoyable watch.
But, it is not science
Of course, the problem with science fiction is that it is fiction, not science. Star Trek may have prided itself on seeking to at least make the science sound feasible, but that is something of an outlier in the genre.
Egrorian and his young assistant Pinder (unfortunately prematurely aged somewhat by a laboratory mishap) show Avon and Vila around their lab.
This is clear, for example, in an episode called 'Orbit' where Avon discuses the tachyon funnel, an 'ultimate weapon', with Egrorian, a renegade scientist. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel faster than the speed of light. The theory of special relatively suggests the speed of light is the theoretical maximum speed anything can have, but some other theories suggest tachyons may exist in some circumstances. As always in science, theories that are widely accepted as our current best understanding of some aspect of nature (e.g., relativity) are still open to modification or replacement if new evidence is found that suggests this is indicated.
In the Blakes7 universe, there seemed to be a surprisingly high frequency of genius scientists/engineers who had successfully absconded from the tyrannical and paranoid Federation with sufficient resources to build private research facilities on various obscure deserted planets. Although these bases are secret and hidden away, and the scientists concerned have normally been missing for years or even decades, it usually transpires that the Blakes7 crew and the Federation manage to locate any particular renegade scientist during the same episode.
This is part of the exchange between this particular flawed genius scientist and our flawed and reluctant 'rough hero', Kerr Avon:
Egrorian: You've heard of Hoffal's radiation?
Avon: No.
Ah… Hoffal had a unique mind. Over a century ago he predicted most of the properties that would be found in neutron material.
Neutron material?
Material from a neutron star. That is a… a giant sun which has collapsed and become so tightly compressed that its electrons and protons combine, making neutrons.
I don't need a lecture in astrophysics. [But presumably the scriptwriter felt the audience would need to be told this.]
When neutrons are subjected to intense magnetic force, they form Hoffal's radiation. Poor Pinder [Egrorian's lab. assistant] was subjected for less than a millionth of a second. He aged 50 years in as many seconds. …
So neutrons are part of the tachyon funnel.
Um, eight of them … form the core of the accelerator.
Now, for anyone with any kind of science background such dialogue stretches credibility. Chadwick discovered the neutron in everyday matter in 1932, so the neutron's properties could be explored without having to obtain samples from a neutron star – which would certainly be challenging. When bound in nuclei, neutrons (which are electrically neutral, thus the name, and so not usually affected by magnetic fields) are stable.
Thinking at the scale of a neutron
However, any suspension of disbelief (which fiction demands, of course) was stretched past breaking point at the end of this exchange. Not only were the generally inert neutrons the basis of a weapon that could destroy whole worlds – but the core of the accelerator was formed of, not a neutron star, nor a tonne of 'neutron matter', but eight neutrons (i.e., one for each member of Blake's 7 with just a few left over?)
That is, the intensely destructive beam of radiation that could destroy a planet from a distant solar system was generated by subjecting to a magnetic field: a core equivalent to (the arguably less interesting) half of a single oxygen atomic nucleus.
Warning – keep this away from strong magnetic fields if you value your planet! (Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay )
Now free neutrons (that is, outside of an atomic nuclei – or neutron star) are unstable, and decay on a timescale of around a quarter of an hour (that is, the half-life is of this order – following the exponential decay familiar with other kinds of radioactivity), to give a proton, an electron and a neutrino. The energy 'released' in this process is significant on the scale of a subatomic particle: 782 343 eV or nearly eight hundred thousand eV.
Eight hundred thousand seems a very large number, but the unit here is electron volt, a unit used for processes at this submicroscopic scale. (An eV is the amount of work that is done when one single electron is moved though a potential difference of 1v – this is about 1.6 x10-19 J). In the more familiar units of joules, this is about 1.25 x 10-13 J. That is,
0.000 000 000 000 125 J
To boil enough water at room temperature to make a single cup of tea would require about 67 200 J. 2 So, if the energy from decaying neutrons were used to boil the water, it would require the decay of about
538 000 000 000 000 000 neutrons.3
That is just to make one cup of tea, so imagine how many more neutrons would have to decay to provide the means to destroy a planet. Certainly, one would imagine,
more than 8.
E=mc2
Now since Einstein (special relativity, again), mass and energy have been considered to have an equivalence. It is commonly thought that mass can be converted to energy and the equation E=mc2 tells you how much of one would be converted to the other: how many J per kg or kg per J. (Spoiler alert – this is not quite right.)
In that way of thinking, the energy released by a free neutron when it decays is due to a tiny part of the neutrino's mass being converted to energy.
The neutron's mass defect
The mass (or so called 'rest mass') of a neutrino is about 1.67 x 10-27 kg. In the usual mode of decay the neutrino gives rise to a proton (which is nearly, but not quite, as heavy as a neutron), an electron (which is much lighter), and a neutrino (which is considered to have zero rest mass.)
Before decay
Rest mass / 10-31 kg
After decay
Rest mass / 10-31 kg
neutron
16 749.3
proton
16 726.2
electron
9.1
neutrino
–
total
16 749.3
16 735.3
[rest] mass defect in neutrino decay
So, it seems like some mass has disappeared. (And this is the mass sometimes said to have been converted into the released energy.) This might lead us to ask the question of whether Hoffal's discovery was a way to completely annihilate neutrons, so that instead of a tiny proportion of their mass being converted to energy as in neutron decay – all of it was.
Mass as latent energy?
However, when considered from the perspective of special relativity, it is not that mass is being converted to energy in processes such as neutron decay, but rather that mass and energy are considered as being different aspects of something more unified -'mass-energy' if you like. Energy in a sense carries mass, and mass in a sense is a manifestation of energy. The table above may mislead because it only refers to 'rest mass' and that does not tell us all we need to know.
When the neutron decays, the products move apart, so have kinetic energy. According to the principle of mass-energy equivalence there is always a mass equivalence of any energy. So, in relativity, a moving object has more mass than when it is at rest. That is, the 'mass defect' table shows what the mass would be if we compared a motionless neutron with motionless products, not the actual products.
The theory of special relativity boldly asserts that mass and energy are not the independent quantities they were once thought to be. Rather, they are two measures of a single quantity. Since that single quantity does not have its own name, it is called mass-energy, and the relationship between its two measures is known as mass-energy equivalence. We may regard c2 as a conversion factor that enables us to calculate one measurement from the other. Every mass has an energy-equivalent and every energy has a mass-equivalent. If a body emits energy to its surroundings it also emits a quantity of mass equivalent to that energy. The surroundings acquire both the energy and mass in the process.
Treptow, 2005, p.1636
So, rather than thinking mass has been converted to energy, it may be more appropriate to think that the mass of a neutron has a certain (latent) energy associated with it, and that, after decay, most of this energy is divided between products (according to their rest masses), but a small proportion has been converted to kinetic energy (which can be considered to have a mass equivalence).
So, whenever any process involves some kind of energy change, there is an associated change in the equivalent masses. Every time you boil the kettle, or go up in an elevator, there is a tiny increase of mass involved – the hot water is heavier than when it was cold; you are heavier than when you were at a lower level. When you lie down or burn some natural gas, there is a tiny reduction in mass (you weigh less lying down; the products of the chemical reaction weigh less than the reactants).
How much heavier is hot water?
Only in nuclear processes does the energy change involved become large enough for any change in mass to be considered significant. In other processes, the changes are so small, they are insignificant. The water we boiled earlier to make a cup of tea required 67 200J of energy, and at the end of the process the water would not just be hotter, but also heavier by about
0.000 000 000 000 747 kg
0r about 0.000 000 000 75 g. That is easy to calculate 4, but not so easy to notice.
Is mass conserved in chemical reactions?
On this basis, we might suggest that the principle of conservation of mass that is taught in school science is falsified all the time – or at least needs to be understood differently from how it is usually presented.
Type of reaction
Mass change
endothermic
mass of products > mass of reactants
exothermic
mass of products < mass of reactants
If we just consider the masses of the substances then mass is not conserved in chemical change
Yet, the discrepancies really are tiny – so tiny that in school examinations candidates are expected to pretend there is no difference. But, strictly, when (as an example) copper carbonate is heated in a crucible and decomposes to give copper oxide and carbon dioxide there is a mass decrease even if you could capture all the CO2. But it would not be measurable with our usual laboratory equipment – so, as far as chemistry is concerned, mass is conserved. 'To all intense and purposes' (even if not absolutely true) mass is always conserved in chemical reactions.
Mass is conserved overall
But actually, according to current scientific thinking, mass is always conserved (not just very nearly conserved), as long as we make sure we consider all relevant factors. The energy that allowed us to boil the kettle or be lifted in an elevator must have been provided from some source (which has lost mass by the same extent). In an exothermic chemical reaction there is an extremely slight difference of mass between the reactants and products, but the surroundings have been warmed and so have got (ever so slightly) heavier.
Type of reaction
Mass change
endothermic
energy (and equivalent mass) from the surroundings
exothermic
energy (and equivalent mass) to the surroundings
If we just consider the masses of the substances then mass does not seem to be conserved in chemical change
As Einstein himself expressed it,
"The inertial mass of a system of bodies can even be regarded as a measure of its energy. The law of the conservation of the mass of a system becomes identical with the law of the conservation of energy, and is only valid provided that the system neither takes up nor sends out energy."
Einstein, 1917/2015, p.59
Annihilate the neutrons!
So, if we read about how in particle accelerators, particles are accelerated to immense speeds, and collided, and so converted to pure energy we should be suspicious. The particles may well have been destroyed – but something else has now acquired the mass (and not just the rest mass of the annihilated particles, but also the mass associated with their high kinetic energy).
So, we cannot convert all of the mass of a neutron into energy – only reconfigure and redistribute its mass-energy. But we can still ask: what if all the mass of the neutron were to be converted into some kind of radiation that carried away all of its mass as high energy rays (perhaps Hoffal's radiation?)
Perhaps the genius scientist Hoffal, with his "unique mind", had found a way to do this (hm, with a magnetic field?) Even if that does not seem very feasible, it does give us a theoretical limit to the energy that could be produced by a process that converted a neutron into radiation.6 Each neutron has a rest mass of about
1.67 x 10-27 kg
now the conversion factor is c2 (where c is the speed of light, which is near enough 3 x 108 ms-1, so c2 =(3×108ms-1)2 , i.e., about 1017m2s-2), so that mass is equivalent to about 1.50 x 10-10 J 5 or,
0.000 000 000 150 J
Now that is a lot more energy than the 1.25 x 10-13 J released in the decay of a neutron,
0.000 000 000 150 000 J
>
0.000 000 000 000 125 J
and now we could in theory boil the water to make our cup of tea with many fewer neutrons. Indeed, we could do this by annihilating 'only' about 7
448 000 000 000 000 neutrons
This is a lot less neutrons than before, i.e.,
448 000 000 000 000 neutrons
< 538 000 000 000 000 000 neutrons
but it seems fair to say that it remains the case that the number of neutrons needed (now 'only' about 448 million million) is still a good deal more than 8.
448 000 000 000 000 neutrons
> 8 neutrons
So, if over 400 million million neutrons would need to be completely annihilated to make a single cup of tea, how much damage can 8 neutrons do to a distant planet?
A common learning difficulty
In any reasonable scenario we might imagine 8 neutrons would not be significant. This is worth emphasising as it reflates to a common learning difficulty. Quanticles such as atoms, atomic nuclei, neutrons and the like are tiny. Not tiny like specs of dust or grains of salt, but tiny on a scale where specs of dust and grains of salt themselves seem gigantic. The scales involved in considering electronic charge (i.e., 10-19C) or neutron mass (10-27 kg) can reasonably said to be unimaginatively small – no one can readily visualise the shift in scale going from the familiar scale of objects we normally think of as 'small', to the scale of individual molecules or subatomic particles.
Students therefore commonly form alternative conceptions of these types of entities (atoms, electrons, etc.) being too small to see, but yet not being so far beyond reach. And it is not just learners who struggle here. I have even heard someone on a national news programme put forward as an 'expert' make a very similar suggestion to Egrorian, in this case that a "couple of molecules" could be a serious threat to public health after the use of chemical nerve agent. This is a preposterous suggestion to a chemist, but was, I am sure, made in good faith by the international chemical weapons expert.
It is this type of conceptual difficulty which allows scriptwriters to refer to 8 neutrons as being of some significance without expecting the audience to simply laugh at the suggestion (even if some of us do).
It also explains how science fiction writers get away with such plot devices given that many in their audiences will readily accept that a few especially malicious molecules or naughty neutrons is a genuine threat to life.8 But that still does not justify using angle-poise lamps as futuristic spacecraft joysticks.
Jenna pilots the most advanced spacecraft in the galaxy
Works cited:
Einstein, A. (1917/2015). Relativity. The special and the general theory. (100th Anniversary ed.). Princeton: Princeton Univerity Press.
Treptow, R. S. (2005). E = mc2 for the Chemist: When Is Mass Conserved? Journal of Chemical Education, 82(11), 1636. doi:10.1021/ed082p1636
Notes:
1 To explain: For younger readers, television was first broadcast in monochrome (black and white – in effect shades of grey). My family first got a television after I started primary school – the justification for this luxury was that the teachers sometimes suggested programmes we might watch.
Colour television did not arrive in the UK till 1967, and initially it was only used for selected broadcasts. The first colour sets were too expensive for many families, so most people initially stayed with monochrome. This led to the infamous 'helpful' statement offered by the commentator of the weekly half-hour snooker coverage: "And for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink [ball] is next to the green". (While this is well known as a famous example of misspeaking, a commentator's blooper, those of a more suspicious mind might bear in mind the BBC chose snooker for broadcast in part because it might encourage more people to watch in colour.)
Snooker – not ideal viewing on 'black and white' television (Image by MasterTux from Pixabay )
My father had a part-time weekend job supervising washing machine rental collections (I kid you not, many people only rented such appliances in those days), to supplement income from his full time job, and this meant on Monday evenings after his day job he had to visit his part-time boss and report and they would go throughout the paperwork to ensure things tallied. I would go with him, and was allowed to watch television whilst they did this – it coincided with Star Trek, and the boss had a colour set!
2 Assuming water had to be heated from 20˚C to 100˚C, and the cup took 200 ml (200 cm3) of tea then the calculation is 4.2 x 80 x 200
4.2 J g-1K-1 is the approximate specific heat capacity of water.
Changing these parameters (perhaps you have a small tea cup and I use a mug?) will change the precise value.
3 That is the energy needed divided by the energy released by each neutron: 67200 J ÷ 1.25 x 10-13 J/neutron = 537 600 000 000 000 000 neutrons
4 E=mc2
so m = E/c2 = 67 200 ÷ (3.00 x 108)2 = 7.47 x 10-13
5 E=mc2 = 1.67 x 10-27 x (3.00 x 108)2 = 1.50 x 10-10
6 Well, we could imagine that somehow Hoffal had devised a process where the neutrons somehow redirect energy provided to initially generate the magnetic field, and perhaps the weapon was actually an enormous field generator producing a massive magnetic field that the funnel somehow converted into a beam (of tachyons?) that could pass across vast amounts of space without being absorbed by space dust, remaining highly collimated, and intense enough to destroy a world.
So, perhaps the neutrons are analogous to the core of a laser.
I somehow think it would still need more than 8 of them.
7 That is the energy needed divided by the energy released by each neutron: 67200 J ÷ 1.50 x 10-10 J/neutron = 4.48 x 1014 neutrons
8 Of course molecules are not actually malicious and neutrons cannot be naughty as they are inanimate entities. I am not anthropomorphising, just alliterating.
There might be a couple of molecules left in the Salisbury area. . ."
Expert interviewed on national news
The subject of chemical weapons is not to be taken lightly, and is currently in the news in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the concern that the limited progress made by the Russian invaders may lead to the use of chemical or biological weapons to supplement the deadly enough effects of projectiles and explosives.
Organophosphorus nerve agents (OPNA) were used in Syria in 2013 (Pita, & Domingo, 2014), and the Russians have used such nerve agents in illicit activities – as in the case of the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. Skripal had been a Russian military intelligence officer who had acted for the British (i.e., as a double agent), and was convicted of treason – but later came to the UK in a prisoner swap and settled in Salisbury (renown among Russian secret agents for its cathedral). 1
Salisbury, England – a town that featured in the news when it was the site of a Russian 'hit' on a former spy (Image by falco from Pixabay )
These substances are very nasty,
OPNAs are odorless and colorless [and] act by blocking the binding site of acetylcholinesterase, inhibiting the breakdown of acetylcholine… The resulting buildup of acetylcholine leads to the inhibition of neural communication to muscles and glands and can lead to increased saliva and tear production, diarrhea, vomiting, muscle tremors, confusion, paralysis and even death
Kammer, et al., 2019, p.119
So, a substance that occurs normally in cells, but is kept in check by an enzyme that breaks it down, starts to accumulate because the enzyme is inactivated when molecules of the toxin bind with the enzyme molecules stopping them binding with acetylcholine molecules. Enzymes are protein based molecules which rely for their activity on complex shapes (as discussed in 'How is a well-planned curriculum like a protein?' .)
Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter. It allows signals to pass across synapses. It is important then that acetylcholine concentrations are controlled for nerves to function (Image source: Wikipedia).
Acetylcholinesterase is a protein based enzyme that has an active site (red) that can bind and break up acetylcholine molecules (which takes about 80 microseconds per molecule). The neurotransmitter molecule is broken down into two precursors that are then available to be synthesised back into acetylcholine when appropriate. 2
Toxins (e.g., green, blue) that bind to the enzyme's active site block it from breaking down acetylcholine.
A need to clear up after the release of chemical agents
The effects of these agents can be horrific – but, so of course, can the effects of 'conventional' weapons on those subjected to aggression. One reason that chemical and biological weapons are banned from use in war is their uncontrollable nature – once an agent is released in an environment it may remain active for some time – and so hurt or kill civilians or even personnel from the side using those weapons if they move into the attacked areas. The gases used in the 1912-1918 'world' war, were sometimes blown back towards those using them when the wind changed direction.
This is why, when small amounts of nerve agents were used in the U.K. by covert Russian agents to attack their targets, there was so much care put into tracing and decontaminating any residues in the environment. This is a specialised task, and it is right that the public are warned to keep clear of areas of suspected contamination. Very small quantities of some agents can be very harmful – depending upon what we mean by such relative terms as 'small'. Indeed, two police officers sent to the scene of the crime became ill. But what does 'very small quantities' mean in terms of molecules?
A recent posting discussed the plot of a Blakes7 television show episode where a weapon capable of destroying whole planets incorporated eight neutronsas a core component. This seemed ridiculous: how much damage can eight neutrons do?
But, I also pointed out that, sadly, not all those who watched this programme would find such a claim as comical as I did. Presumably, the train of thought suggested by the plot was that a weapon based on eight neutrons is a lot more scary than a single neutron design, and neutrons are found in super-dense neutron stars (which would instantly crush anyone getting too near), so they are clearly very dangerous entities!
A common enough misconception
This type of thinking reflects a common learning difficulty. Quanticles such as atoms, atomic nuclei, neutrons and the like are tiny. Not tiny like specs of dust or grains of salt, but tiny on a scale where specs of dust and grains of salt themselves seem gigantic. The scales involves in considering electronic charge (i.e., 10-19C) or neutron mass (10-27 kg) can reasonably be said to be unimaginatively small – no one can readily visualise the shift in scale going from the familiar scale of objects we normally experience as small (e.g., salt grains), to the scale of individual molecules or subatomic particles.
People therefore commonly form alternative conceptions of these types of entities (atoms, electrons, etc.) being too small to see, but yet not being so far beyond reach. It perhaps does not help that it is sometimes said that atoms can now be 'seen' with the most powerful microscopes. The instruments concerned are microscopes only by analogy with familiar optical microscopes, and they produce images, but these are more like computer simulations than magnified images seen through the light microscope. 3
It is this type of difficulty which allows scriptwriters to refer to eight neutrons as being of some significance without expecting the audience to simply laugh at the suggestion (even if some of us do).
An expert opinion
Although television viewers might have trouble grasping the insignificance of a handful of neutrons (or atoms or molecules), one would expect experts to be very clear about the vast difference in scale between us (people for example) and them (nanoscopic entities of the molecular realm). Yet experts may sometimes be stretched beyond their expertise without themselves apparently being aware of this – as when a highly qualified and experienced medical expert agreed with an attorney that the brain sends out signals to the body faster than the speed of light. If a scientific expert in a high profile murder trial can confidently make statements that are scientifically ridiculous then this underlines just how challenging some key scientific ideas are.
For any of us, knowing what we do not know, recognising when we are moving outside out of areas where we have a good understanding, is challenging. Part of the reason that student alternative conceptions are so relevant to science learning is that a person's misunderstanding can seem subjectively to be just as well supported, sensible, coherent and reasonable as a correct understanding. Where a teacher themself has an alternative conception (which sometimes happens, of course) they can teach this with as much enthusiasm and confidence as anything they understand canonically. Expertise always has limitations.
A chemical weapons expert
I therefore should not have been as surprised as I was when I heard a news broadcast featuring an expert who was considered to know about chemical weapons refer to the potential danger of "a couple of molecules". This was in relation to the poisoning by Russian agents of the Salisbury residents,
"During an interview on a BBC Radio 4 news programme (July 5th, 2018), Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who brands himself as one of the world's leading chemical weapons experts, warned listeners that there may be risks to the public due to residue from the original incident in the area. Whilst that may have been the case, his suggestion that "we are only talking about molecules here. . .There might be a couple of molecules left in the Salisbury area. . ." seemed to suggest that even someone presented to the public as a chemistry expert might completely fail to appreciate the submicroscopic scale of individual molecules in relation to the macroscopic scale of a human being."
Now Colonel de Bretton-Gordon is a visiting fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge, and the College website describes him as "a world-leading expert in Chemical and Biological weapons". I am sure he is, and I would not seek to underplay the importance of decontamination after the use of such agents; but if someone who has such expertise would assume that a couple of molecules of any substance posed a realistic threat to a human being with its something like 30 000 000 000 000 cells, each containing something like 40 000 000 molecules of protein (to just refer to one class of cellular components), then it just underlines how difficult it is to appreciate the gulf in scale between molecules and men.
Regarding samples of nerve agents, they may be deadly even in small quantities, but that still means a lot of molecules.
Novichok cocktails
The attacks in Salisbury (from which the intended victims recovered, but another person died in nearby Amesbury apparently having come into contact with material assumed to have been discarded by the criminals), were reported to have used 'Novichok', a label given to group of compounds.
"Based on analyses carried out by the British "Defence Science and Technology Laboratory" in Porton Down it was concluded that the Skripals were poisoned by a nerve agent of the so-called Novichok group. Novichok … is the name of a group of nerve agents developed and produced by Russia in the last stage of the Cold War."
Carlsen, 2019, p.1
Testing of toxins is often based on the LD50 – which means finding the dose that has an even chance of being lethal. This is not an actual amount, as clearly the amount of material that is needed to kill a large adult will be more than that to kill a small child, but the amount of the toxin needed per unit mass of victim. Although no doubt these chemicals have been directly tested on some poor test specimens of non-consenting small mammals, such information is not in the public domain.
Indeed, being based on state secrets, there is limited public data on Novichok and related agents. Carlsen (2019) estimates the LD50 for oral administration of 9 compounds in the Novichok group and some closely related agents to vary between 0.1 to 96.16 mg/kg.
Carlsen suggest the most toxic of these compounds is one known as VX. VX was actually first developed by British Scientists, although almost equivalent nerve agents were later developed elsewhere, including Russia.
'Chemical structures of V-agents.' (Figure 2 from Nepovimova & Kuca, 2018 – subject to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/) n.b. This figure shows more than a couple of molecules of nerve agent – so might this be a lethal dose?
Carlsen then argues that the actual compounds in Novachok are probably less toxic than XV, which might explain…
"…why did the Skripals not die following expose to such high potent agents; just compare to the killing of Kim Jong-nam on February 13, 2017 in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where he was attacked by the highly toxic VX, and died shortly after."
Carlsen, 2019, p1
So, for the most sensitive agent, known as XV (LD50 c. 0.1 mg/kg), a person of 50 kg mass would it is estimated have a 50% chance of being killed by an oral dose of 0.1 x 50 mg. That is 5 mg or 0.005 g by mouth. A single drop of water is said to have a volume of about 0.05 ml, and so a mass of about 0.05 g. So, a tenth of a drop of this toxin can kill. That is a very small amount. So, if as little as 0.005 g of a nerve agent will potentially kill you then that is clearly a very toxic substance.
The molecular structure of XV is given in the figure above taken from Nepovimova and Kuca (2018). These three structures shown appear to be isomeric – that is the three molecules are structural isomers. They would have the same empirical formula (and the same molecular mass).
Chemical shorthand
This type of structural formula is often used for complex organic molecules as it is easy for experts to read. It is one of many special types of representation used in chemistry. It is based on the assumption that most organic compounds can be understood as if substituted hydrocarbons. (They may or may not be derived that way – this is jut a formalism used as a thinking tool.) Hydrocarbons comprise chains of carbon atomic cores bonded to each other, and with their other valencies 'satisfied' by being bonded to hydrogen atomic cores. These compounds can easily be represented by lines where each line shows the bond between two carbon atomic cores. The hydrogen centres are not shown at all, but are implicit in the figure (they must be there to 'satisfy' the rules of valency – i.e., carbon centres in a stable structures nearly always have four bonds ).
Anything other than carbon and hydrogen is shown with elemental symbols, and in most organic compounds these other atomic centres take up on a minority of positions in the structure. So, for compounds, such as the 'VX' compounds, these kinds of structural representations are a kind of hybrid, with some atomic centres shown by their elemental symbols – but others having to be inferred.
From the point of view of the novice learner, this form of abstract representation is challenging as carbon and hydrogen centres need to be actively read into the structure (whereas an expert has learnt to do this automatically). But for the expert this type of representation is useful as complex organic molecules can contain hundreds or thousands of atomic centres (e.g., the acetylcholinesterase molecule, as represented above) and structural formulae that show all the atomic centres with elemental symbols would get very crowded.
So, below I have annotated the first version of XV:
The VX compound seems to have a molecular mass of 267
This makes the figure much more busy, but helps me count up the numbers of different types of atomic centres present and therefore work out the molecular mass – which, if I had not made a mistake, is 267. I am working here with the nearest whole numbers, so not being very precise, but this is good enough for my present purposes. That means that the molecule has a mass of 267 atomic mass units, and so (by one of the most powerful 'tricks' in chemistry) a mole of this compound, the actual substance, would have a mass of 267g.
The trick is that chemists have chosen their conversion factor between molecules and moles, the Avogadro constant of c. 6.02 x 1023, such that adding up atomic masses in a molecule gives a number that directly scales to grammes for the macroscopic quantity of choice: the mole. 5
So, if one had 267 g of this nerve agent, that would mean approximately 6.02 x 1023 molecules. Of course here we are talking about a much smaller amount – just 0.005 g (0.005/267, about 0.000 02 moles) – and so many fewer molecules. Indeed we can easily work out 0.005 g contains something like
(0.005 / 267) x 6.02 x 1o23 = 11 273 408 239 700 374 000 = 1×1019 (1 s.f.)
That is about
10 000 000 000 000 000 000 molecules
So, because of the vast gulf in scale between the amount of material we can readily see and manipulate, and the individual quanticle such as a molecule, even when we are talking about a tiny amount of material, a tenth of a drop, this still represent a very, very large number of molecules. This is something chemistry experts are very aware of, but most people (even experts in related fields) may not fully appreciate.
The calculation here is approximate, and based on various estimates and assumptions. It may typically take about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 molecules of the most toxic Novichok-like agent to be likely to kill someone – or this estimate could be seriously wrong. Perhaps it takes a lot more, or perhaps many fewer, molecules than this.
But even if this estimate is out by several orders of magnitude and it 'only' takes a few thousand million million molecules of XV for a potential lethal dose, that can in no way be reasonably described as "a couple of molecules".
It takes very special equipment to detect individual quanticles. The human retina is in its own way very sophisticated, and comes quite close to being able to detect individual photons – but that is pretty exceptional. As a rule of thumb, when anyone tells us that a few molecules or a few atoms or a few ions or a few electrons or a few neutrons or a few gamma rays or… can produce any macroscopic effect (that we can see, feel, or notice) we should be VERY skeptical.
Kammer, M., Kussrow, A., Carter, M. D., Isenberg, S. L., Johnson, R. C., Batchelor, R. H., . . . Bornhop, D. J. (2019). Rapid quantification of two chemical nerve agent metabolites in serum. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 131, 119-127. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bios.2019.01.056
Nepovimova, E., & Kuca, K. (2018). Chemical warfare agent NOVICHOK – mini-review of available data. Food and Chemical Toxicology, 121, 343-350. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2018.09.015
Pita, R., & Domingo, J. (2014). The Use of Chemical Weapons in the Syrian Conflict. Toxics, 2(3), 391-402.
1 Two men claiming to be the suspects whose photographs had been circulated by the British Police, and claimed by the authorities here to be Russian military intelligence officers, appeared on Russian television to explain they were tourists who had visited Salisbury sightseeing because of the Cathedral.
2 According to the RCSB Protein Data Bank website
"Acetylcholinesterase is found in the synapse between nerve cells and muscle cells. It waits patiently and springs into action soon after a signal is passed, breaking down the acetylcholine into its two component parts, acetic acid and choline."
Of course, it does not 'wait patiently': that is anthropomorphism.
3 We might think it is easy to decide if we are directly observing something, or not. But perhaps not:
"If a chemist heats some white powder, and sees it turns yellow, then this seems a pretty clear example of direct observation. But what if the chemist was rightly conscious of the importance of safe working, and undertook the manipulation in a fume cupboard, observing the phenomenon through the glass screen. That would not seem to undermine our idea of direct observation – as we believe that the glass will not make any difference to what we see. Well, at least, assuming that suitable plane glass of the kind normally used in fume cupboards has been used, and not, say a decorative multicoloured glass screen more like the windows found in many churches. Assuming, also, that there is not bright sunlight passing through a window and reflecting off the glass door of the fume cupboard to obscure the chemist's view of the powder being heated. So, assuming some basic things we could reasonably expect about fume cupboards, in conjunction with favourable viewing conditions, and taking into account our knowledge of the effect of plane glass, we would likely not consider the glass screen as an impediment to something akin to direct observation.
Might we start to question an instance of direct observation if instead of looking at the phenomenon through plane glass, there was clear, colourless convex glass between the chemist and the powder being heated? This might distort the image, but should not change the colours observed. If the glass in question was in the form of spectacle lenses, without which the chemist could not readily focus on the powder, then even if – technically – the observations were mediated by an instrument, this instrument corrects for a defect of vision such that our chemist would feel that direct observation is not compromised by, but rather requires, the glasses.
If we are happy to consider the bespectacled chemist is still observing the phenomenon rather than some instrumental indication of it, then we would presumably feel much the same about an observation being made with a magnifying glass, which is basically the same technical fix as the spectacles. So, might we consider observation down a microscope as direct observation? Early microscopes were little more than magnifying glasses mounted in stands. Modern compound microscopes use more than one lens. A system of lenses (and some additional illumination, usually) reveals details not possible to the naked eye – just as the use of convex spectacles allow the longsighted chemist to focus on objects that are too close to see clearly when unaided.
If the chemist is looking down the microscope at crystal structures in a polished slice of mineral, then, it may become easier to distinguish the different grains present by using a Polaroid filter to selectively filter some of the light reaching the eye from the observed sample. This seems a little further from what we might normally think of as direct observation. Yet, this is surely analogous to someone putting on Polaroid sunglasses to help obtain clear vision when driving towards the setting sun, or donning Polaroid glasses to help when observing the living things at the bottom of a seaside rock pool on a sunny day when strong reflections from the surface prevent clear vision of what is beneath.
A further step might be the use of an electron microscope, where the visual image observed has been produced by processing the data from sensors collecting reflections from an electron beam impacting on the sample. Here, conceptually, we have a more obvious discontinuity although the perceptual process (certainly if the image is of some salt crystal surface) may make this seem no different to looking down a powerful optical microscope. An analogy here might be using night-vision goggles that allow someone to see objects in conditions where it would be too dark to see them directly. I have a camera my late wife bought me that is designed for catching images of wildlife and that switches in low light conditions to detecting infrared. I have a picture of a local cat that triggered an image when the camera was left set up in the garden overnight. The cat looks different from how it would appear in day-light, but I still see a cat in the image (where if the camera had taken a normal image I would not have been able to detect the cat as the image would have appeared like the proverbial picture of a 'black cat in a coal cellar'). Someone using night-vision goggles considers that they see the fox, or the escaped convict, not that they see an image produced by electronic circuits.
If we accept that we can see the cat in the photograph, and the surface details of crystal grains in the electron microscope image, then can we actually see atoms in the STM [scanning tunneling microscope] image? There is no cat in or on my image, it is just a pattern of pixels that my brain determines to represent a cat. I never saw the cat directly (I was presumably asleep) so I have no direct evidence there really was a cat if I do not accept the photograph taken using infrared sensors. I believe there are cats in the world, and have seen uninvited cats in my garden in daylight, and think the camera imaged one of them at night. So it seems reasonable I am seeing a cat in the image, and therefore I might wonder if it is reasonable to doubt that I can also see atoms in an STM image.
One could shift further from simple sensory experience. News media might give the impression that physicists have seen the Higgs boson in data collected at CERN. This might lead us to ask: did they see it with their eyes? Or through spectacles? Or using a microscope? Or with night-vision goggles? Of course, they actually used particle detectors.
Feyerabend suggests that if we look at cloud chamber photographs, we do not doubt that we have a 'direct' method of detecting elementary particles …. Perhaps, but CERN were not using something like a very large cloud chamber where they could see the trails of condensation left in the 'wake' of a passing alpha particle, and that could be photographed for posterity. The detection of the Higgs involved very sophisticated detectors, complex theory about the particle cascades a Higgs particle interaction might cause, and very complex simulations to allow for all kinds of issues relating to how the performance of the detectors might vary (for example as they age) and how a signal that might be close to random noise could be identified…. No one was looking at a detector hoping to see the telltale pattern that would clearly be left by a Higgs, and only a Higgs. In one sense, to borrow a phrase, 'there's nothing to see'. Interpreting the data considered to provide evidence of the Higgs was less like using a sophisticated microscope, and more like taking a mixture of many highly complex organic substances, and – without any attempt to separate them – running a mass spectrum, and hoping to make sense of the pattern of peaks obtained.
4 That is not to suggest that one should automatically assume that one molecule of a toxin can only ever damage one protein molecule somewhere in one body cell. After all, one of the reasons that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons, which used to be used as propellants in all kinds of spray cans for example) were so damaging to the ozone 'layer' was because they could initiate a chain reaction.
In reactions that involve free radicals, each propagation step can produce another free radical to continue the reaction. Eventually two free radicals are likely to interact to terminate the process – but that might only be after a great many cycles, and the removal of a great many ozone molecules from the stratosphere. However, even if one free radical initiated the destruction of many molecules of ozone, that would still be a very small quantity of ozone, as molecules are so tiny. The problem was of course that a vast number of CFC molecules were being released.
5 So one mole of hydrogen gas, H2, is 2g, and so forth.
Taking advantage of good design? (Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay )
"A lot of researchers talk about this [neural system] called the care-giving system which is designed to help us care for our crying babies".
Assoc. Prof. Sara Konrath
The reference to the 'design' of a human neural system caught my attention. The reference was made by Dr Sara Konrath, Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, who was interviewed for the BBC radio programme 'The Anatomy of Kindness'.
As a scientist, I found the reference to 'design' out of place, as it is a term that would often be avoided in a scientific account.
Mention of 'design' in the context of natural phenomena is of note because of the history of the idea, and its role in key philosophical questions (such as the nature of the world, the purpose of our lives, the origins of good and evil, and other such trifling matters).
The notion of design was very important in natural theology, which looked at 'the book of nature' as God's works, and as offering insight into God as creator. A key argument was that the intricacy of nature, and the way life seemed to encompass such complex interlinked systems that perfectly fitted together into an overarching ecology, could only be explained in terms of a designer who was the careful architect of the whole creation.
Perhaps the most famous example of this argument was that of William Paley who wrote an entire book (1802) making the case with a vast range of examples. He started with the now famous analogy of someone who found a pocket watch on crossing a heath. Had he kicked a stone on his trip, he would have thought little of how the stone came to be there – but a watch was a complex mechanism requiring a large number of intricate parts that had to be just the right size, made of the right kind of materials, and put together in just the right way to function. No reasonable person could imagine the watch had just happened to come about by chance events, and so, by a similar argument, how could anything as subtle and complex as a human body have just emerged by accident and not have been designed by some great intelligence?
If you came across this object lying on the ground, what might you infer? (Image by anncapictures from Pixabay)
Paley's book does a wonderful job of arguing the case, and, even if some of the examples look naive from two centuries on, it was the work of someone who knew a great deal about anatomy, and the natural history of his time, and knew how to build up 'one long argument'. 1 It must have seemed very convincing to many readers at the time (especially as most would have read it from a position of already assuming there was an omniscient and all-powerful creator, and that the types of animals and plants on earth had not substantially changed their forms since their creation).
Indeed, a fair proportion of the world's population would still consider the argument sound and convincing today. That is despite Charles Darwin having suggested, about half a century later, in his own long argument 1 that there was another alternative (than an intelligent designer or simply chance formation of complex organisms and ecosystems). The title of one of Richard Dawkin's most famous books, The Blind Watchmaker (1988), championing the scientific position first developed by Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace) is a direct reference to Paley's watch on the heath.
The modern scientific view, supported by a vast amount of evidence from anatomy, genetics, paleontology, geology and other areas is that life evolved on earth over a vast amount of time from common ancestral unicellular organisms (which it is thought themselves evolved from less complex systems over a very long period).
Has science ruled out design?
This does not mean that science has completely ruled out the possibility that modern life-forms could have been designed. Science does rule out the possibility that modern organisms were created 'as is' (i.e., 'as are'), so if they were designed then the designer not only designed their forms, but also the highly complex processes by which they might evolve and the contingencies which made this possible. (That can be seen as an even greater miracle, and even stronger evidence of God's capabilities, of course.) What science does not do is to speculate on first causes which are not open to scientific investigation. 2
Many of the early modern scientists had strong religious convictions – including faith in an intelligent creator – and saw science as work that was totally in keeping with their faith, indeed often as a form of observance: a way of exploring and wondering at God's work. Science, philosophy and theology were often seen as strongly interlinked.
However, the usual expectation today is that science, being the study of nature, has no place for supernatural explanations. Scientists are expected to adopt 'methodological naturalism', which means looking for purely natural mechanisms and causes. 3
Arguments from design invoke teleology, the idea that nature has purpose. This makes for lazy science – as we do not need to seek natural mechanisms and explanations if we simply argue that
the water molecule was designed to be a shape to form hydrogen bonds, or that
copper is a good conductor because its molecular structure was designed for that purpose, or that
uranium is subject to radioactive decay because the nucleus of a uranium atom was designed to be unstable
Science has (and so a scientist, when doing her science, should have) nothing to say about the existence of a creator God, and has no view on whether aspects of the natural world might reflect such a creator's design; so arguments from design have no place in scientific accounts and explanations. This is why I honed in on the reference to design.
The evolution of empathy?
The reference was in relation to empathy. The presenter, Dr Claudia Hammond, asked rhetorically "empathy … how did it evolve?", and then introduced an interview clip: "Here's Sara Konrath, Associate Professor at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University in the U.S." This was followed by Dr Konrath stating:
"A lot of researchers talk about this thing called the care-giving system which is designed to help us care for our crying babies. So, think about a crying baby for a minute that is not your own. You are on an airplane, think about that. [She laughs] And probably what you are hoping for is that baby will stop crying, [Hammond: 'absolutely'], I guess.
We need to have a biological system that will make us feel compassion for that little crying baby and figure out what's wrong so we can make the baby feel better. So, there's a whole neural system that's called the care-giving system, that activates oxytocin which is a hormone that helps us to basically reduce stress and feel close and connected, and as you can imagine that would help us want to change that little nappy or whatever the baby needs. * And that same brain system doesn't seem to distinguish too much, well, you know, we can use that, that same system to care for other people in our lives that we know or even strangers, and even people who are different than us."
Assoc. Prof. Sara Konrath
Now, as pointed out above, accepting evolution (as the vast majority of natural scientists do) does not logically exclude design – but to be consistent it requires the design not only of the intended structure, but also of the entire natural system which will give rise to it. And evolution, a natural process, is open to scientific investigation, whereas claims of design rely on extra-scientific considerations. Moreover, as evolution is an ongoing process, one might suggest that references to 'this stage in the design-realisation process' might be more appropriate.
One way of explaining the apparent inconsistency here ("how did it evolve?"…"designed to help us") is to simply assume that I am being much too literal, as surely Dr Konrath was speaking metaphorically. We can talk about 'the design' of the kidney, or a flower, or of a cow's digestive system, meaning the structure, the layout, the assemblage – without meaning to suggest 'the design' had been designed. Although Dr Konrath referred to the neural system being designed, it is quite possible she was speaking metaphorically.
But can we beleive what we (think we) hear?
A listener can reasonably assume, from the editing of the programme, that Dr Konrath was asked, and was answering, the question 'how did empathy evolve?' Yet this is only implied ("…how did it evolve? Here's Sara Konrath…") – the clip of Dr Konrath does not include any interview questions.
A journalist has to edit a programme together, to offer a narrative a listener can easily follow, so it is likely an interview would be edited down to select the most useful material. Indeed, when transcribing, I suspected that there was an edit at the point I have marked * above. I could not hear any evidence of an edit, BUT to my ears the speech was not natural in moving between "…whatever the baby needs" and "And that same brain system…". Perhaps I am wrong. But, perhaps there was a pause, or a 'false start', edited out to tidy the clip; or perhaps some material deemed less pertinent or too technical for present purposes was removed. Or, possibly, the order of the material has been changed if the speaker had responded to a number of questions, and it was felt a re-ordering of segments of different responses offered a better narrative.
All of that would be totally acceptable, as long as it was done without any intention to distort what the speaker had said. Indeed, in analysing and presenting research material from interviews or written texts, one approach is known as editing. 4 I have used this myself, to select text from different points in an interview to build up a narrative that can summarise an informant's ideas succinctly (e.g., Taber, 2008 5). This needs to be done carefully, but as long as an effort is made to be true to the person's own ideas (as the researcher understands them from the data) and this methodological technique is explicitly reported to readers, it is a valid approach and can be very effective.
Perhaps, if Dr Konrath was indeed asked 'how did empathy evolve?' this was a rather unfair question. Unlike some anatomical structures, empathy does not leave direct evidence in the fossil record. This might explain a not entirely convincing response.
The gist of the clip, as I assume a listener was meant to understand it, was along the lines.
How did empathy evolve?
babies cannot look after themselves and need support
they cry to get attention when they need help
a system evolved to ensure that others around the baby would pay attention to its cries, and feel compassionate, and so help it
the system either has the side effect of, or has evolved over time, allowing us to be empathetic more generally so we support people who need help
Perhaps that narrative is correct, and perhaps there is even scientific evidence for it. But, in terms of what I actually hear Dr Konrath say, I do not find a strong evolutionary account, but rather something along the lines:
We have a biological system known as the care-giving system, that activates a hormone that reduces stress and helps us feel close and connected to others
this allows us to feel compassion for people in need
encouraging us to care for other people, largely indiscriminately
even strangers, such as a crying baby
When I reframe ('edit') the interview that way, I do not see any strong case for why this system is designed specifically to help us care for our crying babies – but nor is there any obvious evolutionary argument. 6
If one approaches this description with a prior assumption that such things have evolved through natural selection then Dr Konrath's words can certainly be readily interpreted to be consistent with an evolutionary narrative. 6 However, someone who did not accept evolution and had a metaphysical commitment to seeing the natural world as evidence for a designer would surely be able to understand the interview just as well within that frame. I suspect both Paley and Darwin would have been able to work this material into their arguments.
Works cited:
Darwin, C. (1859/2006). The Origin of Species. In E. O. Wilson (Ed.), From so Simple a Beginning: The four great books of Charles Darwin. New York: W. W. Norton.
Dawkins, R. (1988). The Blind Watchmaker. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Paley, W. (1802/2006). Natural Theology: Or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (M. D. Eddy & D. Knight Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taber, K. S. (2008). Exploring Conceptual Integration in Student Thinking: Evidence from a case study. International Journal of Science Education, 30 (14), 1915-1943. (DOI: 10.1080/09500690701589404.)
1 The term 'one long argument' was used by Darwin to describe his thesis in the Origin of Species.
2 I write loosely here: science does not do anything; rather, it is scientists that act. Yet it would not be true to claim scientists do not speculate on first causes which are not open to scientific investigation. Many of them do. (Dawkins, for example, seems very certain there is no creator God.) However, that is because scientists are people and so have multiple identities. Just as nothing stops a scientist also being a mother or a daughter; nothing stops them being ice skaters, break dancers or poets. So, scientists do speculate outside of the natural realm – but then they are doing something other than science, as when they write limericks. (And perhaps something where their scientific credentials suggest no special expertise.)
3 Unfortunately, this can mislead learners into thinking science is atheistic and scientists necessarily atheists:
"The tradition in Western science (with its tendencies towards an analytical and reductionist approach) to precede as though the existence and potential role of God in nature is irrelevant to answering scientific questions, if not explicitly explained to students, may well give the impression that because science (as a socio-cultural activity) does not need to adopt the hypothesis of the divine, scientists themselves (as individuals sharing membership of various social groups with their identities as scientists) eschew such an idea."
4 This process would need to be made explicit in research, where it is normally just accepted as standard practice in journalism. These two activities can be seen as quite similar, especially when research is largely based on reports from various informants. A major difference however is that whereas researchers often have months to collect, analyse and report data, journalists are often expected to move on to the next story or episode within days, so may be working under considerable time pressures.
5 For example,
"Firstly the interviewtranscript was reworked into a narrative account of the interview based around Alice's verbatim responses, but following the chronology of the interview schedule in the order of the questions….The next stage of the analysis involved reorganising the case material into themes in terms of the main concepts used in Alice's explanations…This process produced a case account that was reduced (in this case to about 1,000 words), and which summarises the ways Alice used ideas in her interview."
Taber, 2008: 1926
6 One can imagine researchers asking themselves how this indiscriminate system for helping others in need arose, and someone suggesting that perhaps it was originally to make sure mothers attended to their own babies, but as a 'false negative' would be so costly (if you do not notice your baby is unfed, or has fallen in the lake, or is playing with the tiger cubs…) the system was over-sensitive and tolerated 'false positives' (leading to people attending to unrelated babes in need), and even got triggered by injured or starving adults – which it transpired increased fitness for the community, so was selected for…
It can be much easier to invent feasible-sounding evolutionary 'just-so stories' than rigorously testing them!
Scientist reveals what the earth has been trying to do
Keith S. Taber
Seismology – the study of the earth letting off steam? (Image by ELG21 from Pixabay)
"the earth has one objective, it has had one objective for four and half billion years, and that's…"
In our time
'In Our Time' is an often fascinating radio programme (and podcast) where Melvyn Bragg gets three scholars from a field to explain some topic to a general audience.
Imagine young Melvyn interrupting a physics teacher's careful exposition of why pV = 1/3nmc2 by asking how the gas molecules came to be moving in the first place.
I am not sure if the reason that I sometimes find the science episodes seem a little less erudite than those in the the other categories is:
a) Melvyn is more of an arts person, so operates at a different level in different topics;
b) I am more of a science person, so more likely to be impressed by learning new things in non-science topics; and to spot simplifications, over-generalisations, and so forth, in science topics.
c) A focus in recent years on the importance of the public understanding of science and science communication means that scientists may (often, not always) be better prepared and skilled at pitching difficult topics for a general audience.
d) Topics from subjects like history and literature are easier to talk about to a general audience than many science topics which are often highly conceptual and technical.
Anyway, today I did learn something from the episode on seismology ("Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the study of earthquakes helps reveal Earth's secrets [sic]"). I was told what the earth had been up to for the last four and half billion years…
Seismology: Where does this energy come from?
Quite early in the discussion Melvyn (sorry, The Lord Bragg CH – but he is so familiar from his broadcasts over the years that he seems like an old friend) interjected when Dr James Hammond (Reader in Geophysics at Birkbeck, University of London) was talking about forces involved in plate tectonics to ask "Where does this energy come from?". To this, Dr Hammond replied,
"The whole thing that drives the whole caboose?
It comes from plate tectonics. So, essentially the earth has one objective, it has had one objective for four and half billion years, and that's to cool down. We're [on] a big lump of rock floating in space, and it's got all this primordial energy, so we are going right back here, there's all this primordial energy from the the material coming together, and it's trying to cool down."
My immediate response, was that this was teleology – seeing purpose in nature. But actually, this might be better described as anthropomorphism. This explanation presents the earth as being the kind of agent that has an objective, and which can act in the world to work towards goals. That is, like a human:
Of course, in scientific terms, the earth has no such objective, and it is not trying to do anything as it is inanimate. Basic thermodynamics suggests that an object (e.g., the earth) that is hotter than its surroundings will cool down as it will radiate heat faster than it absorbs it. 2 (Of course, the sun is hotter than the earth – but that's a rather minority component of the earth's surroundings, even if in some ways a very significant one.) Hot objects tend to cool down, unless they have an active mechanism to maintain their temperature above their ambient backgrounds (such as 'warm-blooded' creatures). 3
So, in scientific terms, this explanation might be seen as flawed – indeed as reflecting an alternative conception of similar kind as when students explain evolutionary adaptations in terms of organisms trying to meet some need (e.g., The brain thinks: grow more fur), or explain chemical processes in terms of atoms seeking to meet a need by filling their electron shells (e.g., Chlorine atoms share electrons to fill in their shells).
Does Dr Hammond really believe this account?
Does Dr Hammond really think the earth has an objective that it actively seeks to meet? I very much doubt it. This was clearly rhetorical language adopting tropes seen as appropriate to meet the needs of the context (a general audience, a radio programme with no visuals to support explanations). In particular, he was in full flow when he was suddenly interrupted by Melvin, a bit like the annoying child who interrupts the teacher's carefully prepared presentation by asking 'but why's that?' about something it had been assumed all present would take for granted.
Imagine the biology teacher trying to discuss cellular metabolism when young Melvin asks 'but where did the sugar come from?'; or the chemistry teacher discussing the mechanism of a substitution reaction when young Melvin asks why we are assuming tetrahedral geometry around the carbon centre of interest; or young Melvyn interrupting a physics teacher's careful exposition of why pV = 1/3nmc2 by asking how the gas molecules came to be moving in the first place.
Of course, part of Melvin's job in chairing the programme IS to act as the child who does not understand something being taken for granted and not explained, so vicariously supporting the listener without specialist background in that week's topic.
Effective communication versus accurate communication?
Science teachers and communicators have to sometimes use ploys to 'make the unfamiliar familiar'. One common ploy is to employ an anthropomorphic narrative as people readily relate to the human experience of having goals and acting to meet needs and desires. Locating difficult ideas within such a 'story' framework is known to often make such ideas more accessible. Does this gain balance the potential to mislead people into thinking they have been given a scientific account? In general, such ploys are perhaps best used only as introductions to a difficult topic, introductions which are then quickly followed up by more technical accounts that better match the scientific narrative (Taber & Watts, 2000).
Clearly, that is more feasible when the teacher or communicator has the opportunity for a more extensive engagement with an audience, so that understanding can be built up and developed over time. I imagine Dr Hammond was briefed that he had just a few minutes to get across his specific points in this phase of the programme, only to then find he was interrupted and asked to address additional background material.
As a scientist, the notion of the earth spending billions of years trying to cool down grates as it reflects pre-scientific thinking about nature and acts as a pseudo-explanation (something which has the form of an explanation, but little substance).
As cooling is a very familiar everyday phenomena, I wondered if a basic response that would avoid anthropomorphism might have served, e.g.,
When the earth formed, it was very much hotter than today, and, as it was hotter than its surroundings, it has been slowly cooling ever since by radiating energy into space. Material inside the earth may be hot enough to be liquid, or – where solid – be plastic enough to be deformed. The surface is now much cooler than it was, but inside the earth it is still very hot, and radioactive processes continue to heat materials inside the earth. We can understand seismic events as driven by the ways heat is being transferred from deep inside the earth.
However, just because I am a scientist, I am also less well-placed to know how effective this might have been for listeners without a strong science background – who may well have warmed [sic] to the earth striving to cool.
Dr Hammond had to react instantly (like a school teacher often has to) and make a quick call based on his best understanding of the likely audience. That is one of the difference between teaching (or being interviewed by Melvin) and simply giving a prepared lecture.
1 Speech often naturally has repetitions, and markers of emphasis, and hesitations that seem perfectly natural when heard, but which do not match written language conventions. I have slightly tidied what I transcribed from:
"The whole thing that drives the whole caboose? It comes from plate tectonics, right. So, essentially the earth, right, has one objective, it has had one objective for four and half billion years, and that's to cool down. Right, we're a big lump of rock floating in space, and it's got all this primordial energy, so we are going right back here, there's all this primordial energy from, from the the material coming together,4 and it's trying to cool down."
2 In simple terms, the hotter an object is, the greater the rate at which it radiates.
The hotter the environment is, the more intense the radiation incident on the object and the more energy it will absorb.
Ultimately, in an undisturbed, closed system everything will reach thermal equilibrium (the same temperature). Our object still radiates energy, but at the same rate as it absorbs it from the environment so there is no net heat flow.
3 Historically, the earth's cooling was an issue of some scientific controversy, after Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) calculated that if the earth was cooling at the rate his models suggested for a body of its mass, then this was cooling much too rapid for the kind of timescales that were thought to be needed for life to have evolved on earth.
4 This is referring to the idea that the earth was formed by the coming together of material (e.g., space debris from a supernova) by its mutual gravitational attraction. Before this happens the material can be considered to be in a state of high gravitational potential energy. As the material is accelerated together it acquires kinetic energy (as the potential energy reduces), and then when the material collides inelastically it forms a large mass of material with high internal energy (relating to the kinetic and potential energy of the molecules and ions at the submicroscopic level) reflected in a high temperature.
Anthropomorphic language refers to non-human entities as if they have human experiences, perceptions, and motivations. Both non-living things and non-human organisms may be subjects of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism may be used deliberately as a kind of metaphorical language that will help the audience appreciate what is being described because of its similarly to some familiar human experience. In science teaching, and in public communication of science, anthropomorphic language may often be used in this way, giving technical accounts the flavour of a persuasive narrative that people will readily engage with. Anthropomorphism may therefore be useful in 'making the unfamiliar familiar', but sometimes the metaphorical nature of the language may not be recognised, and the listener/reader may think that the anthropomorphic description is meant to be taken at face value. This 'strong anthropomorphism' may be a source of alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') of science.
The first example was from the lead story about 'long COVID'.
Prof. Onur Boyman, Director of the Department of Immunology at the University Hospital, Zurich, was interviewed after his group published a paper suggesting that blood tests may help identify people especially susceptible to developing post-acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) syndrome (PACS) – which has become colloquially known as 'long COVID'.
"We found distinct patterns of total immunoglobulin (Ig) levels in patients with COVID-19 and integrated these in a clinical prediction score, which allowed early identification of both outpatients and hospitalized individuals with COVID-19 that were at high risk for PACS ['long COVID']."
Cervia, Zurbuchen, Taeschler, et al., 2022, p.2
The study reported average patterns of immunoglobulins found in those diagnosed with COVID-19 (due to SARS-CoV-2 infection), and those later diagnosed with PACS. The levels of different types of immunoglobulins (designated as IgM, etc.) were measured,
Differentiating mild versus severe COVID-19, IgM was lower in severe compared to mild COVID-19 patients and healthy controls, both at primary infection and 6-month follow-up… IgG3 was higher in both mild and severe COVID-19 cases, compared to healthy controls …In individuals developing PACS, we detected decreased IgM, both at primary infection and 6-month follow-up… IgG3 tended to be lower in patients with PACS…which was contrary to the increased IgG3 concentrations in both mild and severe COVID-19 cases…
Cervia, Zurbuchen, Taeschler, et al., 2022, p.3
Viruses in a defensive mode
In the interview, Professor Boyman discussed how features of the immune system, and in particular immunoglobulins, were involved in responses to infection, and made the comment:
This is anthropomorphic as it refers to viruses trying to hide from the immune components. Of course, viruses are not sentient, so they do not try to do anything: they have no intentions. Although viruses might well pass across tissue barriers and move into tissues where they are less likely to come into contact with immunoglobulins, 'hiding' suggests a deliberate behaviour – which is not the case.
Professor Boyman is clearly aware of that, and either deliberately or otherwise was speaking metaphorically. Scientifically literate people would not be misled by this as they would know viruses are not conscious agents. However, learners are not always clear about this.
The bacteria, however, are going on the offensive
The other point I spotted was later in the same programme when the presenter, Gaia Vince, introduced an item about antibiotic resistance:
"Back in my grandparent's time, the world was a much more dangerous place with killer microbes lurking everywhere. People regularly died from toothache, in childbirth, or just a simple scratch that got infected. But at the end of the second world war, doctors had a new miracle [sic] drug called penicillin. Antibiotics have proved a game changer, taking the deadly fear away from common infections. But the microbes did not just accept defeat, they have been mounting their resistance and they are making a comeback."
Gaia Vince presenting 'Inside Science'
Antibiotics are generally ineffective against viruses, but have proved very effective treatments for many bacterial infections, including those that can be fatal when untreated. The functioning of antibiotics can be explained by science in purely natural terms, so the label of 'miracle drugs' is a rhetorical flourish: their effect must have seemed like a miracle when they first came into use, so this can also be seen as metaphoric language.
Bacteria regrouping for a renewed offensive? (Image by WikiImages from Pixabay )
However, again the framing is anthropomorphic. The suggestion that microbes could 'accept defeat' implies they are the kind of entities able to reflect on and come to terms with a situation – which of course they are not. The phrase 'mounting resistance' also has overtones of deliberate action – but again is clearly meant metaphorically.
Again, there is nothing wrong with these kinds of poetic flourishes in presenting science. Most listeners would have heard "microbes did not just accept defeat, they have been mounting their resistance and they are making a comeback" and would have spontaneously understood the metaphoric use of language without suspecting any intention to suggest microbes actually behave deliberately. Such language supports the non-specialist listener in accessing a technical science story.
Some younger listeners, however, may not have a well-established framework for thinking about the nature of an organism that is able to reflect on its situation and actively plan deliberate behaviours. After all, a good deal of children's literature relies on accepting that various organisms, indeed non-living entities such as trains, do have human feelings, motives and behavioural repertoires. (Learners may for example think that evolutionary adaptations, such as having more fur in a cold climate, are mediated by conscious deliberation.) Popular science media does a good job of engaging and enthusing a broad audience in science, but with the caveat that accessible accounts may be open to misinterpretation.
Work cited:
Cervia, C., Zurbuchen, Y., Taeschler, P. et al.(2022) Immunoglobulin signature predicts risk of post-acute COVID-19 syndrome. Nature Communications, 13, 446. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27797-1
