Professional development activity 2
Instructions:
You will find below a selection of genuine examples taken from presentations of natural phenomena/scientific ideas.
To my mind each of these has an anthropomorphic element in describing/explaining some non-human entity as though it is a person. Anthropomorphisms can be seen as a kind of metaphor – but have their own particular character – and advantages/challenges in teaching.
I have included a range of examples to give you choice in selecting examples of interest/relevance – you are not expected to work through them all! Please choose example related to your teacing topics if possible.
Note – anthropomorphising is such a common trope that it becomes insidious – you may (?) have to read some of the examples several times to spot the anthropomorphism
Again, colleagues in a pair/group should take turns in selecting an example from within or related to their area of science specialism.
[The 'Page contents' list above may help you navigate the page]
The 'specialist' should first ask the [non-specialist] colleague(s) what they think the author of the example was trying to convey.
After selecting an example from your own area of specialism, ask your colleague(s) how they understand it, before proceeding to analyse it together.
Then collectively consider
- To what extent does the anthropomorphic language 'illuminate' or (perhaps, and?) 'obscure' the scientific idea being presented?
- Would it be sufficient for a student to learn the account in anthropomorphic terms to get examination credit?
- How readily could the example be re-written without figurative language – purely using technical scientific terminology?
Examples:
acetylcholinesterase
"Acetylcholinesterase … waits patiently and springs into action soon after a signal is passed…"
acid
"…the world's strongest acid…That title falls to fluoroantimonic acid – a superacid mixture of antimony pentafluoride and hydrofluoric acid. You see, HF loves the idea of donating a fluorine to SbF5, and the resulting SbF6- anion is relatively stable."
adrenaline
"… what that adrenaline is going to do, is, it is going to ask your heart to beat faster, it's going to ask your body for more oxygen…"
anaphylaxis
"So, anaphylaxis…is your immune cells will come into contact with something that they decide that they don't like the looks of, that they don't want to be a part of you, and then they will send out cell signals, usually histamine… it's all dependent on what those cells decide to do in the moment."
apoptosis
"By limiting their reproduction and dying at the right time, cells inside bodies sacrifice themselves for a higher good, the functioning of the body as a whole."
cardiomyocytes
"the cell…palpated at the cardiomyocyte…stroked it all the way round, and then it was, it seemed to like it a lot…[another cell] reared up and …rushed off…one like[d] it and the other one didn't"
carnivorous bees
"These are more specialised bees that once they were vegetarian for a really long time and they actually decided to change their ways, there's all of this meat in the forest, why not take advantage?…so potentially this specialised group of bees realised that, and maybe there's enough competition on the flowers that they decided to switch…"
complementarity (D.N.A.)
"And what we had to do was to separate those two strands, and then ask those separated strands to find the complementary sequence in the human genome that we had also separated into single stranded pieces. So, it was sort of like a magnet, sort of like asking that fly piece [of D.N.A.] to bind to the opposite strand in the human genome like a magnet."
dark matter
"it's the gravity of dark matter that likes to kind of bring everything together"
D.N.A.
"The environment decides how long that D.N.A. survives and is stable."
earth – over geolocical time
"essentially the earth has one objective, it has had one objective for four and half billion years, and that's to cool down…it's trying to cool down."
economy of nature
"Nature doesn't waste energy trying to attack something it can't – put fungi on glass and it doesn't do anything."
elasticity
"A weight will sit motionless on a spring at its balanced position, but tug it down a little the spring pulls back. Similarly, a curved violin string wants to go back to being a straight line. …It's fairly straightforward to write the differential equation that tells you how strongly any point on the drumskin wants to return to its neutral position."
electrical conduction
"By repelling the clouds of electrons around the positive ions, the moving electron digs a hole for itself as it goes, easing its passage through the solid."
evolution of clothes moths
"there must have been a point when they [common clothes moths] were feeding on something else, and they thought 'actually, here's a better life, clothes'…"
genetic engineering
"And people have tried to make spider silk from yeast, getting yeast to generate – you put the genetic code of spider silk in, and you ask the yeast to generate the silk."
growth differentiation factor 15
"We discovered that GDF15 was being secreted from the liver, and then talking to the brain to tell the brain to reduce feeding."
immune cells
"These cells usually rush to the site of an injury, or an infection, and they try to kill the pathogen, or seal up the pathogen…goes around sniffing other cells, basically touching them and trying to find out whether they have been altered in some way."
Le Châtelier’s principle
"This principle says that matter resists change: when it is forced to change, it opposes the force with all the means at its disposal. … When a gas is compressed, it is forced to occupy a smaller volume. It must comply, but it complies as reluctantly as it can."
light transmission
"A photon hitting the inside surface of a window somehow knows how thick the glass is and acts accordingly. There's something similar to entanglement happening here, a kind of action at a distance by which the photon knows how thick the glass is without passing through it…"
lithium
"Lithium is crucial for batteries because it is a highly reactive metal, it has an extra electron, and therefore it is happy to give that electron away, take it back again."
memory formation
"cells were speaking to one another in the act of making memories, reaching out to one another across gaps between neurons to form the bridges that allow memory to exist…"
methane from geological deposits
"If you are a bubble of methane, and you are trying to get up to the surface, the easiest route might be the bore hole, rather than going through layers and layers of rock"
microbes
"we are talking microbes here, not higher life, but these microbes have specific thoughts of where they want to live…"
multi-cellular organisms (origin)
"Cells, which had previously been aggressively independent individualists, discovered the advantages of communal life."
natural killer cells
"Touching these receptors placates NK cells, inhibiting their killer ways. Stressed, infected cells display fewer of these normal receptors on their surface and in the absence of their calming presence the trigger-happy NK cells attack."
neutrinos
neutrinos "are very shy"
neutrons
"Neutrons don't like to be compressed, at some point they resist it."
ocean currents
"In normal situations the wind is blowing across the Pacific, from South America towards Indonesia, and it piles up the warm water in the West Pacific. That piled-up warm water is wanting to move towards South America but it can't because the winds are pushing it there."
orbiting
"A planet like Earth tries to move in a straight line through space, but the gravity of the sun pulls that line around in a curve, making an ellipse over which the planet travels year by year."
plants
"When the plant realises that the external stresses are too great and … there isn't sufficient water in the soil for the plant to take up, then the plant has to shut its stomata…"
pollination
"In nearly all of the flowers of Angræcum distichum sent me from Kew, insects had bitten holes through the nectaries, so as to get more readily at the nectar: if insects were invariably to follow this bad habit in the plant's native African home, undoubtedly it would soon become extinct, for it would never produce a seed."
radioactive golf balls
"By 1922 the 'Blue Radio' golf ball 'with radium salts in the centre' was available at John Wanamaker's New York department store. It's adverts explained the benefits of using radium in this unusual way: 'When the ball is hit, the radium salts in the plastic centre start a wave of momentum which gives a great resiliency. The ball literally is alive and the released energy actually fights to free itself'."
reproductive strategy
"fish have a strategy called broadcast spawning where they lay hundreds of thousands of eggs, each individual, and just let those drift and hope that some of them reach a suitable environment and survive."
sand heaps
"this is the natural angle that the dry sand wants to be at to form a slope, it is somewhere on the order of 32 to 35 degrees."
SARS-CoV-2 virus
"The virus has not gone away. It will attempt to survive by mutating"
sea urchins
"In the greenish depths of the sea, the sea-urchins lead a contemplative life, aloof from the problems of world and science."
selective chemical reactions
"There are lots of different ways to get molecules to connect to each other, but the more complicated a molecule gets, the harder it is to control exactly where it will react, and the beauty of click chemistry…and bioorthogonal chemistry which is a cousin of click chemistry, these reactions have the special quality that they are so incredibly selective that the two reacting partners just ignore all the other functional groups even on really large molecules and even on large objects like human cells for example…they find each other, but also like they might like bounce around each other until the right two functional groups find each other, right, and they'll click, and all the rest of the stuff on the molecule just, you know, just along for the ride."
surface tension
"you see a little drop of water, a tiny drop. And the atoms attract each other, they like to be next to each other. They want as many partners as they can get. Now the guys that are at the surface have only partners on one side here, in the air on the other side, so they're trying to get in. And you can imagine…this teeming people, all moving very fast, all trying to have as many partners as possible and the guys at the edge are very unhappy and nervous and they keep pounding in, trying to get in, and that makes it a tight ball instead of a flat. And that's … surface tension. When you realise when you see how sometimes a water drop sits like this on a table then you start to imagine why it's like that because everybody is trying to get into the water"
"To minimize surface tension, the jet tries to become a cylinder…"
tuberculosis
"Tuberculosis was a cunning disease, coming on slowly, almost casually. At first it seemed innocuous, beginning with a cough: a cold, perhaps, or a touch of bad air. But then that cough turned malevolent, becoming stronger and more painful and extracting blood with each spasm."
viral infections
"IgG3… is able to cross certain tissue barriers and go into those sites where viruses might actually try to go to and hide"
Sources
These examples are taken from the writings of scientists themselves, popular science books, reports by journalists, and broadcast reports – the sources and other examples can be found here.
(Some of these quotes have been excised from a wider 'text' that would have offered additional context for understanding the comparison being used.)
Note: historically nature, the earth, the moon, the sun, etc., were assigned gender, and 'she', 'her', etc., was often used in these contexts in scientist's writing. There are even contemporary examples of this personification of nature and natural entities.
