Know This

by Mr. John Brockman

  Cimpian and Leslie are careful to stress that they don’t interpret their findings as indicating that the FAB hypothesis provides the sole factor behind the lingering gender gap, but simply argue that it is operative. And in follow-up studies, they also discuss informal evidence that raises the plausibility of the FAB hypothesis, including the number of fictional male geniuses inhabiting popular culture—from Sherlock Holmes to Dr. House to Will Hunting—compared to the number of female geniuses. The stereotype of the genius is overwhelmingly male. And when, I might add, a female genius is the subject, her femaleness itself becomes the focus as much as, or even more than, her genius. If genius is an aberration, then female genius is viewed as significantly more aberrational, since it’s seen as an aberration of femaleness itself. Given such stereotypes, is it unlikely that fields that highlight innate genius would show lagging female numbers?

  The authors were exclusively concerned with academic fields. But there is another area of human creativity in which words like “gifted” and “genius” are not uncommon, and that is the arts—including literature. Here, too, cold, hard statistics tell a story of persistent gender imbalance. For despite the great number of contemporary women writers, data compiled by VIDA, a women’s literary organization, reveal that the leading American and British literary magazines—the kind whose very attention is the criterion for distinguishing between the important figures and the others—focus their review coverage on books written by men and commission more men than women to write about them. Might it be that the FAB hypothesis explains this imbalance as well, highlighting Cimpian’s and Leslie’s findings that the problem is not, essentially, one of STEM vs. non-STEM, nor of mathematical vs. verbal skills?

  I realize that discussing the FAB hypothesis will be seen as small stuff compared to such big news as, say, the ice caps melting at a faster rate than anticipated. And that is why, in responding to this year’s Edge Question, I first began to write about the ice caps. But perhaps the insignificant measure we assign to the underestimation of the creative potential of more than half our population is itself a manifestation of the problem. And what could be a greater boon to humanity than increasing the, um, manpower of those making important contributions, not only to science but to our culture at large?

  Diversity in Science

  Gino Segre

  Professor of physics, emeritus, University of Pennsylvania; author, Ordinary Geniuses

  In a recent U.S. Supreme Court hearing regarding affirmative action in higher education, a Justice posed the question, “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” If physics were the work of robots, the answer would be none. But physics, as all of science, is approached with the biases and perspectives that make us human. Both disciplined and spontaneous, science is an intuitive as well as a systematic undertaking.

  It is the people who comprise physics graduate schools, institutes, and faculty—their interests, their backgrounds, their agendas—who drive the direction of physics research and scholarship. And it does not take much imagination to picture what different directions this research might take, were the pool of scientists not heterogeneous.

  Science has become increasingly collaborative in a way that makes diversity a paramount necessity. Until recently it was the work of single individuals, primarily white males from Northern Europe. It was rare to find a published paper with two authors and a paper with more than three was essentially unheard of. A change began at the time of World War II, and it has grown since then.

  Large science collaborations encompassing diversity of gender, race, and ethnicity have become a new norm. ATLAS, a group that has been a major contributor to CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson, consists of 3,000 physicists from 175 institutions in 38 countries, working harmoniously together. Even though a single large instrument, such as a particle accelerator or a large telescope, is not required in biology, we see parts of the field moving in the same direction, with the Human Genome or Human Microbiome project. A different kind of complexity, the assembling of disparate parts of the pattern, is needed there.

  The news is that science’s success in such endeavors is creating a recognized model for international collaboration, the response to climate change being the most conspicuous example.

  The diversity in approach engendered by diversity in background has been a powerful combination in science. It is no secret that in a fairly recent past, if physics graduate school admission had been based on achievement tests, the entering class would have been composed almost entirely of students from mainland China. Most of these schools believed that such a homogeneous grouping would not have benefited either the students or the field. It would have reinforced conformity rather than encouraging the necessary originality and entrepreneurship.

  Science’s future, both in the classroom and in research, is tied to an increased achievement of diversity in gender, race, ethnicity, and class. If this goal is not met, science will suffer.

  The Democratization of Science

  Michael Shermer

  Publisher, Skeptic magazine; monthly columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; author, The Moral Arc

  The biggest news story over the past quarter century—one that will continue to underlie all the currents, gyres, and eddies of individual sciences going forward—is the democratization of scientific knowledge. The first wave of knowledge diffusion happened centuries ago with the printing press and mass-produced books. The second wave took off after World War II, with the spread of colleges and universities and the belief that a higher education was necessary to being a productive citizen and cultured person. The third wave began a quarter century ago with the Third Culture: “Those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are,” in John Brockman’s 1991 description.

  A lot has happened in twenty-five years. While some Third Culture products remain topical (AI, human genetics, cyberspace) and others have faded (chaos, fractals, Gaia), the culture of science as a redefining force endures and expands into the nooks and crannies of society through ever growing avenues of communication, pulling everyone in to participate. A quarter century ago, the third culture penetrated the public primarily through books and television; today third culture apostles spread the gospel through ebooks and audio books, digital books, and virtual libraries, blogs and microblogs, podcasts and videocasts, file-sharing and video-sharing, social networks and forums, MOOCs and remote audio and video courses, virtual classrooms, and even virtual universities.

  The news is not just the new technologies of knowledge, however, but the acceptance by society’s power brokers that third-culture products are the drivers of all other cultural products—political, economic, social, and ideological—and the realization of citizens everywhere that they, too, can be influential agents by absorbing and even mastering scientific knowledge.

  This democratization of science changes everything, because it means we have unleashed billions of minds to solve problems and create solutions. The triumphs of the physical and biological sciences in the 20th century are now being matched by those in the social and cognitive sciences, because, above all else, we have come to understand that human actions, more than physical or biological forces, will determine the future of our species.

  News About Science News

  Sheizaf Rafaeli

  Professor, director, Center for Internet Research, University of Haifa, Israel

  They say that news serves as the first draft of history and that reportage is just literature in a hurry. Both history and literature have more patience and perspective than the often urgent work of science. So, what’s new and what is news in the special domain of science? For me, the important news in this area is about news itself and the relation between news and science. The most important news about science is h
ow transparent it is becoming.

  News is both socially constructed and the construction of the social. It is socially constructed in that it is contextual, subjective, and ephemeral. And it constructs the social in that the work of news is to tell us who and what we are. We’ve known the social-construction aspect of news about politics and power since Plato’s cave. Now we are learning to recognize more of the interplay between science and social construction with the emergence of transparent, open science news. Through the news about science news, we are learning how much science is socially constructed and how to deal with this fact.

  The most important changes with regard to news are themselves social. News, including science news, is collected, collated, curated, and consumed by ever growing circles of stakeholders. During our lifetime, or even the past decade, the science/news/society axis has been redrawn entirely. Instead of being a trickle-down so-called broadcast experience, news is now a bottom-up phenomenon. Fewer “invisible colleges” and many more public arenas for science. News about discoveries, innovations, controversies, and evidence are increasingly grass-roots generated and ranked, and universally more accessible. Economics of tuition and budget play a role, as does the evolving perception of the structure of knowledge.

  Quite a few factors have formed these developments. Literacy is up, censorship is down. Access is up. Uniformity and control over news sources are down, even though algorithmic news curation and ranking are up. Thus, through the news about science and the new avenues for such news, expectations for the democratization of science, its funding and fruits, are all up. In fact, this venue—the public and cross-disciplinary conversations here on Edge—is a pleasant and prime example.

  While attempts to control or filter news, including the news about science, have not slowed, the ability of regimes and authorities to put a lid on public knowledge of events and discoveries is falling apart. Sharing, in all its online forms, is up. Science news is a major case in point. The boundaries between scientific publishing and news enterprises are eroding. In this open and transparent environment, anti-intellectual and nonscientific phenomena such as conspiracy theories are less likely to hold for long. Truth just might have a chance.

  This is not necessarily all good news. We should not let our guard down; problems and challenges are at both the high and low end. More transparent and participatory science may mean too much populism. Critical thinking about the organs and channels of news dissemination should continue. At the other, “high” end, monopolies still loom, not the least of them in scientific publishing. Concentrated ownership of media outlets is still a threat, and in some locations growing. Attempts to manipulate the reporting of news, scientific literature, and learning curricula in the service of an ideology, or of the powers that be, or of special interests have not gone away. The loss of some traditional venues for news, the erosion of business models for others, alongside the problems experienced by some of the organs of scientific dissemination, are a continuing cause for concern. But this is a transitional period, and the transition is in the right direction.

  Whether the first draft of history or just “literature in a hurry,” the important news is more in the eye of the beholder than set in stone. Thus, the most encouraging news about science is that there are many more eyes beholding, ranking, participating, and reacting to the news of science.

  The Broadening Scope of Science

  Tania Lombrozo

  Associate professor of psychology, UC Berkeley

  Every time you learn something, your brain changes. Children with autism have brains that differ from those of children who do not. Different types of moral decisions are associated with different patterns of brain activity. And when it comes to spiritual and emotional experience, neural activity varies with the nature of the experience.

  In most ways, this is news that shouldn’t be news—at least not in this century, or probably the last. Given what we already know about the brain and its relationship to behavior and experience, these claims don’t tell us anything new. How could it have been otherwise? Any difference in behavior or experience must be accompanied by some change in the infrastructure that implements it, and we already know to look to the brain.

  So why do neuroscientific findings of this type still make the news?

  In part, it’s because the details might be genuinely newsworthy—perhaps the specific ways in which the brain changes during learning, for example, can tell us something important about how to improve education. But there are two other reasons why neuroscientific findings about the mind might make headlines, and they deserve careful scrutiny.

  The first reason comes down to what psychologist Paul Bloom calls “intuitive dualism.” Intuitive dualism is the belief that mind and body, and therefore mind and brain, are fundamentally different—so different that it’s surprising to learn of the carefully orchestrated correspondence revealed by the “findings” summarized above. It’s wrong to equate mind with brain (perhaps, to quote Marvin Minsky, “the mind is what the brain does”), but we ought to reject the Cartesian commitments that underlie intuitive dualism no matter how intuitive they feel.

  The second reason is because neuroscientific findings about the mind reveal the broadening scope of science. As our abilities to measure, analyze, and theorize have improved, so has the scope of what we can address scientifically. That’s not new—what is new is the territory that now falls within the scope of science, including the psychology of moral judgment, religious belief, creativity, and emotion. In short, the mind and human experience. We’re finally making progress on topics that once seemed beyond our scientific grasp.

  Of course, it doesn’t follow that science can answer all our questions. There are many empirical questions about the mind for which we don’t yet have answers, and some for which we may never have answers. There are also questions that aren’t empirical at all. (Contra Sam Harris, I don’t think science—on its own—will ever tell us how we ought to live or what we ought to believe.) But the mind and human experience are legitimate topics of scientific study, and they’re areas in which we’re making remarkable, if painstaking, progress. That’s good news to me.

  Q-Bio

  Nigel Goldenfeld

  Center for Advanced Study Professor in Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; director, NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology, UIUC

  The past year was a great one for science news, with two coming-of-age stories, decades in the making, that are going to capture the headlines in the years to come. The first item was not in a newspaper, but if it had been, the splash headline would read something like this: “A Mathematician with a Model Organism! Really?”

  You know what a mathematician is, but what about the term “model organism”? It refers to biological investigators’ deep study, manipulation, and control of a carefully chosen organism—for example, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, probably the most widely used laboratory organism for studying multicellular eukaryotes because generations of researchers have discovered ingenious ways to manipulate its genetics and watch the cells as they grow. It’s almost unthinkable to associate a mathematician with a model organism. So what’s the story? Here’s a vignette that makes the point:

  A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a mathematician colleague of mine who is an expert on differential equations and dynamical systems. She writes papers with titles like “Non-holonomic constraints and their impact on discretizations of Klein-Gordon lattice dynamical models.” During lunch, she told me that her favorite model organism was Daphnia. Daphnia are millimeter-sized planktonic organisms that live in ponds and rivers. They are so transparent that you can easily see inside them and watch what happens when they eat or drink (alcohol, for example, increases their heart rate). My colleague is part of a community that has developed ways to use mathematics to study ecology. They study populations, infectious diseases, ecosystem stability, and the competition for resources. Their work makes real predictions and they co
-author papers with card-carrying ecologists.

  A mathematician with a model organism marks the coming-of-age of Q-Bio, short for “quantitative biology.” Generations of biologists have entered that subject in part to escape the horrors of calculus and other advanced mathematics. Yesterday’s biology was a descriptive science; today, biology is becoming a quantitative and predictive discipline. One remarkable instance of the passing of the baton is that a principal leader of the public domain Human Genome Project was Eric Lander, founding director of the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute and a pure mathematician by training.

  Applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists are developing new sophisticated tools to deal with other, non-genomic challenges in quantifying biology. One of these challenges is that the number of individuals in a community may be large, but not as large as the number of molecules of gas in your lungs, for example. So the traditional tools of physics based on statistical modeling have to be upgraded to deal with the large fluctuations encountered—such as in the number of proteins in a cell or individuals in an ecosystem.

  Another is that living systems need an energy source; they are inherently out of thermodynamic equilibrium and so cannot be described by the century-old tools of statistical thermodynamics developed by Einstein, Boltzmann, and Gibbs. Stanislaw Ulam, a mathematician who helped originate the basic principle behind the hydrogen bomb, once quipped, “Ask not what physics can do for biology. Ask what biology can do for physics.” Today, the answer is clear: Biology is forcing physicists to develop new experimental and theoretical tools to explore living cells in action.