Anyone with an internet connection and a web browser can do searches on Google Scholar or Pubmed. I just find it strange that you expect everyone else to do the homework needed to back your claims.
Why the obsession with books?
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Why is it necessary to write a book about something nearly all biologists already agree with, and have agreed with for decades?
You are expecting people to read a 300 page book before you will even discuss things with them. Thatâs not a realistic ask.
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Iâm not required to back any claims, because I made no claims. You asked me what a scientist had published. I told you where you could look it up.
I donât need to have a list of what a man has published in order to assess whether or not the argument of a book is logically coherent. But you obsess over the number of peer-reviewed articles someone has published. This is understandable because you operate entirely under that professional reward system. Iâm outside of your profession, so I couldnât care less about pleasing its guardians.
I have no obsession with books. I merely mentioned a book I was reading that was more thoughtful in its contents than 99% of what I have read published on the internet by people who are biologists, or feign being biologists (as Fruitfly used to do on BioLogos), or affect great expertise in evolutionary theory without having any publications in that field. Then I was met by howls of protest about what a waste of time books are for scientists. This of course untrue, as all the scientists I find worth having a conversation with read books, and lots of them. Gould, who knew evolutionary theory better than anyone posting here, read lots and lots of books on the history of evolutionary thought, and you can see the fruits of that reading in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. He didnât stick his nose up in the air, and sniff, âIf you were a scientist, like me, youâd know scientists read only articles, not books.â His broader intellectual attitude may be a partial explanation why he was a professor of evolutionary theory at Harvard, while others in these debates are only professors at lesser places. Gunter Wagner writes and reads books, too. Heâs a professor of evolutionary theory at Yale. Shapiro writes and reads books, too. Heâs a professor of Molecular and Evolutionary Ecology at Chicago. Harvard, Yale, Chicago â It seems to me itâs the lesser lights, the second-stringers of biology, who are telling me that evolutionary theorists donât read books, donât have time to read them, find them boring, etc. The heavyweights of the field appear to differ.
I believe that science is something you do, not something you write about. I suppose that people can have some interesting ideas about the world, but I am more interested in hypotheses, experiments, and data. My response is, âOk, thatâs interesting, but is it true?â. (that would be a truth with a little âtâ, as in a tentative scientific conclusion)
But what does it mean that a non-professional thinks a book is thoughtful, and what scientific merit does âthoughtfulâ have? I am fully in support of reading books and challenging your ideas and thoughts, but I am also looking for GOOD ideas and GOOD conclusions, not simply thoughtfulness.
Itâs necessary when you have something new to say about the idea, especially regarding its relevance to evolution. But of course, only those who read the book will ever know what new thing it is that it has to say.
Iâm asking people not to condemn an author on the basis of the imagined contents of a book they havenât read. If people donât want to read a book and discuss it, then fine. If people want to read a book and discuss it, then fine. But if people want to pass judgment on the arguments and conclusions of a book without having read it, on the basis of second-hand summaries generated by a third party, that to me is not fine. Already Neil has indicated that a review on ENV put him off reading the book. I donât want my own possible lack of competence at scientific exposition to put others off from reading the book. Iâd rather people encountered the book directly, and reacted to it, not to me.
In the humanities, we read books together and discuss them. That is the learning model. (Sometimes we read journal articles together and discuss them, too.) Part of the problem of the modern world is that there are almost no books every educated person has read in common, and so generating a common culture is difficult. That in itself is bad enough, but even where one would expect a core of common readings (e.g., one would expect that every biologist has read Darwin), that common reading experience is absent. It would be great to know that every scientist who offers strong, firm opinions about how evolution works has arrived at those opinions by considering a wide range of views on evolution, not just the views of one sector of biologists, e.g., the population geneticists. It would be great to know that the population geneticists (who for most of the 20th century thought they were Godâs gift to evolutionary theory, and the only ones who knew anything about evolution) are actually reading books by physiologists like Turner, or molecular biologists like Shapiro, etc., and that their conception of evolution has been formed out of participation in a wide discussion coming from a wide range of perspectives, from other biologists, biochemists, chemists, physicists, geographers, historians of evolutionary theory, etc., rather than being formed almost exclusively out of 25 years of study of the population genetics of fruit flies.
This is the difference between science and the humanities.
I would guess that many biologists have read Darwin. But that would be for historical and cultural reasons, not for scientific reasons. I doubt that there is much scientific value in reading Darwin. Science ages very quickly.
Why are the two mutually exclusive? Newton and Boyle did experimental work, then wrote books about it. Were they wrong to do so? Darwin did observational work, and even breeding experiments, and then wrote books about it. Was he wrong to do so? Turner has done plenty of field work in physiology, and his field work has informed his thoughts on evolution. Is he wrong to write up those thoughts in a book? Shapiro did years of experimental work in biology. Was it wrong for him to write up a focused synthesis of the implication of those studies for evolutionary theory in book form? If he had divided the book into 10 articles each proving some itty-bitty point, losing the intellectual focus that a book with a thesis brings to the material, and published those articles in journals, would all his experimental work have suddenly been vindicated in your eyes, merely because it was presented in 15-page chunks rather than a 150-page unit? You have a fetish about articles as a delivery system. Iâm concerned more about the content of someoneâs thought, than about the delivery system.
If you donât think that my non-biologistâs evaluation is of any use, you are under no obligation to read my posts, or read any book I recommend, or even to converse with me here. But indeed, if only a biologistâs opinions matter to you, there is little point in your conversing with most of the people who post here, since only a minority of them are biologists, and a considerable number of them arenât scientists at all. You might as well just talk with Joshua and Glipsnort and ignore the rest of us.
There is always the possibility that those who have read the book can describe what those new ideas are.
In the sciences we read primary literature (i.e. papers that describe original research as written by the scientists who did the research) and discuss it between ourselves. Most research groups call it âJournal Clubâ or something similar. If we want to learn about the science we look at the scientific papers written by the people who did the science.
There is also this thing called discernment. Reading bad science doesnât make you a better scientist, except in the practice of determining what bad science is. A wide range of GOOD science is what is important.
On the details, yes, but to those of us who have spent years studying the history and philosophy of science, it is quite striking how often old ideas re-emerge in new guise. âLamarckianâ ideas (though before anyone uses that term, they should read read Gouldâs excellent long section on Lamarck) are re-emerging (albeit not in their original form) in biology in work by people like Shapiro (who was of course preceded by Barbara McClintock). We now know that the original strictures of Weissman, who laid down the law at the beginning of the 20th century, were not entirely correct. So âLamarckianismâ comes back to correct âDarwinism.â Turner is trying to show that a revival of âvitalismâ (a revival of a qualified kind) can be useful for understanding the nature of life, and for understanding evolution. The problem with scientists who donât look beyond the journal literature of the past five or ten years, and who never think about the history or philosophy of their own field, is that they are ignoring a lot of useful theoretical resources.
Gould didnât write about the history of evolutionary thought just for cultural or historical reasons; his review of the history of evolutionary thinking helped him think out what the evolutionary theory of the future could look like. The historical task and the scientific task arenât in such watertight compartments as you and others here are making out.
What hypotheses did Turner come up with, and how did he test them?
I will quote another scientist who reviewed Shapiroâs book:
That is pretty consistent with everything I have read from Shapiro, and the same conclusions are echoed by other scientists.
All I am trying to say is that we are looking for scientific merit, not âthoughtfulnessâ.
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Not necessarily true. The word âcognitiveâ can be used in a qualified sense â as Turner does in his book, by the way â that allows it to be useful in scientific discussion. As for âsentientâ â sentience has been conceded to be a property of animal life since the beginning of biological thought, so why couldnât single cells, in principle, be âsentientâ? And why couldnât âsentienceâ be a property of organisms capable of systematic investigation?
Note that I asked you whether it was wrong for Shapiro to write up his research in book rather than article form, but you didnât answer the question. Instead, you quoted from a review of the book, to tell me what was wrong with the contents of the book. But we were at the moment discussing why you think scientists should not write books, but only articles. Are you now withdrawing that objection, and saying there was nothing wrong with the book format, and that your only objections to Shapiro are over the contents?
Youâll know that when you read the book, or excerpts from the book, or when you read material on Turnerâs website, or when you write to him to ask his view, or go to hear him speak. Iâm merely letting you know that the man and the book exist. What you do about that is not my business.
âWeâ, speaking for yourself, and scientists of your intellectual attitude. But many other scientists, in addition to reading primary literature, also read books by other scientists. If a certain kind of scientist has no desire ever to read a book by another scientist, I have no interest in forcing him at gunpoint to do so. But the most intellectually interesting scientists, in my experience, both read and write books. Time and again I have found in these debates that I get along best with those scientists who enjoy reading scientific books, and end up in conflict with those scientists who think that all that is necessary to be a good scientist, beyond doing oneâs own experiments, is to keep up with the most recent journal literature. Itâs the same conflict I end up in with religion scholars who think that all you need to be a good scholar of religion is minute attention to the latest articles published in their subfields.
As I said before, the issue here is not arts vs. science, but a difference in temperament, between minds that instinctively try to put together broad syntheses (like Darwin, which is why he wrote books, or the founders of the Modern Synthesis, Mayr etc., all of whom set forth that synthesis in seminal books in the 1940s), and minds that prefer to work on smaller, bite-size problems that yield definite right or wrong answers. In the larger scheme of things, good science needs both types of mind, but those with synthetic gifts are generally better communicators to the non-scientific world, and hence are more likely to be socially and culturally influential.
Yes, scientific merit is the ultimate aim, but if you routinely discourage thoughtfulness in your discipline, you will in the long run inhibit the creative juices that lead to significant scientific change, and hence to better scientific answers. Itâs fine to criticize new arguments and presentations for their real flaws, but if anything like the spirit of heresy-hunting gets going, that can only damage science (or any other academic enterprise). If someone wants to criticize the details of a particular modern proposal to revive vitalism, thatâs fine with me; but if someone with knee-jerk professional reflex condemns any new direction that in his mind smells of âvitalismâ (the way the Church used to be on the lookout for anything that had even the faintest whiff of âArianismâ or âPelagianismâ), then that person is not going to listen with an open mind to the new proposal, and that attitude can only weaken science.
That statement alone is worth pondering at length.
Nature doesnât change very quickly, nor some human concerns, such as authoritative texts, human desires, global ethics, the past causes of present things and so on.
On the other hand, some other human things - like fashions in clothes, music, morality or philosophy - come and go, and so are regarded as more ephemeral by those not blind to the lessons of the past.
Iâm 66 now, and science has evidently aged more quickly than I have, to judge from my sixth form and university notes. But nature remains the same. Odd.
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This is not fair. I remember having a discussion with you about Shapiro where you responded the same way. I linked to a paper he has published with 200+ citations to back up his claims. At that time you did not have time to even look up a single one of those examples.
This is just a repeat of the sameâŚ
I think @Eddie, has a point, if you want to discuss the book, then read it and invest some time into whatever argument is made⌠or else let it be.
No, it isnât really odd.
Science is mostly about what we donât already know. As we learn more, science changes because there is more that we already know, so science points to a different direction where we donât yet know enough.
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But the point was about not reading old science (like Darwin) because itâs obsolete. But how do you know it has nothing to say to the new enterprise if you donât read it? I discovered that truth in reading a book (woops) on aposematism by a Czech biologist working in Germany.
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It is a question of how you incorporate sentience into a research program. That is what the reviewer meant by ânor does it set a clear research agendaâ.
There is nothing wrong with writing a book. However, if you want to make an impact in the scientific community then books are not the best way to go.
Since you donât appear to know what hypotheses Turner has and how to test them after you have read the book then I fail to see why I should read the book.
I donât remember you presenting any of those papers. If you would like to discuss one of the papers that Shapiro cites as support then I would be happy to discuss it.
But why wonât @Eddie discuss it?
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No one is discouraging thoughtfulness. What we are asking for is hypotheses, methodologies, and data. If someone thinks they have a great idea then all the more power to them. The next step is to demonstrate itâs merit by applying the scientific method.
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