Science is not fun

Farà cosa de gairebé tres anys vaig veure per televisió l’entrevista a la monja Teresa Forcades que va fer en Joan Barril al seu programa literari, «Qwerty», on el presentador va afirmar que ja no feia falta creure en les Sagrades Escriptures per què per això ja estava el Big Bang (com si el problema de la relació entre ciència i religió es solventés amb aquesta afirmació). La germana Teresa podia haver respost que la ciència forma part del pensament crític, que no construeix veritats absolutes, inclòs el Big Bang. No va dir res.

Dos anys més tard, la trobo a Internet defensant postulats pel que sembla incontestables sobre la campanya de vacunació de la grip A. He de reconèixer que fins llavors l’actitud de la doctora Forcades em provocava admiració. No deixa de merèixer un aplaudiment que una religiosa sigui capaç de postular-se a favor de l’avortament apel·lant al sentit comú.

És del coneixement públic que les grans companyies farmacèutiques es condueixen amb criteris de racionalitat econòmica amb la intenció d’obtenir beneficis màxims, y que les campanyes de vacunació més generals han tingut lloc als països on s’ubiquen aquestes companyies –Estats Units, França, Gran Bretanya. També és conegut que aquests grups tenen prou influència a l’Organització Mundial de la Salut (OMS). A aquestes idees s’aferra Forcades per elaborar un discurs impecable en quan a la seva posada en escena, amb una estètica monacal d’extrema senzillesa –hàbit inclòs- i un llenguatge directe. Fins i tot fa servir una sèrie de dades científiques per recolzar el seu discurs.

Aquí comencen el problemes, doncs tot i que Forcades sempre ha defensat la necessitat de publicar els informes que demostrin la necessitat de la vacuna, no es mencionen les seves fonts i els estudis d’on surten les dades que utilitza. A la seva presentació només es fa servir la idea de la ciència per la seva imatge pública d’objectivitat com una disciplina que avala les tesis de Forcades, però el procediment utilitzat en el tractament de les dades no resulta gaire científic. Una línia de pensament crítica presenta fets però permet al ciutadà extreure les seves pròpies conclusions. No és el cas de Forcades, almenys en aquests vídeos, i si el futur de l’opinió passa per l’edició de vídeos per canals públics com YouTube, s’haurà d’augmentar el rigor en el tractament de dades.

En el cas de Forcades, la cosa es fa més greu quan comenta que darrera de tot això pot haver una conspiració per enverinar a grans masses de població mitjançant les vacunes. Forcades arriba a afirmar que sempre han existit grups que pretenen dominar el món i que ara podrien estar preocupats per l’excés de població i interessats a reduir-la mitjançant una gran pandèmia. Després es desdiu. Però el mal ja està fet. Allò que es presentava com un discurs que abanderava el pensament crític davant els interessos dels grans grups farmacèutics es transforma en una altra cosa: sensacionalisme.

La idea de la conspiració emmascara les veritables raons de les campanyes de les companyies farmacèutiques. I al veure els múltiples comentaris d’agraïment penjats a YouTube, sembla que el sensacionalisme de Forcades ha aconseguit el seu propòsit. Però no resulta lògic que des de criteris de racionalitat econòmica s’elimini als consumidors més productius i en edat de rendir laboralment, que precisament mantenen el sistema, com són els habitants dels països on s’ha fet més extensible l’ús de la vacuna de la grip A. Aquesta seria una reflexió crítica, com les que han fet historiadors de la ciència de l’alçada de Marcos Cueto, Raymond Fosdick o John Ettling al analitzar els interessos colonialistes nord-americans que s’amagaven darrera de les “filantròpiques” campanyes de salut pública organitzades per la Rockefeller Foundation a l’Amèrica del Sud. Per aquesta raó els suggeriments de la senyora Forcades al final del vídeo no inclouen un consell, el de que cadascú decideixi en funció de la seva situació personal, si no un mandat, que no ens hem d’anar a vacunar. Aquesta forma taxativa i sensacionalista de presentar els esdeveniments que presideix la presentació emmetzina uns continguts que podrien obrir un interessant debat a la societat civil.

Carlos Gámex Pérez

(Una versió en castellà del text es pot llegir aquí).

I have just came upon a recent book on Stephen Jay Gould. There, I found not only contributions on evolution, but also reflections on science in the public sphere. Here is a sample, in which Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins advocate for the Jay-Gould model of scientist-popularisers.

“How is there to be even a semblance of a democratic state when vital knowledge is in the hands of a self interested few? The glib answer offered is that there are instruments of the popularization of science, chiefly science journalism and the popular writings of scientists, which create an informed public. But that popularization is itself usually an instrument of obfuscation and the pressing of elite agendas.
Science journalists suffer from a double disability: First, no matter how well educated, intelligent, and well-motivated, they must, in the end, trust what scientists tell them. Even a biologist must trust what a physicist says about quantum mechanics. A large fraction of science reporting begins with a press conference or release produced by a scientific institution. “Scientists at the Blackleg Institute announced today the discovery of the gene for susceptibility to repetitive motion injury.” Second, the media for which science reporters work put immense pressure on them to write dramatic accounts. Where is the editor who will allot precious column inches to an article about science whose message is that it is all very complicated, that no predictions can be made, that there are serious experimental difficulties in the way of finding the truth of the matter, and that we may never know the answer? Third, the esoteric nature of scientific knowledge places almost insuperable rhetorical barriers between even the most knowledgeable journalist and the reader. It is not generally realized that a transparent explanation in terms accessible to the lay reader requires the deepest possible knowledge of the matter on the part of the writer.”

Richard C. Lewontin & Richard Levins (2009). “Stephen Jay Gould—What Does It Mean to Be a Radical?”. In Allmon et al. (eds.) Stephen Jay Gould. Reflections on His View of Life. Oxford:Oxford University Press, p. 202-203

Down with the deficit model! Nobody ever formulated it this way yet this slogan sums up at best the trend in science communication over the past twenty years. Deficit model? To outsiders this may sound like financial theory. Yet what this model represents is the idea that the general public does not know enough about science. Therefore its deficit in knowledge has to be remedied by science popularization. Sometimes it is also labeled the top-down-model: knowledge is distributed from above (science) downwards to an ignorant public. Llegir més »

Amb pocs dies de diferència, assisteixo a la projecció a la Facultat de Ciències de la UAB del documental Universo extremo, produït i dirigit pel físic de la UB José Ignacio Latorre, i a una lectura dramatitzada de Copenhaguen, l’exitosa obra de Michael Frayn sobre l’encontre entre Niels Bohr i Werner Heisenberg a la Dinamarca ocupada pels nazis de 1941, amb les armes nuclears com a teló de fons. Llegir més »

Etiquetes: Copenhagen, Michael Frayn, Universo extremo

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a starting grant for the project entitled ‘The Earth Under Surveillance (TEUS): Climate Change, Geophysics and the Cold War Legacy’, which will be held at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM, University of Manchester) in collaboration with the Institut de Recherche sur les Sciences et la Technologie (IRIST, Université de Strasbourg) and the Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

This is one of the largest ever grant awarded in Europe for research in the history of science and technology and the first assigned within the ERC programme to a project in this disciplinary area.

The five-year TEUS project will support the establishment of an international research team including Simone Turchetti (as principal Investigator), Soraya Boudia, Néstor Herran, Jérôme Lamy, Sébastien Soubiran and Leucha Veneer. Some PhD scholarships will also be advertised in the running of the project.

The research will seek to track down the ancestry of scientific studies on the earth and the environment, especially by examining how the Cold War shaped research and funding trajectories. If the recent rush towards earth science studies has been propelled by the environmentalist discourse, a big leap forward in geophysics took place because of strategic imperatives deriving from the confrontation between superpowersOur historical study aims to map the rise of geophysics in Europe in the light of these contextual factors. Among its innovative features will be a focus on the interplay and mutual shaping of the geosciences and intelligence programmes, especially in the organisation of geophysical explorations.

Normalmente yo entrevisto a los científicos pero esta vez era viceversa. Se lee los artículos de Michele Catanzaro con Salvador Moyà-Solà sobre sus descubrimientos recientes y después conmigo sobre la “nacionalición” de los fósiles humanos.

At the moment there is a well done exhibition in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid to commemorate the Darwin year 2009 entitled “La evolución de Darwin“. I was pleased to see that the curators had picked up on some of the context of Darwin’s work. For example that Darwin spent most of his budget in the year 1866 on postage. This is a memorable fact that reminds the visitor just how important letters were for Charles Darwin and how much he profited from the British postal system that literally connected him with the rest of the world. Hence he could gather information from remote corners and also receive specimens of certain pigeons or some exotic animal from South-East-Asia.

The exhibition also tries to make a connection to 19^th century Spain and its naturalists. In one of the cases we see one of Darwin’s works opened on a page where there is a footnote that refers to one of those Spanish naturalists. Wow! one feels inclined to exclaim. Darwin mentions a Spanish naturalist.

Another chart shows how many of the hundreds and hundreds of people Darwin corresponded with over the course of many decades come from which country. Germany beats France easily. The Spanish-speaking world is also listed but it makes up less than one percent of his correspondents.

This is one way of representing the interaction of Darwin with Spain, and it is a telling one. The result is rather meager and it might be fine for an exhibition to point out this kind of interaction, however peripheral it actually was for Darwin and his work.

Yet what should Spanish (or Catalan) historians of science do in 2009? There probably isn’t all that much to say about those few letters exchanged. Well, then we have to study the reception of his ideas. In the second part of the exhibition (El darwinismo en España) there is a nice assembly of the translation of Darwin’s works from the late 19^th century through the period of the dictatorship until the early 21^st century. This also includes a section of translations into Catalan as well as Basque. In a very nice case that centers on the visual representation of Darwin’s ideas apes and monkeys appear on Spanish consumer goods, works of art an so on.

This is interesting to browse and certainly a well-worth object of study. Yet again the historian of science might not feel too comfortable with this “receptionist” approach. It reminds us a little of the rather out-dated top-down-model of scientific communication. The great ideas come from above (in this case from abroad) and trickle down (in this case into Spain). It is a one-way-communication and does not allow for interaction. It also leaves little room for looking at how exactly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated. Maybe this is asking too much from a museum that has to keep the interest of the common visitor in mind. Yet it is certainly not too much to ask of a historian of science to search for more that translations and references made to Darwin in Spanish or Catalan sources. Any suggestions?

History of Science surely is no profession that makes you rich (unless you give evidence for the tobacco industry). Yet while we are all scraping by, more or less, Paolo Rossi has just received the Balzan Prize. Far less known than the Nobel Prize but nearly as well endowed. Each laureate receives 1.000.000 Swiss Franks. (There are four categories that change every year).

The press release reads as follows

Nicolette Mout (Professor of Modern History and Professor of Central European Studies at the University of Leiden; Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Foreign Member of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) read the motivation for the assignment of the Prize for the History of Science to Paolo Rossi: “for his major contributions to the study of the intellectual foundations of science from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment”.

Well, to be frank, I could think of historians of science that would deserve the Balzan Prize a little more. But let us not be petty, in particular because the laureate is supposed to invest half of the sum into research. Dear Paolo, I would like to propose the following research project …

CONTROVERSIES ON CRISIS IN PSYCHOLOGY (1897-1933)

Scientists spend most of their time doing research. But sometimes they stop and reflect on their discipline. In talks, textbooks or general introductions scientists present their own field of expertise to students and the lay public. Usually a broad description of the present day situation is offered, sometimes even enriched with a historical perspective. Generally, this type of text draws a coherent and harmonic picture of the discipline, presented in very positive terms. But sometimes talks and texts of this genre contain critical reflections about the past and present situation of the field, addressing theoretical and methodological problems. In my project I will study this second type of texts dealing with crisis diagnosis and discussions on the historical situation or evolution of a discipline put forward by scientists.
Thomas Kuhn (1962/1970) claimed that every scientific revolution is preceded by a crisis of a dominant scientific paradigm. He also took it that states of crises are hardly if ever acknowledged by scientists. In other words, Kuhn’s concept of “crisis” is not an actor’s, but an observer’s category. But what if “crisis” does figure as an actor’s category? What are we to make of the scientific crises diagnosed by scientists themselves? In what contexts do such diagnoses occur?
There are indeed historical cases in which a crisis was diagnosed by scientists. Perhaps the strongest instance of this can be found in psychology from the late 19th century until the 1930s. The first author who in 1897 raised an alarm was Rudolf Willy. Many other texts stating a crisis in psychology followed. Authors as varied as Constantin Gutberlet, Alfred Binet, Nicolai Kostyleff, Hans Driesch, Mary Whiton Calkins, Karl Bühler, Wilhelm Wirth, and many others all found the notion of “crisis” something worth discussing. In the late twenties of the last century the discussions about crisis reached a first peak defined by a notable increase of frequency and intensity.
The questions I will pursue during my stay in Berlin (21/06/-21/07/2009) at Department II of the Max Planck Institute for History of Science are twofold. First, what do the actors mean by “crisis”? Secondly, what arguments do they propose for or against a diagnosis of crisis in psychology? The examination of arguments will lead to the necessity of taking into account basic issues raised in relation with the crisis diagnoses in psychology, like the problem of defining psychology as natural or human science. Different epistemological ideals about psychology as science are confronted with one another in these crisis debates.
The discussion and historical analysis of arguments requires the inclusion of voices from both sides, the defenders of crisis diagnosis and their opponents, and in connection with general reflections made by psychologists about their discipline. My interest is historical and historiographical. That is why I will concentrate on how the evolution and present status of psychology is perceived by psychologists themselves at a certain time.
(For more information about the project or my stay see: http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/amuelberger )

Have a look at the last issue of Centaurus -51(2), May 2009, which includes a collection of articles devoted to science and technology in Spanish, Greek and Danish newspapers around 1900. Two members of CEHIC, Matiana González-Silva and Néstor Herran, have contributed with the article “Ideology, Elitism and Social Commitment: Alternative Images of Science in Two fin de siècle Barcelona Newspapers” (p. 97-115).