Disinteresting Star Trek Conventions

Reading: Dear, Peter. 2001 Science Studies as Epistemography. in The One Culture, A Conversation about Science. Labinger & Collins, Eds.

This essay makes the point that Science Studies needs to be disinterested, by which the author means 'not interested in the scientific truth of the matter under study'. If the researcher used normal scientific methodology in order to study his subject, he'd be introducing an 'interest' that could bias the results.
But the problem with this is that the scientific truth of the matter at hand is relevant to the study of science, to the history of science, and why certain theories are accepted while others are not.

In Science Fiction, the reader is asked to suspend disbelief over a few technical issues in order to provide the setting and backdrop against which the story takes place. This, by way of analogy, is like Dear's disinterest. But there is a major problem with this type of disinterest and suspension of disbelief: it's one thing to think about Warp Drives and allow them to exist in order to be entertained and educated by the stories in Star Trek, it's quite another thing to actually go around believing that, yes, Warp Drive does exist. While that belief might seem insane to most people, there is a tendency amoung Trekkies to in fact believe that the Science of Star Trek is real science, or a likely and reasonable projection of what science will be like in the future; it's not science today, so we need to suspend our disbelief in that sense, but one day it will most likely come to fruition, it's believable.

A Star Trek Technical Manual, 
yes, that's "a" manual, there are 
several and they'll explain the 
physics and engineering challenges 
involved in incorporating the 
Bussard Ramscoop into the 
Warp Nacelle, or that a 
Nanocochrane is a billionth 
of a Cochrane, itself a measure of 
the subspace field stress.

Given that this tendency or trend exists (and competes with a similar trend to realize that Star Trek is not about real science), what is the better way to analyze and critique Star Trek? Based on it's literary value or on it's scientific accuracy? Surely most would agree that literary criticism of Star Trek is more sensible than Scientific criticism. And so, by analogy, it might seem that criticism/evaluation/analysis of science should "stand-off" from the truth, that scientific accuracy shouldn't be a criteria through which we analyze the social development of a scientific research program.
But that's wrong, the analogy fails, because Star Trek is literature, it's not the truth and doesn't claim to be scientific. The truth of scientific correctness of a research program or theory is very much a part of the how and why it's successful. The truth of a sci-fi story is not, in fact in a way it's explicitly not, a part of why the story is successful.

Scientists don't just happen to stumble on the truth, the scientific enterprise (see what I did there) builds upon previous successes in order to achieve more success: science progresses. Maybe not in straight lines, and certainly not inevitably, science does form columns and march right into progress, but, nonetheless, it does progress. So it's grossly inadequate to evaluate science from a sociological perspective without taking into account the scientific correctness of the theory, research program, or even researcher, under study.
Clearly there are other influences. Going back to the Sci-Fi analogy, IF you ask the audience to suspend disbelief too much, then at the very least you cross genres and end up in Science Fantasy Land, where hobbits have ray guns, and that's just plain stupid.

No Comment on either.

In the sociology of science, there is a tendency to reject experiment and empiricism, largely because of conventionalism: explaining experimental failures through auxiliary theories that represent an ad hoc defense of the core theory. Philosophers of science like Karl Popper insist that we make a "bold" decision to refrain from conventionalism (and also to design experiments that test our theories where they'd be the weakest, to try to disprove our theories rather than merely confirm them). This has a parallel in science fiction.  The science of Star Trek has been laid out in books and articles and is moderately well established; you can argue about the results of hypothetical actions in the Star Trek universe, and arrive at canonically consistent results (whereas you can't do this in the Dr. Who universe, because time is merely all wibbly wobbly). Star Trek Conventionalists can criticize a Star Trek story if, say, it involves ship speeds greater than Warp 10. If there's a story where this happens, we know that this is not allowed by the fictionalized science, and so some other explanation has to be offered, or instead we could say that a story must stay within the conventions of Star Trek (not to be confused with Star Trek Conventions of course). Popper wants us to avoid that kind of conventionalism and to make what's arguably a quantum leap: that a theory which hasn't technically been completely falsified, should nonetheless be discarded, and we should move on to another. If you do that in Star Trek, what you get are arguable disasters like Enterprise or Andromeda (as far beyond Star Trek as Trek was beyond Today).

Actor Scott Bakula, playing Dr. Sam

Beckett playing Capt Jonathan Archer,

who's hoping that his next leap will 

be his leap home.

In Science, researchers are supposed to,of course, be disinterested; they're supposed to not be interested in one particular theory over another because it's more popular; it's what their lab director has a research program in; or because it's what the government is providing funding for--a literary critic of Star Trek isn't supposed to be interested in, say, the Romulans coming out on top, and if that doesn't happen well dammit the story was flawed! A science fiction critic is supposed to be interested in the story. A scientific researcher is not supposed to be disinterested in the truth.

Responses and Reactions to Threatened Paradigms

There have been a few responses to Dupré's column on a crisis in Evolutionary Theory; Dr. Jerry Coyne's and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci's.

Coyne's arguement

I think Dr. Coyne's argument would be seen by many as the standard fare to expect from most researchers on this issue. A crisis is an extraordinary thing, and it requires, so the saying goes, extraordinary evidence to support it. Dr. Dupré instead offers some interesting things that perhaps Ernst Mayr would've found really surprising, but not an Kuhnian indictment of Evolutionary Theory. 
Dr. Coyne's main beef is that we tend to hear the evolution is in crisis from a lot of quarters, and they're usually wrong. This is not to say that there aren't any debates between biologists, just that we aren't in the stagnation followed by revolution stage of Kuhn, nor near it.

Pigliucci's Points

Dr. Pigliucci's essay is as much a response to Coyne as it is to Dupré. Some would argue that a mainstay of philosophy is to use reconciliation between opposing camps to better get at the 'truth' of any particular matter, and that is what Pigliucci attempts here.

A major disagreement between Coyne and Pigliucci is over rare events and important events. Obviously an event can be both, and Pigliucci cites the Big Bang as a good example of just that. However, while Inflationary Theory is important, did it result in a re-writing of the Standard Model in Physics? While Margulis hit on something amazing in biology, does the endo-symbiont hypothesis really challenge the Modern Synthesis?

Another contentious point is the importance of 'causal arrows' that don't extend out of the genome. I don't think most would consider Coyne a genetic determinist, certainly not in the way that Dawkin's is usually accused of being, but he does seem fairly set in the idea that most of the important stuff traces back to the genome, and things that don't are just ancillary, not revolutionary.

This entire argument really tracks back to, or at least mimics in some ways, reactions to Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (pdf). Many felt that what Kuhn was describing was the way science normally operates, that he hadn't hit on anything really interesting, and for others his shifting paradigms concept was a truly revolutionary way of understanding change in science, of addressing the 'problem of progress'. For the people who felt Kuhn wasn't saying anything new, well, it was just that, he was describing things events that were already well known, understood, and accepted. His small problems that a standing theory couldn't address (and that eventually were involved in the theory's downfall), weren't capable of bringing the theories down (in this contra-Kuhnian line of thinking). The small problems were relegated to the side or worked on further in the normal process of science, and only added to the existing theory. Thus it is with Dr. Coyne's assessment of Dr. Dupré's crisis claim, the small issues are just that, small, and while they're real, and affect evolutionary theory, they don't represent a crisis.
Prof. Pigliucci seems to feel differently, even if he isn't happy with Dupré's use of 'radical' to describe the changes, and he rattles off a list of concepts that are foreign to the Modern Synthesis.


The biggest challenge to the Modern Synthesis, in my mind, was Genetic Drift and Neutralism, even tho some might argue that they're 'fully' accounted for in MS. And they were successful challenges, and they defeated the Modern Synthesis, or at least the MS-based claim that they couldn't contribute to an organism's evolution and history. But the MS was formulated around a hundred years ago; I don't think that Dr. Coyne is trying to defend the traditional MS in this piece. Dr. Dupré explicitly mentions the MS, and his 'threats' are threats to the MS, but haven't we moved away from the MS already anyway? That's been my impression for a while now, so while Dupré would certainly be right that the traditional Modern Synthesis, which is pretty explicit about what counts in Biology, is challenged to the point of crisis (Kuhnian or not) by the 'threats', or rather, it already had been challenged by those threats and had to give in to them.

Threatened Paradigms?

Dr. Dupré is the Director of the Economic & Social Research Council's Centre for Genomics in Society. He considers speciation by branching and genetic determinism to be  "Threatened Paradigms", as detailed in his column, Evolutionary Theory's welcome crisis. Here are my thoughts on his threatening paradigms.

Horizontal Transfer

This is not a new phenomenon, in fact it's something that's so well established and argueably uninteresting that it's made it's way into high school textbooks. If our focus is on largish mutlicellular animals, then yes, we're probably not appreciating the quantity of horizontal tranfers that goes on in life, but the bigger problem there is that we're focused on largish mutlicellular animals in the first place! Microbes are by far the greater moiety that makes up life, and there horizontal transfer is rampant. While the recognition that microbial life is where the bulk of the action of life is 'at' is an important recognition, it's not one that Dupré actually calls out; it's not something that really changes our understanding  of evolution; and it's not a new idea.

Epigenetics

Again, this is not a new phenomenon, and while it wasn't in my high school textbooks, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it was in then now. Dupré also overstates the case when it comes to epigenetics, it's not like the outside environment sends molecules into the organism that then alters the genome or suppresses/activates large segments of it, it's the genome that largely does the control work for epigentics. Much like "Evo-Devo" as a phrase, epigenetics is something that seemed to claim something radical, but as a program, hasn't altered the status quo much. 

Also, note that what  Dr. Dupré claims here is that, these are not merely interesting addenda to the Modern Synthesis, but rather they're 'Radical Restructuring of Evolutionary Theory'.  From what I can tell, if Stephen J. Gould's ideas, as worked out in his magnum opus "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" were to take over the majority of thinking in evolution and biology, that would be a radical restructuring, not paying attention to drift, methylation, and horizontal transfer.


I 'get' that maybe  Dupré 's main point was that it's the disagreements between evolutionary theorists and biologists and the like that really shows how evolution (in fact science itself), shines, but that claim doesn't require the non sequitor of radical restructuring.

Dr. S. Pekar on ancient changes in Antarctic Ice Volumes

The first GEOS talk for the Fall 2012 semester will be a great one, from Prof. Stephen Pekar on ancient changes in Antarctic Ice Volumes.  Prof. Pekar is a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, as well as an instructor at CUNY Queens. The talk will begin at 5:30 on Thursday, September 6th, in the Graduate Center, in the 4th Floor Science Center (Room 4102).   Dr. Pekar is heavily involved with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program and the Antarctic Drilling Program (ANDRILL) and has served on expeditions to the Antarctic, where ocean floor sediments, including important proxies for past climate, have been retreived. Prof. Pekar studies the make-up and stratigraphy of these materials in order to better understand changes in the all-important Ice Volume of the Antarctic Ice Sheets. At points in Earth's past, the Antarctic was ice-free, but of course today the continent is layered in a thick sheet of ice. The stability of this ice sheet is a terribly important question when it comes to predicting future changes in sea level. In the Mesozoic, when both poles were ice-free, the middle of the United States was submerged under the great "Western Interior" Sea, in fact North America was broken up into three island-continents because of this.  Today much of that water has been pulled out of the oceans and is held, frozen, in the Ice Sheets. The onset of Ice Sheets in the Antarctic is also one of the areas in paleo-climate studies that is somewhat controversial, some workers believe that once the Ice Sheets were established they remained unchanged, and Antarctica was essentially "dry"  (despite the ice cover, there was little free flowing water). Other workers believe that the Ice Sheets were much more dynamic, with periods in which they grew and shrank, and times when there was free water on the continent. Dr. Pekar has been heavily involved in this scientific debate, and his talk will likely touch on this and other climate-science issues.

 Please follow the link below for a promotional flyer for Dr. Pekar's talk: Past Climate and Ice-Volume Changes in Antarctica: Looking Back to Our Future

(This entry is cross-posted at the GEOS group blog: http://opencuny.org/geos/?p=118)

More on webpages

I was having a bit of a problem getting a viable web page up and running before. Our campus's document sharing system (Xythos) seemed to be working, but the webpages I was making just weren't functioning well. I had been using Microsoft Publisher 2007.
I then tried using Adobe Illustrator, but that ended up not being too easy to use, I could get a layout setup and create slices, but I really have no idea how to work it as html, all I had were images.

Then I found out about KompoZer, which is a 'what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor. I've been able to get a two-page website up and running. It's really uninteresting right now, and exceptionally plain. I suspect that the coding is excessive for such a simple site too. But, now at least I have something I can work with:
https://wfs.gc.cuny.edu/rschenck/www/index.html

Webpages

Trying to create a new webpage for myself. I got the idea because at the Grad Center we're given access to a document 'share' system called Xythos (apparently these are the same people that run the classroom software program "Blackboard"). One of the functions of Xythos is that it can 'share' html documents, in other words we can host our own webpages.

So now I am playing around with MS 2007 Publisher. I suspect that it's not the 'goto' program of a lot of people, but it's what I have access to through Kingsborough. We also have access to the Adobe Suite, but apparently that doesn't include Dreamweaver, which is an ambitiously named website-maker.