A post at we make money not art made me laugh.
Category: Nature
I recently read Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi, which is a book that uses mutation as a way of understanding the development of the body. It’s interesting but quite medical; I have a pretty high tolerance for stuff about chemical pathways, gene mutations, hormones and so on, but I still found all the polysyllabic chemical names tended to make my eyes glaze over.
Lots of interesting snippets along the way, though. For example, the chapter about growth mutations had to distinguish them from ‘normal’ variation, whether racial or environmental. Apparently, young Dutch men now have an *average* height of six foot – which makes them taller than famously genetically tall people like the Masai and the Dinka. Almost more strikingly, in Holland there is no longer any correlation between young people’s social class and their height. That is certainly not true in the UK, and I find it an incredibly impressive advertisment for Dutch social policy.
This blog-post on the Hwang debacle kind of annoyed me. As is probably obvious from what I said in the comments section. The relevant part of the post is this :
It sounds like there was nothing in the paper that should have given Hwang Woo-suk away; doubtless he faked the data to be believable. But check this out (from the San Jose Mercury News):
“Hwang chalked up much of the success to South Korean government support and dedicated researchers working around the clock. He also credited his workers’ dexterity with chopsticks; stem cell researchers visited from around the world and rushed back to their labs to try the new technique.”
ARE they kidding?? Are they KIDDING? What next, “We just cultured the cells in kim-chee and they grew like mad!”?
Evidently westerners are so dense about Asian cultures that they figured this guy was doing a scientific version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style kung fu, using secret Asian powers involving chopsticks. This is deeply ridiculous. “So THAT’S how those brilliant Koreans accomplished their scientific research! They have special dexterity with chopsticks!” Once again:
“…stem cell researchers visited from around the world and rushed back to their labs to try the new technique.”
The chopsticks technique.
[some stuff about the Sokal hoax, which is an interesting enough subect in its own right but not what I’m interested in here]
The Sokal Hoax, while obnoxious, provided the humanities with an urgent motive for some much-needed self-scrutiny, including a few brilliant articles by one of my heroes, John Guillory (“The Great”).
Similarly, it might be time to check, in a public way, why scientists around the world were willing to believe that dexterity with chopsticks was the secret answer.
I’m all for making people’s biases and prejudices explicit, but this kind of thing just undermines any serious attempt to do that. I agree that the quote above reflects badly on the San Jose Mercury News, but that’s no big surprise, since science reporting in the media is so consistently poor. Of course the media love the chopstick quote – in a story which they know they have to cover but which they don’t believe their readers are going to understand, it’s the one human detail they can latch onto. I would speculate that Dr Hwang said it for that reason, since he seems to have enjoyed publicity.
But it’s ludicrous to suggest that the world’s working embryologists and geneticists were so beguiled by Orientalism that a comment about chopsticks was the reason they accepted Hwang’s claims. Hwang was one of the most highly respected and successful people in the field. Why on earth wouldn’t his claims be taken at face value?
There’s no shortage of real racism and stupidity in the world. Insisting on seeing it where it isn’t just reduces your credibility.
btw, if anyone wants to read the original Hwang paper, it’s available here. Personally I found it completely incomprehensible.
EDIT:
Actually, thinking about it, what really annoyed me is the bizarre idea of how the scientific community works implied by the post. Considering it’s attached to accusations of credulity and denseness about other cultures, there’s a certain amount of pot/kettle to it.
There’s a group on Flickr called Field Guide: Birds of the World. Pretty self-explanatory, really – they’re trying to form a collection of photos that can be used to help identify birds. It’s a great idea and they’ve already got a lot entries, though it’s weighted towards European and N American birds, not surprisingly. But it quickly exposes the failings of Flickr as a content-management system. Although it’s possible to search within the group pool for photos tagged with a particular name, it’s not obvious how to do it. More crucially for a field guide, it’s not easy enough to add information to a photo in an organised way – for example, to provide a link from a species to any confusion possibilities. Or to give distribution info.
In some ways, like most reference works, it’s a good candidate for a wiki; there’s a network of people who are very enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject, it’s naturally modular and so on. The internet would allow for many pictures attached to each species, as well as audio and even video. You could easily establish a standard template for an entry, to encourage people to include all the useful information – distribution, easily confused species, call, and so on. I suppose I could set it up – the Wikimedia software which Wikipedia runs on is open-source and I think I could set it up on my server space, although I suspect there would be a bit of a learning curve to cope with. More seriously, if it ever really caught on, especially with a lot of audio and video, it would be quite bandwidth-heavy.
With mobile broadband on the verge of becoming widespread, people might even start using it in the field to complement traditional field-guides.
The first satellite of Galileo, the EU’s competitor to GPS, was launched yesterday – initially to test out the kit, with the service planned to go online in 2010. One of the explicitly stated aims is provide independence from reliance on the US government, since GPS is a military system that is made available for civil users at the discretion of the government and, presumably, the Pentagon. I’m always intrigued when interaction between Europe and America slips into rival-Great-Powers mode, rather than the usual closest-allies shtick.
In practical terms the project sounds pretty sane to me anyway (not that that I know much about these things). In future, I’m sure all the devices that currently use GPS will be designed to use both – Galileo is designed for compatibility with GPS anyway – and the number of GPS-equipped things will increase for some time yet. The combination of GPS and Galileo will provide better accuracy than either of them alone and will provide backup if either goes offline for whatever reason. So it’s not a redundant system just reproducing the functionality of GPS.
Whether all that justifies the cost is another question. €3.4bn sounds a lot, but it pales in comparison to the €50bn for the Common Agricultural Policy this year. I think it’s probably a good idea, but then I am a bit of a geek.
I’ve got an iPod shuffle. It weighs 22g; about as much as a reasonably fat nightingale.
