Anthonares

I’ve just finished reading the first five chapters in Charles Mann’s fantastic 1491 and have been simply blown away so far. But, that will have to wait until a future entry. Today I’m going to share an idea I had when reading Mann’s chapter about the scientific infighting surrounding the Clovis culture. Pardon me if it’s a bit rambling, I’m just beginning to firm up my thoughts here.

For those who aren’t aware of the “Clovis-first” issue, Mann summs it up quite well. For decades, a powerful group of anthropologists headed by Dr. C. Vance Haynes at Arizona jealously defended the idea that the Clovis Culture was the progenitor of all subsequent Native American cultures. A few so-called “pre-Clovis” sites appeared, but none so convincing as the Clovis, New Mexico site that had given its name to the early Americans. This absence of evidence was taken to be evidence of absenc” in light of the beautiful line of reasoning that motivated the Clovis-First hypothesis (for more information, read 1491!).

The basic premise of my argument is this: subsets of, or entire scientific disciplines occasionally become wrangled in debates that seem little to do with the science, but rather with the personalities involved because the theory outpaces the ability of the science to gather and process data. Good recent examples of this include the slow acceptance of the tectonic theory in Geology, impact extinction in archaeology, string theory, and until about two decades ago, anthropogenic global warming.

There are three basic requirements for situations like this to occur:

1. Enough data relevant to the theory must be available. Otherwise, no theory can be rejected outright. For instance, the field of Astrobiology is a wide open field in which highly speculative articles can be published because, as of yet, there is no data in the entire field.
2. The prize must be big enough. There must exist some overwhelming need for a scientific explanation that is urgent enough to excite heated debate. The origin of man (i.e. evolution), the fundamental nature of the universe (i.e string theory), and the very motion of the continents (i.e. tectonism) are such big ideas that they represent big scientific prizes.
3. There cannot exist enough quantitative evidence to rule out competing ideas. Quantitative evidence is different, in my mind, than inferential evidence or logical arguments. Advocates of the impact hypothesis had a great logical argument going for them, but it wasn’t until the Alvarez’s theorized and then demonstrated that an extraterrestrial iridium layer was present exactly at the K-T boundary that scientists accepted the impact hypothesis outright. As an aside, Evolution is not such an example because it fails to meet this third criteria: there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that speciation occurs via the mechanism of natural selection.

Some scientific fields are not places where heated personality-driven debates occur very often, or at least when they do those debates are very arcane. For instance, engineering, the very definition of data-driven science, is generally free of high-profile debates (That’s not to say that extremely esoteric debates don’t occur within engineering disciplines. But, they tend to be over very small prizes and involve very small groups of people). At the other extreme, many social sciences are littered with minefields of jealously guarded pet theories because they are inherently non-quantitative fields. With tons of big scientific prizes to bag and not enough data to settle arguments, it’s no wonder.

(In my current sub-discipline, hydrogeology, there is a small version of these larger debates occurring right now. When contaminants move through the groundwater system, their motion is described by several factors including one called dispersion. Dispersion is a mathematical term that generally refers to how much of the contaminant decides to veer off of the course of the fluid that is carrying it along. The problem is that dispersion is not constant across scales. If you examine a very small volume, the equations are the same but the dispersion term is very much smaller than in large volumes. Thus, it’s an inherently dimensional quantity which leads most quantitative scientists to conclude that dispersion is not the fundamental physical quantity we should be interested in. Anyway, long story short, there are all kinds of modeling approaches to deal with dispersion, each which seems to produce good results in a few experiments but not in others. Our research group is hoping to change all that by collecting a dataset so detailed and complete that the questions of which modeling approach is best, and indeed the very nature of dispersion, might just be able to be answered.)

Some sciences seemed condemned to a never-ending cycle of data-starved theories either because of their sheer complexity or because we haven’t figured out how to address them quantitatively (witness computational biology’s relative recent rise, before that biology was a dark science full of arguments about nomenclature and the like). Other sciences seem clean and antiseptic by comparison. The physical sciences of the 20th century enjoyed this reputation, and biology and genetics increasingly enjoy it today.

If you’ve ever met a hardcore quantitative scientist, such as a physicist or engineer, they may have been the type to dismiss the more argumentative disciplines as soft-science and scoff at their efforts. But I see those fields as part of a continuum extending from philosophy to mathematics. In between lies every discipline in regards to its complexity and our current level of understanding. Physics is almost as “hard” a science as mathematics (never mind that mathematics probably isn’t science at all, just bear with me), while sociology often stands with a foot in philosopy.

Many fields of science, perhaps most, have gradually shifted from the philosophical end to the mathematical end of the spectrum as our analytical capacities have increased. But, I’m not sure that movement along that continuum can be considered progress necessarily, because to do so inherently assigns value to each end of the continuum. Purists crave the precision of mathematics, and artists the deeper relevance of philosophy.

Though those fractious debates can stall progress in a field for decades, their resolution can be deeply exciting: they can signal the occurrence of paradigm shifts both in scientific understanding and sometimes even in general human awareness. For a student trying to decide what type of science to study, getting a better idea of what the large-scale debates are is probably a pretty good start.

With this in mind, a good student might have a far better chance of making an impact in an a field full of big, fundamental arguments than one in which such arguments are very limited. You, as the good student, just have to figure out how to collect data where people have failed or overlooked before. That’s what Dr. Haynes did when as a doctoral student he pioneered the use of radiocarbon dating on Clovis artifacts. And then who knows, you might grow up to jealously guard a pet theory of your own!