{"id":4016,"date":"2014-01-01T14:53:37","date_gmt":"2014-01-01T14:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=4016"},"modified":"2014-01-01T14:53:37","modified_gmt":"2014-01-01T14:53:37","slug":"science-poetry-and-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2014\/01\/01\/science-poetry-and-gender\/","title":{"rendered":"Science, Poetry and Gender"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not so long ago I gave a talk in Oxford about why I believe it is important for the public not to feel so distanced from science and maths that they are comfortable saying ‘I never could do maths at school’ or ‘you must be so clever to be a physicist’. Why is that acceptable in society whereas ‘I never could read Shakespeare at school’ would be regarded as beyond the pale? One listener asked me afterwards if I had ever read any of Mary Midgeley<\/a>‘s work. The answer at the time was no, but I followed up his recommendation and have just been reading her Science and Poetry.<\/i><\/p>\n

Like Gaul, this book comes in three parts. Crudely speaking, the first I found illuminating, the second irrelevant and slightly dubious on the subject of consciousness and the third too full of pious hopes (largely focussed on Gaian ideas) for my taste. So I had better just concentrate on the first part, the part that deals most explicitly with the book title and with my own interests. Some of what follows will however have been influenced by the narrative throughout.<\/p>\n

For Midgley, a philosopher of the Mary Warnock and Elizabeth Anscombe generation in Oxford, writing books came late in life. She was 82 when this particular book was published in 2001, but age has not dimmed her language or the forcefulness of her views. For her, poetry encompasses prose just as much as the stuff poets actually write and from which she clearly feels scientists cut themselves off.\u00a0 Of the book, she says in her introduction:<\/p>\n

In particular, it asks how we can bring together our ideas of science and poetry within a whole that has a place for both of them. It investigates the strange imperialistic, isolating ideology about science which now makes this kind of connection seem impossible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Really? Most scientists I know would not subscribe to this view of imperialism in their work (or writings).\u00a0 As it happens, in parallel with reading her book I was also reading Caspar Henderson<\/a>‘s\u00a0wonderful Book of Barely Imagined Beings<\/a>, a book that beautifully mingles the poetic and the scientific in shimmering prose that yet is packed full of detailed facts (and numbers) about the organisms he chooses for his bestiary. His book strikes me as an immediate counter-example to Midgley’s position. The juxtaposition of these two tomes made for fascinating reading, but certainly weakened my willingness to accept Midgley’s views. To pile on the evidence, the next book I picked up was Seed to Seed<\/a>, by Nicholas Harberd<\/a>. This is a book-cum-diary (as it happens, recommended to me by the author himself after this same Oxford talk I mentioned above) examining the life cycle of Aridopsis thalania<\/i>, that I would say also effectively repudiates Midgley’s view that scientists can’t reach beyond their narrow world to bring science and the wider world into happy conjunction.<\/p>\n

To take a specific example of Midgley’s pugnaciousness with respect to science and scientists, she has a long history of disagreement with Richard Dawkins. In particular she objects to his use of the word selfishness<\/a> (as in The Selfish Gene) as being inappropriate to describe the motivations of complex organisms such as humans and their society.\u00a0 This theme of scientists using language one-dimensionally to impose a view that she feels is (to quote her) ‘ludicrous’ and smacking of the imperialism she hates, permeates her text. But many scientists can also take exception to Dawkins’ rather black and white views: that in itself is not sufficient to distinguish the philosopher from the scientist. But I found it rather dispiriting to watch her paint all scientists with a single hue in this way. She seemed to feel we were all equally one-dimensional and stuck in our silos whereas she, and those of her ilk, were necessarily better capable (in her eyes) of taking a multi-facetted view of things. Well, maybe. But to dissect individual pieces of writing, each of which may be trying to convey one particular message, and to deduce from that that all scientists are unable to join the dots, strikes me as both untrue and not a sound deduction. It may be an interesting intellectual point to make, but not sufficient fodder on which to base a whole section of the book.<\/p>\n

I also had a strong desire to direct her to physicists who are exhibiting an increasing interest in emergent phenomena and complexity. \u00a0These ideas of emergence seem entirely consonant with her desire for the whole to be seen as more than the sum of their parts. Although 20th century physics may have had much that was reductionist in it, there are increasingly whole swathes of it which are much less so. Speaking as a physicist who had to spend many years defending the idea that the research I did on biological systems was physics despite it being inherently complex, I know that in the not-too-distant past many physicists didn’t feel comfortable with that complexity. Maybe when she was writing the book that was still the prevalent view of those whom she spoke to or whose work she read. But it certainly isn’t so now, and that is not due to the philosophical drivers or virtues that she puts forward; it is simply that the field progresses. Maybe if she met some 21st century physicists she would feel that we were more in touch with her world view and less imperialistic than she feared.<\/p>\n

She could also learn from 21st century physicists that coarse-graining, the process of analysing problems at different length scales as appropriate to the actual question in case leaving out the unnecessary details at other (smaller) length scales, is another key tool these days. This too seemed to be a concept she hadn’t come across as she repeatedly revolted against reductionism to the smallest component parts, which was what she equated with the physicist’s mindset. This she thought was a mindset that could only miss the cooperativity of how we ourselves, at all levels from our own cells and genes to our whole society, operate. Again, I just felt she hadn’t been exposed to the right physicists! She was damning us for a philosophy that is no longer rampant.<\/p>\n

None of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy the book or find it stimulating. I did. The part that I found most interesting was her historical overview of the language of science from Bacon on, something she refers to as ‘The Baconian onslaught on Nature’<\/i>. Her view of this dominance and the feud she identified between Feeling and Reason that started around the time of the founding of the Royal Society and to which she traces the ongoing divisions between science (equated with Reason) and the Humanities (for which read Feeling) make for enlightening reading. I also found her interpretation of the way this has led to the gendering of science \u2013 which echoes that of Evelyn Fox Keller in her much earlier book Reflections of Gender and Science (which I touched on in an earlier post<\/a>) \u2013 highly relevant to many of the issues that underline much of what I write on this blog in general.\u00a0 To quote Midgley:<\/p>\n

\u2026gendered opposition between intellect and feeling was the point of Bacon’s claim about a ‘masculine birth of time’ and of Henry Oldenburg’s boast that the Royal Society would ‘raise a Masculine Philosophy’.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So a book with much food for thought, even if I simultaneously was irritated by it and frustrated by her ability to lump all scientists together as a monolithic group who all thought in the same \u2013 and to her eyes the ‘wrong’ \u2013 way.<\/p>\n

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Not so long ago I gave a talk in Oxford about why I believe it is important for the public not to feel so distanced from science and maths that they are comfortable saying ‘I never could do maths at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[739,737,740,738],"class_list":["post-4016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communicating-science","tag-caspar-henderson","tag-mary-midgley","tag-nicholas-harberd","tag-richard-dawkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}