Category Archives: writing

Writerly scientist derided scientist-writer?

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ResearchBlogging.orgFollowing up on the recent discovery that novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov correctly supposed that Polyommatus blue butterflies colonized the New World in stages, Jessica Palmer points out that none other than Stephen Jay Gould dismissed Nabokov’s scientific work as not up to the same standards of genius exhibited in his novels. She suggests that Nabokov’s work may have been dismissed by his contemporaries because his scientific papers were a little too colorfully written.

Roger Vila, one of Pierce’s co-authors, suggests that Nabokov’s prose style (Wellsian time machine!) did his hypothesis no favors:

The literary quality of his scientific writing, Vila says, may have led to his ideas being overlooked. “The way he explained it, using such poetry — I think this is the reason that it was not taken seriously by scientists,” Vila says. “They thought it was not ‘hard science,’ let’s say. I think this is the reason that this hypothesis has been waiting for such a long time for somebody to vindicate it.”

That’s a little harsh toward scientists, but it seems plausible: creativity in scientific writing is rarely rewarded.

Hyperlink to quoted source sic.

Palmer’s analysis is thoughtful and thorough, and you should read all of it. But she misses what (to me) seems like the best wrinkle in the whole business: Gould, alone of all the scientists, should have been sympathetic to the dangers of writing “too well” in a scientific context.

Stephen Jay Gould, one suspects, never murdered a single darling in a decades-long career of writing for scientific and popular venues. The iconoclastic 1979 paper “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme” [PDF], coauthored with Richard Lewontin, is a case in point. Gould and Lewontin wanted to make the point that not all traits and behaviors of living species are necessarily adaptive—that is, evolved to perform a function that enhances survival and/or reproductive success. Today it is widely agreed that this point needed making. But Gould’s writing undercut the success of his own argument, or at least gave his detractors a toehold for derision.

The Cathedral of San Marco in Venice, its structurally practical arches encrusted with Baroque decoration. A metaphor for Gould’s metaphors? Photo by MorBCN.

Gould and Lewontin developed their argument with references to architecture and to literature. They compared non-adaptive traits to mosaics decorating the spandrels of the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice. Spandrels being spaces created between arches, anything decorating them is clearly secondary to the architectural decision to build an arch. They also compared “adaptationist” biologists to the character of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s satire Candide, who claims that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

Pangloss is a fool, and biologists who felt Gould and Lewontin were critiquing them took the obvious inference. One of the most biting responses to “Spandrels” focused much more on the style than the substance of the paper. The author, David Queller, titled it “The spaniels of St. Marx and the Panglossian paradox: A critique of a rhetorical programme” [PDF], and the parody only continues from there.

Queller built an elaborate and unflattering image of Gould and Lewontin as Marxists focused on their political perspective like the dog in the old RCA ads fixated on a grammophone. He even referenced one of Gould’s favorite cultural touchstones, the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, to tweak Gould as “the very model of a science intellectual.” Queller manages to have his cake and decry it, too—he mocks Gould and Lewontin with overflown metaphors, then backs off to say that such tactics are irresponsible:

So, how did I like my test drive in the supercharged rhetoric-mobile? It’s certainly been fun … but it’s pretty hard to keep the damned thing on the road. … my little parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern Major General, who knows about everything but matters military, might induce an uninformed reader to conclude that Gould knows about everything but matters biological. But this is exactly the complaint that many biologists would level at Spandrels—that colorful language can mislead as well as inform.

So if Gould’s reading of Nabokov’s scientific achievement was predicated on the opinions of Nabokov’s colleagues, who didn’t care for elaborate prose in their scientific journals, well, I think that’s what my English teachers called irony.

References

Gould, S., & Lewontin, R. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc. Royal Soc. B, 205 (1161), 581-98 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.1979.0086

Queller, D. (1995). The spaniels of St. Marx and the Panglossian paradox: A critique of a rhetorical programme. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 70 (4), 485-9 DOI: 10.1086/419174

Vila, R., Bell, C., Macniven, R., Goldman-Huertas, B., Ree, R., Marshall, C., Balint, Z., Johnson, K., Benyamini, D., & Pierce, N. (2011). Phylogeny and palaeoecology of Polyommatus blue butterflies show Beringia was a climate-regulated gateway to the New World. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2213

#scio11 aftermath, and an idea for #scio12

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At ScienceOnline, even the coffee break is nerdy. Photo by Ryan Somma.

So now I’m back in Moscow, mostly recovered from ScienceOnline 2011. I’ve almost finished the copy of Holly Tucker’s cracking good book Blood Work that came in my swag bag. (Cross-country flights are great for reading.) I’m breaking in my new “How to Explain Your Research at a Party” t-shirt from AAAS, and I’ve finished a conference weekend’s worth of laundry. I even got to resume my workout schedule with an outdoor run, because all of a sudden northern Idaho is as balmy as North Carolina. And I’m able to think about the conference a little more reflectively than I did in my previous posts.

One of the highlights of the conference that’s still sticking with me is the “How to Explain Science in Blog Posts” session, which broke the audience into small groups to discuss different aspects of science blogging. I made a beeline for the “writing” group, since that’s been on my mind lately. The group moderators, Ed Yong and Christie Wilcox, led a great discussion on tone and the use of metaphor, and even shaded into the writing process. None other than Bora Zivkovic related how he’ll have his wife edit particularly important posts.

As I said in my earlier brief wrap-up, the whole session reminded me of my undergrad creative writing class, and in a good way. But we didn’t really have time for specific examples, and could barely scratch the surface of the process from finding a subject to writing it up and presenting it.

It occurred to me (about two miles into the aforementioned run) that I’d really enjoy a workshop that took participants through that entire process for a single post. I’m imagining it’d have to be at least two sessions: one discussing how to come up with topics, another for the writing process, and maybe a third for presentation with images, layout, et cetera. It’d be especially cool to have participants actually develop a single post through the course of the different sessions, and do some peer editing at one or more stages.

Is it too early to start proposing sessions for ScienceOnline 2012?

Writing without a spotter

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Photo by athena.

Writing is hard, but writing alone is even harder.

Most writing projects are team efforts. Even if only one person is responsible for the final product, there’s someone else to read drafts and help shape the text into something clear and pleasing. Books or newspaper and magazine articles have editors. Scientific papers usually have coauthors, or at the very least colleagues who’ll provide feedback on a draft—and then peer reviewers and journal editors who will point out inaccuracies and missed commas with equal delight.

You can even ask your roommate to look over the essay you’re writing for English 102, if he’s still awake at 2 a.m.

By comparison, blog posts are often composed in a vacuum. I’ll read a scientific paper or a news article, or view a video on YouTube, compose my thoughts about it, drop in a Creative Commons-licensed photo or two from Flickr, and then give the whole thing a read-through in Blogger’s “preview” mode to make sure I like it. Sometimes I’ll repeat that final read-through a couple of times for a long post, but that’s all the editorial process I have. I’m the only one to see the work until I click “publish post.”

This never really seemed like a problem to me until I was working through my reviewing for the Open Lab 2010 anthology, and began to suspect that I’m not the only one writing this way. Time after time I read Open Lab submissions and caught myself thinking about the comments I’d scribble in the margins if I were editing them, instead of rendering yes/no judgements.

Not that these OL submissions weren’t good writing—several were among the best in my list to review. But as a reader who wasn’t also the author, I could see how small changes—moving a few paragraphs to create a clearer train of thought, or returning to an idea from the first few sentences to provide a neater ending—could improve the work. I’m left to wonder what improvements someone else would suggest if he or she could look over my posts before I publish them.

I’m not about to hire an editor for this one-man blog, and I don’t know how often I’ll get up the nerve to ask colleagues or my roommate to look over blog posts and give feedback. Short of that, I think I’m going to spend more effort thinking about what I like in the kind of writing I want to do here—science, for non-scientists—and how I can emulate it. If I can’t have an editor or a coauthor, I can at least pay deliberate attention to what works and what doesn’t, and see if I can’t get better at writing without a spotter.

I may end up with some bruises to the ego, but I’ll survive. After all, I’ve only just realized that I’m in danger of falling.

Fearmongering for good?

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Medical thriller specialist Robin Cook outlines the plot of a book about the catastrophe resulting from recombinant influenza, in the hope that such a book would spur preparedness efforts:

Governments and individuals will do desperate things, some rational and others not so, like deploying the military to try to close borders or using firearms to keep possibly infected strangers at bay. Hospitals will be overwhelmed at first and later forced to lock their doors. To avoid interpersonal contact, people will hole up in their homes, causing government offices, schools, and businesses to close. Many public officials will be forced to quarantine themselves from a diseased population and retreat to undisclosed locations, which will only fuel the public panic. Riot police in biohazard suits (if there are even enough to go around) will increasingly be called upon to beat back waves of sick, scared, and helpless civilians, desperate for food, water, and medicine.

Tom Clancy seems to inspire a lot of our homeland security policy (though less so under the present Administration) — why shouldn’t Cook have a go at public health planning? Personally, I find the pandemic ‘flu threat more probable than terrorists armed with exploding water bottles.

Happy Birthday Strunk & White: You suck!

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For the 50th anniversary of The Elements of Style, the little writing guide by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, the New York Times “Room for debate” feature invites linguists and grammar geeks to discuss the book’s impact. The only “debate” however, seems to be over whether S&W is merely outdated and worthless, or actively harmful. Here’s Geoffrey Pullman, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh:

Again and again, Strunk and White recommend the stuffy and unidiomatic, and warn against what sounds effective and natural. Even their beliefs about English as it used to be are wrong; but foisting their prejudices on today’s students is much more so.

And here’s professor of English Ben Yagoda, from the University of Delaware:

White purports to be talking about “style” but is really advocating a particular style. It is a style of absence: absence of grammatical mistakes, breeziness, opinions, jargon, clichés, mixed metaphors, wordiness and, indeed, anything that could cloud the transparency of the prose and remind readers that a real person composed it.

Clearly none of the contributors have recently read through a pile of undergraduate writing assignments. S&W, and the “stuffy and unidiomatic” style they advocate, is the only antidote for the sort of dreadful writing undergraduates learn to produce over twelve years of assignments based on filling up a given amount of space. Beginning writers don’t have an ear for what is “effective and natural” — they need training wheels.


Photo by JKim1.

I’ve benefited from those training wheels myself. As both a writer and reader of scientific prose, I have nothing but respect for S&W’s knee-jerk reaction against the passive voice, and their repeated exhortations to write clearly and simply. Sometimes the passive voice is indeed better (as S&W freely concede), but without great care it can reduce an already technical passage to an unreadable tangle. Likewise, it is sometimes necessary to use specialized vocabulary and twisty verbiage to communicate complex ideas; but more often these get in the way of communicating scientific results.

The little book never pretends to be the last word, but it is a vital starting point. As White wrote in the introduction:

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.

A limerick for Darwin’s 200th

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Thursday is, of course, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. To kick off a week of commemorations, symposia, and nerdy parties, I humbly submit a limerick:

The vicar, one Quite Reverend Darwin
Considered, whilst penning each sermon,
How he might have advanced,
Had he taken that chance
To go with the Beagle a-voyagin’.

(It is widely considered that Darwin, had he not taken an interest in natural history, would’ve ended up as a clergyman; see David Quamman’s excellent pocket biography, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.)

Inauguration Day

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Photo by Jeremy Yoder.

In one of those quirks of political geography, the Idaho panhandle is apart from the rest of the state in the Pacific time zone. So Barack Obama will become President of the United States at about 0830 local time, and I am listening to the Inauguration on NPR as part of only slightly extended morning laziness with a cup of coffee and Ovaltine. Through one of those quirks of weather, my part of Idaho is under what’s called a thermal inversion – a layer of warm air somewhere above us is preventing the air at ground level from moving. At this time of year, that means there’s no wind to blow away the freezing fog, which every night coats trees’ leafless twigs in a filigree of frost. In Washington, though, a new wind is blowing, and today, at least, there’s a smell of spring in the air.


Photo by Barack Obama.