Pharyngula

There are a lot of non-scientists who think you can be a well-rounded person without ever studying any math or science at all. Is there any curriculum at any serious university in this country in which you can graduate without taking some courses in writing or literature or art or a foreign language? No. Yet there are plenty in which math and science are left to those weirdo science majors.

Bravo, I say. There needs to be the "well rounded student." Hard science geeks who need to be exposed to poetry. Fine arts majors who need to spend time in the chem lab.

My experience, a BA in humanities, no hard science at all.
Then an MS about 5 years later. Now THAT at least presented some hard (or attempts at hard) science. Stat. Writing a thesis with data and hypothesis. I hated it at the time. And yet, it helped tremendously in my learning.

Posted by: compass | May 14, 2006 7:33 PM

No, we can't have science "take a rest." We don't have too much science already. There are untold problems in our world that may be on the verge of a solution if the right science gets funded. Unfortunately we don't know what they are until some find them, and that won't happen if we stop now.

Science also plays a role in the development of art and culture. Much of our modern culture exists because of the breakthroughs made by science. Without science we'd have no radio, television, motion pictures etc. etc.

Posted by: tim gueguen | May 14, 2006 7:47 PM

One of my best friends is a graduate student in English, working on his Ph.D. dissertation. He is regarded askance by the other English grads because he knows math. (He took three semesters of calculus as an undergrad.) His professors and his fellow grads are almost entirely innocent of the least trace of any science or math, but that sure doesn't stop them from opining about it. When they offer comments like "Well, a mathematician would say..." and he demurs, they get very defensive and irritated with him. He's the English department's one-man freak show, instead of being regarded as a scholar of rare breadth because he has some non-trivial knowledge outside his field. Perhaps if he had minored in philosophy instead...

Posted by: Zeno | May 14, 2006 7:48 PM

Science is more highly rated than the humanities? In what parallel universe?

I have humanities colleagues who are perfectly fine with being innumerate. Many of them have this dismissive attitude towards the science faculty (my training though not my job at the moment) as being less cultivated, irremediably reductivist, and all around less nuanced than the humanities side of the street.

I ride to work with a cultural historian and last week I spent much of the drive explaining pop music to her and how to get to Van Morrison from Jackie Wilson (a straight shot).

The irony is that she was going to go in and lecture to a class on this.

We may not need more science students, but we definitely need more science literacy and a bunch more respect.

Posted by: rrp | May 14, 2006 8:07 PM

I agree with most of your points about science, but I have to oppose your tangential point about distribution requirements. I graduated from Cornell recently enough to still be angry about some of the crap I had to take to get my degree.

I started college with a healthy respect for the humanities, and I still respect several of them. But many of them are plagued by pseudo-intellectualism thick enough to make a scientist's head explode. They are formulaic: they hijack a bunch of big words from an avant garde field of science like string theory and mix them together with terrible metaphors, stylish words like "praxis" and "hermeneutics," and self-citations until they've assembled enough garbage to to fill a river barge. Publish and repeat. These papers turn out to be utterly meaningless if you sit down and actually decode them.

This only afflicts certain fields and stands in stark contrast to people doing good work in economics, history, writing, political science, and other reasonable humanities. But universities waste billions of dollars paying other, fake academics who waste students' time and are largely to blame for the public attitude of anti-intellectualism. All the rightwing talking points about intellectuals in general (the "out-of-touch Ivory Tower those-who-can't-teach" nonsense) rings completely true for fields like social theory and art criticism. Any time one of those professors appears in public, the meaning of the word "professor" is diminished in the eyes of anybody listening.

A good place to find the nonsense papers I'm talking about is http://www.ctheory.net. A quick skim over the articles turns up this typical example of their silliness: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=500. You can also Google the "Sokal Hoax" to see the very clever way that a physicist revealed the lack of intellectual standards in some social sciences. Feynman griped about the problem in his anecdotes, too. At best these people make one or two trivial, self-evident points in an absurdly convoluted way. At worst they are complete frauds.

Many university requirements don't really allow scientists to diversify their education by studying the arts. I never had a single distribution requirement I could fulfill by learning to paint or play a musical instrument or design a building. The requirements instead pointed me in the direction of people who pointlessly over-analyze somebody else's art. Art history, criticism, and theory fulfill many more requirements than art itself, and they usually drown a student's natural creativity beneath a sea of fashionable buzzwords. I can speak only for my own experiences, but I suspect the problem is widespread.

Sorry this is slightly off your topic, but I think it's important to recognize that undergrad science majors who hate their distribution requirements shouldn't be so quickly dismissed.

Posted by: Troutnut | May 14, 2006 8:35 PM

I think part of the problem is that people in both science and the humanities still have this false dichotomy -- as if people in universities had only two choices: "science" vs the "humanities". In reality, the real problem isn't people shifting out of the sciences into the humanities, it's people shifting out of both scholarly domains into purely practical affairs like accounting and finance. Even though I'm a practicing scientist, I have a lot of respect for historians and other members of the humanities. Like us, they want to add to knowledge, not just pull in a good salary.

Posted by: Jonathan Badger | May 14, 2006 8:44 PM

reminds me of 1968-1972: science is part of the establishment. science is killing the environment. science is making bombs, Agent Orange. science is wasting money on the Apollo lunar program. groovey ..... (actually, i still say "groovey".) yeah, and science set up and enabled the personal computer revolution, which many hippie types found their way to world domination ....

but seriously folks ...

okay, four factors.

first, college students have in my observation always been very keen judges of Where Their Bacon Lies. they might not be able to see reliably 10-20 years in the future, but, properly or not, most opt for careers which have some reasonable likelihood of panning out. why are Mr Gates and company having such a hard time finding computer science people to work for them? because they know there's no apparent future for software people in the United States. students also have a keen sense of a payoff to themselves gauged by a combination of financial and fulfillment. so, if the workload seems too high on a career path now or in the future to warrant what they'll get out of it, they'll avoid: "Danger Will Robinson!" competition in science might be getting tougher because the competition is and has been truly international rather than national.

second, if anything, science as performed today is TOO practical, too results focussed, too forced by the hands that feed it to be concerned about "are we getting our money's worth?" and "what is it good for?" the best science is today and always has been an educated waltz into the unknown, driven more by curiosity than anything else. the funding of science by the Department of Defense in earlier decades was extensive, but there were also few strings on it, because the funding was set up as part of an enlightened process, by people who understood what it really took to do science. ironically, by focussing science upon high payoff areas, the science that is done is more expensive, requiring bigger and better instruments and devices, and quick and massive assaults upon subjects of study in order to get results out quickly and control costs. the major science projects of the 20th century were actually long term, patient things, like the drilling program which the JOIDES Resolution and its sister ships were a part of which provided the clear documented evidence for plate tectonics.

third, like it or not, the United States is in economic decline, with resources available for discretionary spending dwindling, consumed increasingly for basic necessities, with federal and state resources consumed by adventures and subsidies to corporations, and ownership of these corporations and of government (who owns T-bills?) increasingly going to the wealthier groups in the world. thus, whatever things perceived as non-immediate or nice-but-not-necessary are going to bear these cuts: libraries (who uses them?), arts (troublemakers and traitors and perverts, no?), scientists (ivory tower dreamers and money wasters, right?).

four, science is changing. that is, the classic formulation of science as problem solving, classification, and quintessential book learnin' is being supplemented by the intrusion of computation, statistics, and information technology. i think we collectively are only beginning to understand how to grapple with these. we certainly don't know how to properly explain and use these tools in science-driven policy decisions, e.g., climate models, and we have a difficult time using them even in engineering, e.g., Space Shuttle debris impact models. this doesn't mean science is unimportant. it means there are groups of people supporting science who aren't formally considered scientists but probably should be. in this regard, i have been impressed with the jacks-of-all-trades kinds of rewards the Australian scientific community seems to grow. so scientists might not even understand what science is becoming. certainly, values-driven scholarship isn't science, e.g., biblical archaeology. but this other stuff? what is informatics?

and finally, to those who demean science and technology because of its association with power and the powerful: (a) to the extent science and technology are about reality and about controlling aspects of reality, it is natural that those in power would align themselves with it. sadly, many don't understand science so they end up alienating it and those who practice it. (b) language and media communications are also a technology, some of it very old, some of it new. which has the greater mote in the eye?

Posted by: ekzept | May 14, 2006 8:57 PM

Science is more highly rated than the humanities? In what parallel universe?

Ours. At least in terms of funding, that is. Science professors make more on average than humanities profs (of course, scientists tend to bring in millions of dollars in NIH and NSF grants, of which a rather large fraction which gets skimmed off by the universities as overhead).

Also, there is actually funding for grad students. When I went off to get my doctorate in microbiology, my parents were amazed that I was fully supported by the department. My father did a Masters in history and would have liked to have gotten a doctorate, but he just couldn't afford it -- the stipends that science graduate students get just aren't there in the humanities.

Posted by: Jonathan Badger | May 14, 2006 9:12 PM

You're right about that. But I'm so spoiled--I teach the scientific method and research literacy to complementary and alternative medical practitioners who are motivated to learn and understand what they didn't get in their previous education, and apply it to reading research literature, and using the information from those articles in their practice.

However, my students are self-selected for my course, so I get the ones who've already chosen to seek this knowledge out. I'm on a study safety oversight board with a researcher who taught at a local Chinese medicine school, and the stories she tells me about anti-science attitudes among her students! Quantum this, and evil scientist conspiracy theory that--I'm afraid I wouldn't maintain my equanimity nearly as well as she did with it.

Yay for selection bias! (in this case)

Posted by: RavenT | May 14, 2006 9:30 PM

It's true that science faculty have higher salaries on average than humanities. Within science, physicists and chemists make more than biologists, and across campus economists make more than geographers. It's also true that as a PhD student in science you are virtually guaranteed full (and more) funding, a better conference travel budget, a computer, and access to millions of dollars of equipment and resources. In the social sciences and humanities, a PhD student is lucky to get their own desk, often has to go into massive debt, and has more teaching/TAing responsibilities.

There are lots of rationalizations for these disparities, including retention of scientists in academia and the fact that it costs tons of money just to DO science at all, whereas it doesn't cost as much to, say, analyze Norse epic poetry. Science students get full funding because the cost of keeping a grad student alive is a miniscule percentage of most science budgets, but a significant dent in the budget of a humanities department.

None of this makes it "fair," though, especially in a society where status and prestige are inextricably linked to money, both how much you make and how much you control.

As for people, especially "intellectuals," who are willfully ignorant or hostile to science and mathematics...yes, they are annoying and misled. but they certainly aren't the norm among people I know in the humanities and social sciences. I have heard far more scientists snidely questioning the value, purpose and methods of academic study of culture or philosophy than vice versa.

Posted by: miko | May 14, 2006 10:04 PM

The sleeper has awakened.

messianic delusions, Polly Anna?

no, only kidding. it's just that i decided to watch the whole 6 hour Sci-Fi channel remake of Dune yesterday, for whatever reason. i got to thinking it ought to be something The Decider should watch, especially Harkonnen comments about 'for every Fremen we kill, ten more spring up to fight us'. i guess it would be too much to ask The Decider to read the thing.

Herbert said a lot of things in Dune, many being decidedly anti-science. but, hey, it's great fiction. too bad the books Heretics of Dune and beyond weren't as good. and i just can't imagine any American public tolerating God Emperor of Dune, not any time soon.

Posted by: ekzept | May 14, 2006 10:08 PM

As someone who switched from humanities to the sciences, I can understand the hostility between the two "camps." Really, they shouldn't be two camps, since they could benefit from working together, but many colleges set up a false dichotomy.

For example, most colleges are rather balkanized in terms of funding and governance. At my school, most sciences are in a separate college within the university. Chem labs are shiny and new, whereas the English class rooms are practically rotting.

Part of the problem? Gen eds. These form the core curriculum at a lot of universities so we students can be "well rounded." Good idea, bad execution. I took science gen-eds as a history major and english gen-eds as a biology major. They last thing they do is ingratiate students towards "the other side." At my university, often they are composed of a professor reading dumbed down material off a powerpoint to a class of nearly 500 people. Some choice courses include "Life With Animals" and "Talking Culture." Students end up thinking that other disciplines are useless and trivial.

Sure, there are good gen-eds, after all, I was a girl who was homeschooled and taught creation science and I ended up in biology because of some really good professors, but a lot of them just engender hostility. If universities and academia are to become "whole" again, new vitality needs to be injected into core curriculums.

Posted by: Melissa | May 14, 2006 10:20 PM

Science is a field whose practitioners, like those in English literature or American history or philosophy, pursued it because of a love of knowledge.

Damn straight. I don't know why there's a perceived binary relationship between the humanities and science. We're all in the pursuit of knowledge, after all. We just go about it in slightly different ways. (Not to mention it's pretty silly to lump all things in two categories. The difference between marxist theory and clay sculpture, or pure mathematics and plant biology can't be greater than the difference between psychology and medicine, say.)

All the rightwing talking points about intellectuals in general (the "out-of-touch Ivory Tower those-who-can't-teach" nonsense) rings completely true for fields like social theory and art criticism.

Oi. The social needs analysing. There's no use exploring the uiniverse if we can't critique ourselves, and the social stuff that constitutes the self. I don't particularly like the word praxis either, but that's what peer review, and argument is for. If you're bothered about the state of critical theory, feel free to do some observation and theorising yourself, and discuss it with a student or professor of the subject. The subject ain't homogenous or static. Personally, I find social theory to be fascinating and remarkably useful.

Posted by: The Amazing Kim | May 14, 2006 11:03 PM

Didn't mean that to sound as agressive, or twice-posted, as it did...
I heard a rumour once that the science and arts students were deliberately kept apart from each other, and separate cultures created, so they wouldn't get together and become politically active. Because neither of them have much chance of getting real jobs when they leave, they don't have much to lose from rioting and burning stuff.

Posted by: The Amazing Kim | May 14, 2006 11:13 PM

Medicine is so messed up that even scholars in the humanities can tell. It's the case that proves the rule, RavenT.

Posted by: Caledonian | May 14, 2006 11:37 PM

I can't even remember the last time I had extended contact with someone in the sciences (I'm a musicologist). My roommate through all four undergrad years was a CS major. That was probably it.

As an undergraduate music major, I was required to take one class in science or math. Not one each. One. It pissed me off, because I wanted to take more science, just for fun. I'd have liked to complete the entire chem lab course track.

But nope. Specialization killed that pretty quick.

Posted by: Dan | May 14, 2006 11:39 PM

Absent any other data, you're right: social theory successfully tackled sexist notions in medicine. But there is other data, which suggests that social theory either got it right by accident, or was not needed to get it right.

It's worth noting that Alan Sokal agrees that there's plenty of robust critique of medicine and other fields on feminist and other grounds. His problem isn't with feminist or antiracist critiques that refute research first and then show how sexist or racist bias caused the researcher to come to erroneous conclusions. Rather, it's with postmodernists who publish incomprehensible papers that say that reality doesn't exist, or defend those who do.

Now, Sokal is about the most academically moderate critic of postmodernism. More bang-on-table critics bash the entire existence of Af-Am and Gender Studies departments, or at least their political roots; conservatives would prefer it if rightist think tanks took over the entire non-scientific academia. But in the last ten years, Sokal has dominated the science side of the science wars, which has done a lot to exclude more extreme critics of social science from the debate.

Posted by: Alon Levy | May 15, 2006 12:35 AM

I wouldn't call modifying the habitual practice of excluding women from clinical trials, reforming the way rape victims had been treated in emergency rooms, or examining the received wisdom on routine mastectomies for breast cancer in light of the scientific evidence "trivial".

Can any of these things be attributed to social theorists publishing in social theory journals? I doubt it, but I don't read their tripe any more than I read FreeRepublic, so I may have missed something. One can only tolerate so much before veins start to pop.

Reread my post and you'll see I'm not condemning all social sciences (nor even all of sociology). And I certainly don't oppose careful study of social issues, but most approaches I've seen are completely stupid. The only thing dumber than an idiot is a group of idiots, and those fields are infested with them, groupthinking their way down the road to insanity at twice the speed of the neoconservatives. I dislike the specific self-absorbed corners of academia which build their own imaginary universes and suck in unrecoverable hours of student time and university money like a black hole. The worst offending philosophy I've found is "radical constructionism." The lucky uninitiated can find it summarized on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_constructionism

These people suggest -- with a straight face, no less -- that even the basic findings of science are mere social constructs. Gravity. Levers. Germs. Magnetism. Light. Evolution. Their intellectual standards make the Discovery Institute look good. The only other thing that can do that is Ralph Wiggum.

Posted by: Troutnut | May 15, 2006 12:52 AM

Dude, take off your flannel, Kurt Cobain's dead, the 90s are long gone.

Sokal brilliantly skewered the worst excesses of the writing style of a faddish minority of postmodernists (a decade ago).

I know it's been around for a while, but it's still a great example for anyone who hasn't seen the fraud of social theory first-hand. Classes I took a few years ago were filled with precisely the kind of crap Sokal called out, and I really doubt the field has redeemed itself yet. And Sokal's point was about not their writing style, but their indifference toward actual substance. The style just made it funny.

Posted by: Troutnut | May 15, 2006 1:02 AM

Can any of these things be attributed to social theorists publishing in social theory journals?

Publishing in journals, like publishing in a science journal, isn't going to do much at all, no. It will expose your ideas for critisism and evaluation, but that's about it. Practical applications can made by a range of other people, later, or your theories can be used to expand another person's argument. In an era of growing anti-intellectualism, where less appreciation is given to abstract throught and theory over concrete applications, universities (in this country at least... or my uni at least) are definitely under pressure to justify superficially unproductive departments.

The social sciences are by far the most self-critical disciplines, arguably too much so.

Good point. Sometimes it just seems like a huge 200 year stoush...

Posted by: The Amazing Kim | May 15, 2006 1:39 AM

Troutnut wrote:

I dislike the specific self-absorbed corners of academia which build their own imaginary universes and suck in unrecoverable hours of student time and university money like a black hole.

Hey! What's your problem with math? :)

Posted by: archgoon | May 15, 2006 2:39 AM

PZ, Great post! Thanks for raising this discussion topic. I think this is an important topic that deserves more attention. Liberals seems to have a slightly better batting average with science lately, but they aren't a perfect group. By the way, thanks for quickly jumping on the earlier recent embarrassment.

I think that Melissa might be on to something with her comments about gen eds not always being a great way to show undergraduates students a look into another field. While a gen ed might be needed to get some basic background, liberal arts students should take a couple of upper level courses outside of their area. I believe that UMM requires at least one such course (a good first step). Serious students should be advised to pursue more.

Posted by: brent t. | May 15, 2006 8:47 AM

The way I have always put matters is that one needs to understand science for humanistic reasons: without it, one fails to understand one of the most important cultural products of humanity ever. Conversely, one needs a humanistic approach to understand science. This is what I have mentioned earlier about science shading into philosophy. Similarly with technology - to design an artifact entails making ethical and aesthetic decisions.

Dan: What would have stopped you from doing chemistry and music? Money? Time?

BTW, as for the "social critiques of biology" Paul Gross has an interesting retort to the old canard about "feminist embryology" etc. in the collection A House Built on Sand.

Posted by: Keith Douglas | May 15, 2006 9:38 AM

Dear All,

First of all, let me say I'm very pleased that my diary sparked this discussion, which was its purpose.

I don't have more time now to respond, sadly, but I would very much like to do so later.

I do feel that my position (questions, more than a fixed position) has been somewhat mischaracterized, though, so I just wanted to register that objection.

The author of this article does make many strong points, though, and I sincerely appreciate that they've taken to time to do so.

Quickly, though, perhaps the grossest distortion has to do with my claimt that Science hasn't been cultivated due to a love of learning. I'm not at all (at all) saying that the practitioners are soulless. I'm saying that social patronage of Science in this country is not patronage intended to facilitate the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The patronage patterns and infrastructure for the pursuit of science have to do with its perceived social utility.

I'm saying that that utility should be examined. Science education cannot and ought not be understood independently of the applications it has because those applications are the reason for its relative social prestige.

Ask anyone whether kids should learn more science or art and they'll probably say the former, based on an ethos that rewards "hard" knowledge as opposed to "soft."

I'm questioning the social status of Science, not its intrinsic merits as a discipline of learning.

I'm all for learning, the more the better. I'm just saying that there are only so many resources and given that, there is a zero-sum dimension to patterns of patronage and support. The more there is of science, the less there is of something else.

I think that the balance of learning ought to be reconsidered because in my view science is perhaps disproportionately valued by society right now.

Sorry, have to go, more later.

Thanks again for the discussion, it's very productive and important.

Posted by: weeping for brunnhilde | May 15, 2006 9:51 AM

Please don't blame computer science for the falling number of (hard-) science students; we've seen our numbers drop 40% or more since the dot-com crash. At my (liberal arts) university, chemistry and biology are *encouraging* us to "poach" some of their students, since they have too many.

On the other hand, please don't credit students with incredible insight in steering away from the field. Most of the research and statistics seems to indicate that outsourcing is way overblown. Computer jobs are still among the top growth areas in the economy, and projected to be there as far out as I've seen anybody make projections, but we don't have nearly the graduates to fill them.

- humble assistant professor of the new handmaid of the sciences

Posted by: Tom Hudson | May 15, 2006 10:11 AM

This discussion reminds me (somehow) of the ridiculous weirdness that happened when Rumsfeld was given an award for worst speech of some kind, by some group. Sorry, don't remember any of the details, it was the thing he said about known unknowns and so on.

My impression at the time, until now not formalized into words, was that most scientists got what he was trying to say - go out, learn stuff, and find out that there are things you don't know that you previously didn't even know existed. And most Arts-majors (for lack of a better term) had no problem decoding what he said; his speech was fine, and completely comprehensible.

So a person with sufficient breadth of education - either a scientist with a good background in humanities, or a humanities-person (argh