…and this is a 
We don't have physics envy, but we still have to deal with physics snobbery
Category: Science
Posted on: June 30, 2007 2:00 PM, by PZ Myers
Peggy has an excellent discusion of the peculiar attitudes towards biology held by physicists and engineers, which includes this wonderful complaint by Jack Cohen:
In summer 2002, I was at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. Lots of biologists presenting, for sure. But… one very popular event was a presentation by three famous astronomers: 'Is There Life Out There?' I prefaced my first question to them by a little imaginative scenario: three biologists discussing the properties of the black hole in the middle of our galaxy. It was very clear that the astronomers really believed that they could discuss 'life' professionally, whereas everyone saw biologists talking about black holes as absurd.
Oh, and let's get started on how SF treats biology…
Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they're not biology….), even the materials that future everyday clothes (not only spacesuits) will be made of. They do go to self-styled "astrobiologists", who are usually astronomers or astrophysicists who remember some Biology 1.01 (or think they could if pressed). Between them they invent reptiloid "aliens" (who are cold-blooded enough to do all those dastardly things no warm-blooded American male could do…), feline aliens (who have the psychology of the household cat writ large, especially by more mature female authors…), dinosaur "aliens"…. Or giant ants. Or were they mut-ants, I don't remember (but how many screen mutations have you seen that change the recipient, not its progeny?). Or a vast array of "alien" human actors with a bit of wax, as easy on the Special Effects Dept as the Pure Energy aliens, or the Aliens on mid-day TV shows who magic things out of the air and see through clothing (do their eyes emit or receive X-rays?), and which otherwise free the writers from having to produce a consistent plot. Or Vulcans who can produce viable offspring with humans (when even our cousins the fish can't - mermaids are even less breedable than Spock). These people know that they don't know about physics, or astronomy, or chemistry. Those disciplines are real science. So they get help. But the biology seems so 'obvious' to them … and they don't realise that it feels just the same to be sure and wrong as sure and right! Of course, those of us that agree biologists can see that all those anthropomorphs can't be alien, they're vertebrate mammals and must share our ancestry here on Earth. They can't see that ET can't be e-t, that the 'Alien' doesn't work - except in its primary purpose, scaring the living daylights out of the audience with the bursting-out-of-chest routine (how can a parasite pre-adapt to immune-responses, and not being felt in the chest when it's bigger than your heart?). Biology questions don't seem professional to the people who design these scenarios; it's like folk psychology or philosophy - everyone has "a right to" an opinion.
There just aren't many SF authors who do good aliens or even good biology. Sterling and Cherryh come to mind; Brin and Vinge come up with some excellently weird aliens, but sometimes they don't seem very organic to me, but more like little black boxes of biological contrivance (it's even worse for authors like Niven—I get the distinct impression they're just plugging weird components together to build an alien, as if they were assembled with bio-legos). Robinson really gets into ecology, and writes more like I imagine a real biologist would do SF. Bear gets a lot of press as someone who writes about SF biology, but I find his books unreadably wrong, right there in the uncanny valley of using a lot of biological terminology while not understanding the concepts very well.
But of course it's all because biology is easy, it isn't a hard science, it doesn't have any math … all ideas that are completely false, but perpetrated on science-fiction convention panels as willfully and as routinely as you'll find in creationist tent revivals.
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Comments
Physics describes a deeper level of reality than biology. The regularities that it attempts to describe are limiting factors on what can be, including the structure of life, and its findings constrain what you may postulate.
There's also the matter of scope. We only know how life has developed in one particular way on one particular planet. The laws of physics are universal. As a biologist, your evidence is limited to this place, as is your expertise. Physicists' expertise extends to every point in space-time.
It's not arrogance that you're responding to. They're just correct attitudes and positions that you don't like the implications of.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 30, 2007 2:14 PM
What about Niven/Pournelle's Moties? Heaven knows I'm no sci-fi fan. But I really loved The Mote in God's Eye. Not for its characters (cardboard cut-outs all; N&P were apparently hoping to achieve Patrick O'Brian In Outer Space, but failed miserably); nor for its portrayal of human society (a confused and unimaginative pastiche). But I was utterly captivated by the Moties. No idea whether such a species could in fact evolve in Real Life, but N&P started with an interesting premise -- the Moties' unusual biology (and if you haven't read the book, I won't spoil things, but let's just say their lack of bilateral symmetry is not the oddest thing about them) -- and then thought through how this would affect everything about them, down to their politics. It's one of those books I imagine I'll be re-reading every five or ten years.
Posted by: Mrs Tilton, FCD | June 30, 2007 2:17 PM
The problem, of course, is that science fiction doesn't really want alien life. It wants monsters and godlings and weremen and vampires and fairies and fantastic races and all the other inventions of fantasy and myth, with the pretext that it really could be, because it is a science fiction story and not a fantasy story. Truly alien life would be wonderfully interesting to biologists. But likely not so useful for a science fiction story.
Posted by: Russell | June 30, 2007 2:19 PM
Caledonian:
Unless a science fiction author wants to invent some new theory for how life comes about, it seems to me that any alien life ought at least be plausibly evolved.
Posted by: Russell | June 30, 2007 2:23 PM
For a very long time, the basic problem with getting the biology "right" in SF was simple: nobody had any idea just how difficult the biology really was, so nobody realized how wrong they were doing it. You can see the same syndrome in the treatment of physics in pre-WW2 SF, especially FTL drives and weaponry. Current theory says FTL travel, even FTL communication, is flatly impossible. With current technology, or even realistically-theoretical technology, it's impossible to build a hand-held laser weapon, and as for a "stun beam", forget it. But such things are staples of pulp-era SF.
But as knowledge of physics became more widely disseminated and the readers got savvier, that sort of thing disappeared, because readers wouldn't believe it anymore. The same thing will happen with biology in SF. In fact it's already happening -- there's been some decent biology-based SF published in just the last five or ten years, much more realistic than anything that came before it.
Posted by: wolfwalker | June 30, 2007 2:27 PM
The characteristics of TV and most movie aliens ultimately come down to money. Its a lot cheaper to create, and to film, an alien who is a human with a funny bump on their forehead, or antennas, or whatever, than to create alien looking aliens. And often when you do create alien looking aliens they look fake because of budget limitations. Still, people do try. The first season Space: 1999 episode "Dragon's Domain" had a tenticled nasty that scared a lot of folks back in the '70s, while the monsters in the season two two parter "Bringers of Wonder" were very obviously non-human, looking sort of like giant walking piles of slime.
Star Trek: TNG actually came up with an explaination of why the various Trek universe races can breed. It turns out the first technological race in the galaxy were humanoids who spread their DNA hither and yon, where it resulted in the evolution of a bunch of humanoid races physically compatible with each other.
Posted by: tim gueguen | June 30, 2007 2:32 PM
One of the things I loved about FIREFLY/SERENITY and their 'verse, is it proved you don't need weird aliens to do good SF...
Posted by: JJR | June 30, 2007 2:40 PM
I think some of the problem is that entry-level biology is easier than entry-level physics-- at least, easier than entry-level physics people count as physics. In high school, biology was a lot of vocabulary and memorization, while chemistry was problem-solving and worse memorization, and let's not even talk about physics when one doesn't have calculus down yet. Physics begins with a block on a frictionless track, but people look at that and say, "No, it's simplified so a normal person like me can understand it."
Biology includes math, but not at lower levels. Hardy-Weinberg and ecology statistics don't affect seventh-graders the same way algebra does. We remember physics as impossible math; we remember biology as Punnett squares and matching the term to the definition.
I'd add Czerneda to the biological SF list, with caveats; she falls into the trap of having almost too traditional of aliens. But if I'll give SF a pass for FTL travel because it gets me to the right planet, I'll give it a pass for improbable evolution because it gives me a character with a gun bolted to his carapace.
Besides, her Species Imperative books have a string of moments like this--
Dia, finishing book: Wait, there's a gigantic biological stupid right there.
Characters in Book 2: Yay!
Another character: Um, guys? We have a gigantic biological stupid over here. Gigantic biological plot hole.
Everyone else: Boy, the next three hundred pages are gonna suck.
Posted by: Diatryma | June 30, 2007 2:42 PM
Alas, Firefly got a long of physics wrong. And I'm not talking about their artificial gravity or fusion drives, I'm talking about things like gunpowder needing oxygen to ignite.
It was speculative fiction, edging into fantasy with River, not 'science' fiction.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 30, 2007 2:45 PM
I'm not really a sci-fi person, but the last sci-fi I read had an alien that was, psychologically, believably alien, so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it.
Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Posted by: Jessica Guilford | June 30, 2007 2:45 PM
That should be *lot, and jen mei NAI-shing duh FWO-tzoo!
Posted by: Caledonian | June 30, 2007 2:49 PM
[quote]There's also the matter of scope. We only know how life has developed in one particular way on one particular planet. The laws of physics are universal. As a biologist, your evidence is limited to this place, as is your expertise. Physicists' expertise extends to every point in space-time.[/quote]
That does not means that physicists can predict the outcome of certain dynamical systems that depends on initial conditions. Yes, you can talk about general things in all space time, no doubt, but when it comes to coplex systems Physics currently does not have that many things to say. And the interactions cease to be simple or trivial. You could say (well, we all, if we have our chemistry right) what are the potential limits of what life can or cannot do (Gasp! X Men are impossible!), but without proper training in Biology , in adaptabilty, back up genes and evolution, you would miss a lot of the picture. We could also talk about black holes and say "gravity is really strong there, you will fall inside and turn into a pulp, no way back". Some of us could even come up with calculations about temporal dilation at relativistic speeds.
Posted by: Guido | June 30, 2007 2:49 PM
Personally, I care not for hard sci-fi. Give me your catgirls, your four-armed jumping slimers, whatever. 'Aliens' in fiction are just humans with different bits exaggerated, a shell over human agency, like elves and dwarves and fairies. They always have been, because we're the only thing we know. And that's okay.
Posted by: Stogoe | June 30, 2007 2:49 PM
For good scifi that's based on some solid biology, check out Peter Watts' Blindsight. It's dark, but good, exploring the implications of truly alien life. The video about vampires that you linked to way back here is actual a promo for that book. Best of all, Blindsight is available online under a creative commons license, so you can check it out for free.
Posted by: lazybratsche | June 30, 2007 2:54 PM
If it makes you feel any better, us mathematicians think we're better than all of you.
(Said with tongue firmly planted in cheek)
As for good biological sci-fi. What about Asimov's Fantastic Voyage or Greg Bear's Blood Music? I don't actually know enough biology to know if they were accurate or not, but they seemed convincing to me.
Posted by: Josh | June 30, 2007 2:57 PM
*cough*
Posted by: Jessica Guilford | June 30, 2007 2:57 PM
I certainly wouldn't put a physicist above a biologist when it comes to life plausibility. Physics can be astoundingly reductionist, and their views on biology can be extraordinarily... weird. Well, weird to someone steeped in biology.
You have Penrose, who thinks that biology alone is somehow insufficient for consciousness and tries to introduce quantum effects for pieces of a cell where the cell biology explanation is sufficient, you have Hoyle with his tornado-in-a-junkyard argument for panspermia, you have Hawking with his apparent view that DNA complexity is proportional to human intelligence, and the list goes on.
Physics is a reductionist step away from chemistry, and even though physics has a lot to say about the laws underwriting chemistry, I wouldn't trust most physicists to make pronouncements on even mildly complex chemistry.
I daresay that biology is a step away, even from that.
We may only know how life evolved here, but it has evolved in many different directions, and can give us some good plausibility clues. "How might that have evolved?" is a question a biologist can deliver a decent answer to, and even for fanciful creatures, a good analysis could produce some other insights.
If you find one species being totally selfless towards another at its own expense, for example, evolutionary hypotheses would tell you that this is not a normal situation, and that it's most likely to have come about via some other means like taking advantage of another creature's altruistic tendencies towards tribe or child.
Emotions are also very likely to play into any particular alien biology, for they are in some wise feedback tools to guide a creature into a better survival position.
I've been enjoying some of the biological world in Julie Czerneda's Species Imperative series. Little things like my favorite scene where you find out whether it's wise to use showers on board an alien ship of thick-skinned aliens. Curiously, the protagonist is a salmon biologist. Hmmm :)
Posted by: Ritchie Annand | June 30, 2007 3:01 PM
Star Trek's explanation of DNA compatibility between earthling and other-planet humanoids may be OK for a TV show, but it's still a biological plot hole. It would be quite an evolutional stretch if populations isolated for thousands of years and living in very different environments didn't speciate. Vulcans had copper-based blood, for example. It's hard to imagine that such a major difference in body biochemistry, undoubtedly involving many genes, wouldn't lead to reproductive incompatibility.
The difficulties with SF would disappear instantly if SF writers could only admit they're writing fantasy, not "science" fiction.
Posted by: Rugosa | June 30, 2007 3:01 PM
Posted by: llewelly | June 30, 2007 3:01 PM
Simple solution:-
Just get some "real" biologists to write some science fiction.
(Or is it just easier to bitch how abused your concepts are by
the current batch of writers?)
Posted by: Bruno Wroblewski | June 30, 2007 3:05 PM
I particularly liked Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy: 'Red Mars', 'Green Mars', and 'Blue Mars'. It took terraforming Mars by fairly plausible methods over several centuries till the planet finally ended up with oceans! The evolution of the politics of the colonists was treated rather well too, I though. The last book ended suddenly with a little girl dropping her ice cream cone at the beach. Nice touch showing the distance from the beginning. I haven't a clue about the biology really works and I would question the rates of oxygen and water recovery, but I was willing to suspend being overly critical as it was a good read back in the early 90's. May read it again to see it it stands up.
Posted by: VJB | June 30, 2007 3:07 PM
Cal,
shouldn't firing a gun in a vacuum be absolutely plausible? I mean, we are not talking flintlock/gunpowder on pan here, but shells, which, AFAIK, contain oxidizer, so are not in need of atmospheric oxygen?
Just wondering.
Posted by: TheJerrylander | June 30, 2007 3:12 PM
Posted by: llewelly | June 30, 2007 3:14 PM
Posted by: Peggy | June 30, 2007 3:14 PM
If I recall correctly, when Jayne needed to fire a gun in a vacuum he had it inside a spare space suit and fired it through the face plate.
Posted by: Jon | June 30, 2007 3:14 PM
"The laws of physics are universal. As a biologist, your evidence is limited to this place, as is your expertise. Physicists' expertise extends to every point in space-time."
What is the evidence that the laws of physics are universal and extend to every point in space-time?
Posted by: PhysioProf | June 30, 2007 3:15 PM
For good bio-SF, check out Nancy Kress and Paul DiFillipo.
Stephen Baxter wrote a novel called Evolution, which was pretty cool, I guess. Its protagonists are successive members of the lineage leading to humans --starting Way Back When. Entertaining while carrying some teleological baggage that probably only jumps out at you if you're especially on guard against such notions --like anybody who's used to dealing with ID.
Agree in general that SF aliens are generally not all that interesting, but the idea that authors of SF aren't really interested in exploring realistic possibilities in extra-terrestrial evolution is belied by the sheer volume of such explorations in the field. Octavia Butler, for one (farewell, Octavia!), crafted some truly weird, yet sneakily sympathetic, alien psychologies. Forget Star Trek --that's not SF.
I could go on and on (big SF reader for 25 years), but, in short, the good stuff is out there; it just isn't alweays the best-known, or the most popular.
Posted by: CJ | June 30, 2007 3:17 PM
I realise that biology does use a lot of maths, and that professional biologists are very, very smart people indeed. It would be easier to make this case, however, if so many university biology professors didn't seem to be functionally innumerate.
Posted by: O | June 30, 2007 3:20 PM
The trouble may be that authors feel that they can either do a good, engaging story or can go into exact detail about the science. In the biology, perhaps more so than the physics, this is important, as it determines what kinds of characters can be created.
Of course, this is a false dichotomy; you can have the hard science and the story, if you choose (and are skilled enough to) to write that way.
Posted by: Physis | June 30, 2007 3:23 PM
Should check out the Rifters series by Ben Watts, a canadean marine biologist, Humans genetically modified to live at a deep sea rift, seeking useful anaerobes....
Posted by: The Pale Scott | June 30, 2007 3:25 PM
The difficulties with SF would disappear instantly if SF writers could only admit they're writing fantasy, not "science" fiction.
There's a clear distinction to be made, though, certainly, only at the extremes; there's overlap in the middle.
If you don't like the "science" in science fiction, call it "speculative literature." Because, to my mind, that's the distinction. SF, contra fantasy, begins with restrained speculation. There's "magic" of a sort, but the author must have parameters for the use and effectiveness of the particular brand of the "ostensibly impossible" he's evoking, and then, most crucially, he must remain true to those parameters as the story works itself out. Star Trek fails at all of this, and should properly be regarded as fantasy in scientific drag.
Posted by: CJ | June 30, 2007 3:25 PM
Ooh, fun.
Biology suffers from the fact that people deal with living things all the time, so they assume that they have a clue. Actually, education suffers from that problem too... everyone went to school, so they assume that their ideas are relevant/valid in general (but that is for a different thread).
As for SciFi, we give film and TV a pass on the anthropomorphic aliens for financial/technical reasons. I remember JMS bemoaning the inability to have really alien aliens in B5.
Some clever folks have worked around this. Joss's Firefly where aliens are just not needed. Stargate where 90% of the random aliens really are just humans with a few thousand years of separation is my favorite (though some of the writers insist on introducing some annoying humanoid "aliens" too).
For print, there really is no excuse except for laziness or using SF as a mere vehicle to write about alternative human society/psyc. Lovecraft's aliens are pretty damn alien. Ursula K Le Guin had great alien(s) in "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (which the best CIV game Alpha Centauri plagerized).
Anyway, a number of authors do a good job of just having one or two discrete "breakings" of the laws of physics (FTL travel is most common probably), but then try to keep everything else on the level. Unfortunately, when it comes to biology, we get people like Greg Bear who derive some plot device which makes no sense biologically, then throw mounds of jargon around it to make it sound more plausible to the gullible. To those who have a clue, this technobabble makes add massive insult to injury (and invariably makes the technical errors/implausibility even worse)...
A final word...
Some works take a refreshing approach to technological "miracles": they don't try to explain them. B5 mostly did well on this point... JMS made a comment once about how the officers on a ship don't try to explain how the engine or radar works to the captain. (Firefly had some great moments along this line too... "its broke") The first few seasons of the Stargate TV show did pretty well with us poor earthlings being able to figure out how to use alien tech which did miraculous things, but not really understanding how it works.
In the context of biology, I could easily forgive some unexplained violations of how reality works (as best we understand it) when they are left unexplained. They could be just common knowledge in the future, or a mystery that even in the future we haven't figured out... Just don't explain it incorrectly.
Posted by: travc | June 30, 2007 3:27 PM
A physicist writes...
About 30% of physicists I encounter think that evolution is a pile of crock.
Anyone else find this?
Posted by: Christian Burnham | June 30, 2007 3:28 PM
The best sci-fi has nothing to do with aliens in my opinion. Like Asimov and Herbert, but I tend to have to ignore the obvious problems with biology and just enjoy the story as an "alternate" universe where silly biology is possible.
Some bad sci-fi biology off the top of my head:
Asimov's mind-reading/manipulation
Card's "Anton's Key"
Herbert's genetic memory
Hubbard's "Virus-based" Psychlos with their own "special" air (and the worst movie in the history of film)
As for TV:
Star Trek is ridiculous on so many levels, but I watched it anyway.
Battlestar is fun to watch but way too drawn out.
Stargate is funny but the endless parade of enemies and mortal peril is a bit played out (hence the cancellation).
Firefly had the most potential. Too bad nobody watched it.
Posted by: Andrew | June 30, 2007 3:30 PM
Now this is what I call biology in science fiction...
Anybody know if "Undifferentiated Tissue" is an old term for stem cells? I've always wondered.
Posted by: K. Signal Eingang | June 30, 2007 3:30 PM
PZ: maybe you can get some hints from Phil Plait on setting up a 'Bad Biology' site.
Posted by: Mike | June 30, 2007 3:32 PM
As Asimov pointed out again again in his numerous essays about his work, what is 'plausible' in fiction is about what the audience will accept, not what the evidence discoverable by the author will support. And the SF community had cultivated an audience which accepted FTL and biologically impossible aliens.
Posted by: llewelly | June 30, 2007 3:32 PM
BTW: regarding xenobiology... some physicists have done a good job of learning the basic mechanisms of evolution (which is really systems anyway) and merged it with planetary science and astrophysics. I'm sure there are biologists who have come at it from the other direction... but some physics specialties (or the rare lack of specialty) have a shorter trip. Evolutionary dynamics and auto-catalytic chemistry are really much easier to get up to speed on than geophysics, astrophysics, and such. The basic theories are simple, and the dynamics/math is so difficult that we haven't been able to derive much beyond them.
Posted by: travc | June 30, 2007 3:33 PM
Re Bruno Wroblewski
Simple solution:-
"Just get some "real" biologists to write some science fiction."
Excuse me, wasn't Isaac Asimov a "real" biologist?
Posted by: SLC | June 30, 2007 3:33 PM
Ha, yes, travc @30, may I just say that I too found Greg Bear's stuff in Darwin's Radio/Darwin's Children (HERVs jump-starting a speciation event etc.) so much bollocks? (But less bollocks than Blood Music, for the love of Recombinant Jesus!) Too bad, really; he might have done something interesting with those odd bacteriophages...
Posted by: Mrs Tilton, FCD | June 30, 2007 3:39 PM
The laws of physics are defined to be consistent throughout the universe. If we found a place where the physics was different, we'd conclude that our laws of physics aren't good enough and rewrite them as necessary. That's happening to us right now with the discovery of dark matter, whose gravitational fields repel instead of attract.
The one exception to this rule is the universe at the very first itsy bitsy unit of time after the Big Bang, for reasons way too complicated to get into here.
Now your next question is, "Why do we assume physics is universal when biology is not?" Because every object in the universe follows the same laws of physics. We can observe objects over 13 billion light-years away and see they behave according to the same rules as everything else. A physicist's experimental playground is unfathomably larger than a biologist's playground, so physics covers a much larger territory. If a SF story took place in another universe, physicists would be just as lost as biologists.
Posted by: Brandon | June 30, 2007 3:44 PM
I have to grudgingly agree with PZ on this one, mostly because I admit to being guilty of the same beliefs in my misspent youth.
I recall one year the NYS Regents exams had been stolen, and we could opt out of taking the test if we had a passing grade. I had a good solid A in chem, but I also had a bet riding on my regents test score (if I made 100% my chem teacher owed me 4 bucks) so I went to summer regents class, where I was taught by a biologist... freshwater inverts. It was a joint chem/ bio class (two weeks long) and I never studied, but was doing seat time so I could take the exam. I told the teacher up front that I was only there to win a bet (ok, unlikable ego problem at that age) then when he suggested I learn some bio I scoffed, and told him bio was easy. When he told me his field, I scoffed again, but agreed to take the course to PROVE to him that I could learn enough bio in two weeks to pass the regents.
I got a "B" on the bio regents... having taken no more than the two weeks. Did my Chem regents in 15 minutes... and on the VERY LAST question I didn't read the last few words but in a typical fit of 14 year old ego, jumped ahead and did the math... and lost my bet.
My experience did nothing to convince me that biology was an admirable field of study, and even when my daughter started out in the field I was disappointed that she chose something that was "beneath her"
Then, of course, being exposed to her work and reading some of the research to keep up with at least PART of her conversation, I learned otherwise.
I'm not sure where the scorn for bio comes from, but it certainly seems to be something ingrained in our society.
Posted by: dorid | June 30, 2007 3:45 PM
BTW, went on to major in Astrophysics in College. I'm ashamed to say we looked down on EVERYONE.
Posted by: dorid | June 30, 2007 3:48 PM
Posted by: Stogoe | June 30, 2007 3:49 PM
Just get some "real" biologists to write some science fiction.
(Or is it just easier to bitch how abused your concepts are by
the current batch of writers?)
Some "real" biologists do write science fiction, such as Joan Slonczewski. (As for Asimov, he began writing full time in the 1950s and was made a full professor long after he stopped actually doing science to honor his writing). The trouble is that writing fiction is a totally different skill than being a scientist. There are few that have both the time and talent to do both. And there's no reason why biologists need to do the writing to have the biology plausible any more than physicists are required to write fiction with plausible physics.
Posted by: Peggy | June 30, 2007 3:51 PM
Peter Watts is a post doc with his PhD in Biology.
http://www.rifters.com/real/crawl.htm
He also writes some of the best "hard" science fiction of today, and all his novels are CC and free to read from his website.
Posted by: Mondo | June 30, 2007 3:53 PM
Well, to be fair, the Astrobiology folks with SETI are multi-disciplinary, and they have more than a few biologists. I'd be happy to talk about the astronomical aspects of aliens life, just as a biologist could talk about the biological aspects of life on a given planet.
I would need to hear more about what those three astronomers were discussing (and who they were; do any of them have biology experience?); if it was life itself, or just the conditions expected on other worlds, for example. I don't think we have enough info from Jack Cohen to make a firm judgment.
Posted by: Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer | June 30, 2007 3:53 PM
Christian Burnham:
With absolutely no pretense that my sample is in any sense representative, and with the caveat that I'm not a physicist, I'll volunteer that I have encountered quite a few physicists, and worked with a few, and have never met one who thought this. I'm sure that they are out there. But 30% seems quite high to me.
Posted by: Russell | June 30, 2007 3:58 PM
Caledonian writes: "Physics describes a deeper level of reality than biology."
That's....true, in a trivial sense. We can think of chemistry as the branch of physics that's concerned with the various ways that matter and energy can arrange themselves, and biology as a branch of chemistry.
"There's also the matter of scope. We only know how life has developed in one particular way on one particular planet. The laws of physics are universal. As a biologist, your evidence is limited to this place, as is your expertise. Physicists' expertise extends to every point in space-time."
Um...nope. There are two issues here, one of rhetorical overreach and the other, which is missing the point.
First, the overreach: while physics looks at the universe, that's no guarantee that it's 'laws' are universal. There are points in space-time about which virtually nothing is known: 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang, for example, or what is beyond the event horizon in a supermassive black hole. Further, there may be more than one universe, and there may be universes which are not 'lawful' as presently conceived. As a practical matter, scientists typically start by assuming the lawfulness of the regularities they have discovered in operation in the areas of space-time in the one universe they have experimental evidence for.
In other words, the scope of physics is greater than biology, granted, but let's not imagine that its' scope is either unlimited or even delimited. A little less hubris, if you please.
Now, the second issue (missing the point). Biology is filled with emergent phenomena which have so far eluded reductionist explanations. This does not mean that reduction is impossible, or that physics has nothing to say about these phenomena. It does mean, however, that in studying these phenomena it is useful to adopt a holistic or systems approach, and biologists have special content, skills, craft knowledge which they gained by (ahem) actually doing biology. One can no more derive these on first principles from physics than one can pass the bar by studying neurosurgery!
"It's not arrogance that you're responding to. They're just correct attitudes and positions that you don't like the implications of."
Caledonian, if a physicist thinks that they can derive all that is necessary to know of biology from first principles and the laws of physics, that is beyond arrogance.
Also, your reticence is noted.
Posted by: Scott Hatfield, OM | June 30, 2007 4:02 PM
The real probably is not physics, but that celphalopod-like body plans are inadequately represented in scifi - especially when it's obvious to any intelligent person that most ET life should be cephalopoid.
Posted by: jeff | June 30, 2007 4:05 PM
No, it's true in a deep and very important sense.
You're confusing our understanding of the laws of physics, and the laws of physics.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Speaking of hubris...
I don't know whether any particular human can - but it can be done. That's what physics IS.
Why don't you treat us to an explanation of how your religious faith is compatible with a hard-nosed skeptical approach to reality?
Posted by: Caledonian | June 30, 2007 4:06 PM
Cohen's complaint about astronomers talking about the possibility of life out there, and that being equivalent to biologists talking about black holes, isn't equivalent in the least.
Now not having been there one can't say for sure what the discussion was, but if is was the possibility of life something as we know it (that is, the possibility of Earthlife conditions), the astronomers are immeasurably more qualified than a biologist to discuss the issue because they're talking about settings where life as we know it can exist in the universe. Insolation, orbital stability, intersteller radiation levels, metal levels in star-producing regions.
The easy analogy is to think of a biologist as a medical doctor and the astronomers as engineers. If the engineers are discussing the possibility of performing surgery in an undersea base, or a remote location in Antarctica, or in orbit, it isn't because they're trying to claim to be greater experts in surgery and medecine than the doctor, it's because they're the experts in what has to be done to get the doctor and patient and the supplies and necessities like power, air and heat in a situation where the doctor is the expert.
Posted by: Keith | June 30, 2007 4:10 PM
This is actually one of my pet areas of sf: books with extra-terrestrials that look and act like aliens.
It's rare indeed to find a book that can pull this off convincingly.
Posted by: Bachalon | June 30, 2007 4:11 PM
I forgot to toss out my recommendation.
Check out "Celestis" by Paul Park.
Posted by: Bachalon | June 30, 2007 4:13 PM
"Excuse me, wasn't Isaac Asimov a "real" biologist?"
Technically, no. Dr. Asimov worked for the military and in academia as a chemist between 1941-1958. He earned a BS, MA and Ph.D in chemistry from Columbia, then taught biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine following WWII. His field of research was antimalarial compounds, but he published very little. After less than a decade, he gave up his teaching duties and salary but retained the title of Professor and devoted his energies to writing.
Asimove was a polymath and surely understood the major theories and concepts in biology as well as any non-specialist and publicly defended evolution on more than one occasion. He was not, however, a biologist and he spent most of his life popularizing science and anything else that interested him, rather than actually doing science. Nothing wrong with that!
Issac Asimov FAQ
Posted by: Scott Hatfield, OM | June 30, 2007 4:21 PM
Physics is trivial compared to biology.
It is contemplated that in the near term there will be a "Grand Unified Theory" in physics that will encompass everything. Is such a thing even remotely considered possible in biology? Of course not.
Biology seems simple because billions of years of evolution that have made living systems remarkably robust. Do we understand the details of that? Not even close.
Quantum mechanics has the advantage that everything is a linear superposition of states. Is anything in biology linear? No, nothing in biology is linear. How many coupled parameters are there in a single living cell? Several thousand? Several tens of thousands?
How many coupled non-linear parameters does it take before a system becomes intractable to model? How many orders of magnitude more does the simplest biological system have?
I think there is scorn for biologists because it is a much more diverse field than physics is. There are many physicists who can understand and work together on the mega projects. The whole physics community can understand and agree on what the priorities should be for research. Beyond sequencing everything (which is important but all it takes now is a big lab and lots of money), what are the "big" questions in research? Ask 1,000 physicists and you will get a handful of answers. Ask 1,000 biologists and you won't get a handful of answers.
Posted by: daedalus2u | June 30, 2007 4:21 PM
I actually recently wrote a blog post (in Swedish, alas) about treknobabble and the endless annoyances of actually knowing stuff about stuff. And yeah, one might wish that authors would actually know something of biology, but can we really expect biologists to be good writers, or good writers to be biologists? No. My idea is that when I'm finally a "real" biologist (just a student atm) I'm going to start a consulting firm. I'll partner up with some other scientists and we'll offer our expertise to authors of movies, tv series, books, games, you name it... Think it might work? ;)
Posted by: Felicia Gilljam | June 30, 2007 4:21 PM
I recently read Ben Bova's Jupiter, which had fascinating descriptions of life in the gas giant. I have no idea if it is "accurately possible" or not, but they were certainly not humaniod, not treated as monsters, and not energy-beings.
Of course they had the human explorers breathing some sort of oxygen-goop and there was a talking gorilla.
Posted by: Tanya | June 30, 2007 4:27 PM
I suspect that what underlies this attitude is residual sexism. Biology is often seen by non-biologists as science for women, with connotations of nurturing, gaia-style ecology, and watercolour sketches of flowers. At high-school level, my experience was that the girls avoided Chemistry and Physics, because we'd already been convinced of our inability to do maths, and as a consequence boys looked down on bio as easy girl stuff. That was my experience, and while I can't speak for anybody else, I don't imagine my high school was unusual. Many professions which have traditionally been associated with women, such as nursing, miss out on the respect they deserve, and I think biology cops some of this attitude.
Posted by: Buffybot | June 30, 2007 4:31 PM
Of course Star Trek was fantasy. That was my point. As you probably can tell, I'm not an SF fan. I was turned off by Asimov and Heinlein a long time ago, and never followed the genre after that. We English majors have higher standards about the actual writing than about content; we can happily suspend our disbelief about anything if the writing is good. Good fiction has parameters for the use and effectiveness of the particular brand of the "ostensibly impossible" [the author is] evoking, and then, most crucially, he must remain true to those parameters as the story works itself out. This is as true of Jane Austen as it is of SF. Her novels were essentially fairy stories with happily-ever-after endings, but we still lap them up a couple of hundred years later because she convinces us of the reality of her world.
Posted by: Rugosa | June 30, 2007 4:33 PM
"You're confusing our understanding of the laws of physics, and the laws of physics."
No, I'm not. It's the arrogant professional, who presumes that the present understanding of their profession is the final word, who is confused when they pooh-pooh other branches of science as poor stepchildren of physics.
"That's what physics IS."
Using your own personal definition of physics, one which conflates it with all of the sciences, is what I mean by 'trivial'. You are trivializing important distinctions in the interest of reifying the meaning of the word 'physics'. It's clever, but not terribly helpful.
"Why don't you treat us to an explanation of how your religious faith is compatible with a hard-nosed skeptical approach to reality?"
That's a good comeback, but of course a person ceases to be a skeptic the moment they accept any claim without evidence. Faith isn't compatible with reason, and both can be held only by some degree of compartmentalization. I would add, however, that both are very real human activities.
Anyway, Cal, I'm not picking a fight with you to get you to justify yourself to me. My offer to you is sincere. Why don't you take me up on it? Who knows? The platform I offer may be as advertised. If not, you can denounce me for my insincerity and expose me as a fraud.
Hopefully...SH
Posted by: Scott Hatfield, OM | June 30, 2007 4:37 PM
Fair biology in the Jani Killian series, by Kristine Smith, Code of Conduct, etc.
Posted by: Beverly Nuckols | June 30, 2007 4:45 PM
The issue here is that there were and are different standards of "good writing" in different genres. In my experience, English majors become excited about complex literary structures regardless of the value of the ideas being expressed in them. Golden Age science fiction didn't concern itself with literary affectations at all, so it's no wonder you didn't like it much.
Actually, Jane Austen is considered one of the best sources for information on what day-to-day middle class British life was like during the period. Happily-ever-after, yes - fairy tales, no.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 30, 2007 4:48 PM
You've completely missed the point. Current physics is wrong, and we know that it's wrong, because it isn't even approaching complete. But introducing things that violate our current understanding of physics is still stepping away from science and towards fantasy, whether it's perpetual energy or FTL.
Physics is the foundation of all the sciences, you fool. What it does not permit, the others may not touch. No matter of buzzword dropping and malappropriation of concepts like 'emergent behavior' get around that.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 30, 2007 4:52 PM
Speaking as both a biologist and a fiction writer myself, I must say that this article has opened my eyes. I can see now that it was my attempt to create plausible aliens that doomed my career in sci-fi. It disturbed all three of my readers and frightened the larger sci-fi cabal, who undoubtedly felt threatened by my keen understanding of biology.
And I can see from the comments thread why I have also been largely unsuccessful as a biologist. I can put it in two words: physicist conspiracy. Physics has become so droll since quantum mechanics, and biology so very sexy since PCR and gene splicing, that physicists now have massive inferiority complexes. This causes them to lash out and sabotage the careers of budding young biologists, such as myself.
Also, these observations explain why I can't keep a relationship going, and why nobody wants to be around me.
Posted by: RB | June 30, 2007 4:55 PM
"'Aliens' in fiction are just humans with different bits exaggerated, a shell over human agency, like elves and dwarves and fairies. They always have been, because we're the only thing we know."
Kind of like the gods we create. Isn't it interesting that gods are simply exaggerated humans. It's more than a coincidence that both SF creatures and gods don't stray too far from the human mold. That's because we are limited by our perception and experiences. Having developed the ability to see the world throught the eyes of another individual, which was a great step in cognative evolution, it would seem plausable that our imaginary gods would simply be a creation of our mind (our ideas projected through a made up god). Gods and aliens would of necessity have quailities limited by human imagination, and human imagination is limited by human experience.
Posted by: Rick T | June 30, 2007 4:57 PM
Re #25, PhysioProf
The evidence is astronomy; or rather astrophysics. Astronomers observe galaxies which are far away both in space and time and based on their observations they have a lot of evidence about the physics in these galaxies.
The evidence mostly shows that basic physics is the same everywhere.
Sometimes they have to invoke speculative physics to explain some observations: like dark matter where nobody knows
what it is to explain the radial movement of galaxies. I personally
like to call it the epicycles of the 21rd century because it
sounds more like frantic tries to bandaid old theories in spite
of evidence.
Anyways, in spite of these problems there is a lot of evidence
that physics is the same everywhere [the galaxy problem above
applies to our Galaxy too]
Posted by: xyz | June 30, 2007 5:27 PM
At my undergraduate university (Middle TN State Univeristy) there is a professor in the physics astronomy dept, Dr. Eric Klumpe, whom I did take a physics course with and liked very much. I was very disappointed when, a few years later, after I had switched from a physics to a biology major, I heard stories about him talking to students about intelligent design. I then attended one of Massimo Pigliucci's lectures about why ID isn't science and Dr. Klumpe was there and asked the same tired, old questions about complexity and the eye and such.
I then heard a rumor that the head of the physics dept, Dr. Robert Carlton, whom I took modern physics with, was an evangelic christian...which I didn't believe until I went to try to change one of my courses, on speciation, and he, as acting dean, wouldn't let me.
Of course, that was Tennessee, but I was very disillusioned with physics after that.
I think that people see biology as being easier because all of the maths are very easy at the beginning and into bio courses are mostly memorization of fairly disconnected facts.