Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Support the City Threatened by Climate Change: A Poignant New Sculpture

in Art, Science | May 17th, 2017

Upon arriv­ing in Venice in the late 1930s, colum­nist and Algo­nquin Round Table reg­u­lar Robert Bench­ley imme­di­ate­ly sent a telegram back home to Amer­i­ca: “Streets full of water. Please advise.” The line has tak­en its place in the canon of Amer­i­can humor, but in more recent times the image of water-filled streets — unin­ten­tion­al­ly water-filled streets, that is — has arisen most often in the con­ver­sa­tion about cli­mate change. Some of the poten­tial dis­as­ter sce­nar­ios envi­sion every major coastal city on Earth even­tu­al­ly turn­ing into a kind of Venice, albeit a much less pleas­ant ver­sion there­of.

And so what bet­ter place than the one that hosts per­haps the world’s best known art exhi­bi­tion, the Venice Bien­nale, to express cli­mate-change anx­i­ety in the form of pub­lic sculp­ture? “Venice is known for its gon­do­las, canals, and his­toric bridges,” writes Condé Nast Trav­el­er’s Sebas­t­ian Modak, “but vis­i­tors will now also be greet­ed by anoth­er, albeit tem­po­rary, reminder of the city’s inti­mate rela­tion­ship with water: a giant pair of hands reach­ing out of the Grand Canal and appear­ing to sup­port the walls of the his­toric Ca’ Sagre­do Hotel.” The piece is called Sup­port, and it’s cre­at­ed by Barcelona-based Ital­ian sculp­tor Loren­zo Quinn.

“I have three chil­dren, and I’m think­ing about their gen­er­a­tion and what world we’re going to pass on to them,” Quinn told Mash­able’s Maria Gal­luc­ci. “I’m wor­ried, I’m very wor­ried.” The hands of his 11-year-old son actu­al­ly pro­vid­ed the mod­el for the polyurethane-and-resin hands of Sup­port, weigh­ing 5,000 pounds each, that stand on 30-foot pil­lars at the bot­tom of the Grand Canal. Modak quotes one of Quin­n’s Insta­gram posts which describes the work as speak­ing to the peo­ple “in a clear, sim­ple and direct way through the inno­cent hands of a child and it evokes a pow­er­ful mes­sage, which is that unit­ed we can make a stand to curb the cli­mate change that affects us all.”

Those argu­ing in favor of more aggres­sive polit­i­cal mea­sures to coun­ter­act the effects of cli­mate change have gone to great lengths to point out what forms those effects have so far tak­en. But the fact that, apart from a stretch of hot sum­mers, few of those effects have yet man­i­fest­ed unde­ni­ably in most peo­ple’s lives has cer­tain­ly made their job hard­er. But nobody who vis­its Venice dur­ing the Bien­nale could fail to pause before Sup­port, a work whose visu­al dra­ma demands a reac­tion that tem­per­a­ture charts or data-filled stud­ies can’t hope to pro­voke by them­selves. And even apart from the issue at hand, as it were, Quin­n’s sculp­ture reminds us that art, even in as deeply his­tor­i­cal a set­ting as Venice, can also keep us think­ing about the future.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

How Cli­mate Change Is Threat­en­ing Your Dai­ly Cup of Cof­fee

Frank Capra’s Sci­ence Film The Unchained God­dess Warns of Cli­mate Change in 1958

Watch Episode 1 of Years of Liv­ing Dan­ger­ous­ly, The New Show­time Series on Cli­mate Change

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Says This Short Film on Science in America Contains Perhaps the Most Important Words He’s Ever Spoken

in Politics, Science | April 26th, 2017

Astro­physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson has won a rep­u­ta­tion as a genial, yet pedan­tic nerd, a sci­en­tif­ic gad­fly whose point of view may near­ly always be tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, but whose mode of deliv­ery some­times miss­es the point, like some­one who explains a joke. His earnest­ness is endear­ing; it’s what makes him so relat­able as a sci­ence edu­ca­tor. He’s whole­heart­ed­ly devot­ed to his sub­ject, like his boy­hood hero Carl Sagan, whose shoes Tyson did his best to fill in a remake of the clas­sic Cos­mos series. Tyson’s coun­try­men and women, how­ev­er, have made his job a lot hard­er than they did in Sagan’s day, when ordi­nary Amer­i­cans were hun­gry for sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion.

The change has been decades in the mak­ing. Like Sagan, Tyson’s voice fills with awe as he con­tem­plates the mys­ter­ies of nature and won­ders of sci­ence, and with alarm as he com­ments on wide­spread Amer­i­can igno­rance and hos­til­i­ty to crit­i­cal inquiry and the sci­en­tif­ic method. These atti­tudes have led us to a cri­sis point. Elect­ed and appoint­ed offi­cials at the high­est lev­els of gov­ern­ment deny the facts of cli­mate change and are active­ly gut­ting all efforts to com­bat it. The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives’ Com­mit­tee on Sci­ence, Space, and Tech­nol­o­gy mocks cli­mate sci­ence on social media even as NASA announces that the evi­dence is “unequiv­o­cal.”

How did this hap­pen? Are we rapid­ly return­ing, as Sagan warned before his death, to an age of “super­sti­tion and dark­ness”? Tyson has recent­ly addressed these ques­tions with earnest­ness and urgency in a short video called “Sci­ence in Amer­i­ca,” which you can watch above, “con­tain­ing,” he wrote on Face­book, “what may be the most impor­tant words I have ever spo­ken.” He opens with a state­ment that echoes Sagan’s dire pre­dic­tions: “It seems to me that peo­ple have lost the abil­i­ty to judge what is true and what is not.” The prob­lem is not sim­ply an aca­d­e­m­ic one, but a press­ing­ly polit­i­cal one: “When you have peo­ple,” says Tyson, “who don’t know much about sci­ence, stand­ing in denial of it, and ris­ing to pow­er, that is a recipe for the com­plete dis­man­tling of our informed democ­ra­cy.”

One must ask if the issue sole­ly comes down to edu­ca­tion. We are fre­quent­ly remind­ed of how much denial is moti­vat­ed and will­ful when, for exam­ple, a gov­ern­ment offi­cial begins a com­plete­ly unsup­port­ed claim with, “I’m not a sci­en­tist, but….” We know that fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies like Exxon have known the facts about cli­mate change for forty years, and have hid­den or mis­rep­re­sent­ed them. But the prob­lem is even more wide­spread. Evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, vac­cines, GMOs… the amount of mis­in­for­ma­tion and “alter­na­tive fact” in the pub­lic sphere has drowned out the voic­es of sci­en­tists. “That’s not the coun­try I remem­ber grow­ing up in,” Tyson laments.

There are plen­ty of good philo­soph­i­cal rea­sons for skep­ti­cism, such as those raised by David Hume or by crit­i­cal the­o­rists and his­to­ri­ans who point out the ways in which sci­en­tif­ic research has been dis­tort­ed and mis­used for some very dark, inhu­mane pur­pos­es. Yet cri­tiques of method­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, and ethics only strength­en the sci­en­tif­ic enter­prise, which—as Tyson pas­sion­ate­ly explains—thrives on vig­or­ous and informed debate. We can­not afford to con­fuse thought­ful delib­er­a­tion and hon­est reflec­tion with spe­cious rea­son­ing and will­ful igno­rance.

I imag­ine we’ll have a good laugh at cre­ative rede­ploy­ments of some clas­sic Tyson harangues. (“This is sci­ence! It’s not some­thing to toy with!”) And a good laugh some­times feels like all we can do to relieve the ten­sion. The real dan­ger is that many peo­ple will dis­miss his mes­sage as “politi­ciz­ing” sci­ence rather than defend­ing the very basis of its exis­tence. We must agree on the basis of sci­en­tif­ic truth, as dis­cov­er­able through rea­son and evi­dence, Tyson warns, before we can even get to the polit­i­cal ques­tions over cli­mate change, vac­cines, etc. Whether Amer­i­cans can still do that has become an unset­tling­ly open ques­tion.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

An Ani­mat­ed Neil deGrasse Tyson Gives an Elo­quent Defense of Sci­ence in 272 Words, the Same Length as The Get­tys­burg Address

Neil deGrasse Tyson Remem­bers His First Meet­ing with Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Philosophical, Sci-Fi Claymation Film Answers the Timeless Question: Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

in Animation, Comedy, Film, Philosophy, Science | April 21st, 2017

It’s a ques­tion that’s occu­pied our great­est thinkers, from Aris­to­tle and Pla­to to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye:

Which came first—the chick­en or the egg?

The debate will like­ly rage as long as there’s a faith-based camp to square off against the evi­dence-based camp.

With that in mind, and the week­end loom­ing, we’re inclined to go with the Clay­ma­tion camp, in the form of Time Chick­en, Nick Black’s 6‑minute stop-motion med­i­ta­tion, above.

Described by its cre­ator as a “philo­soph­i­cal-action-fan­ta­sy into the world of sci­ence, reli­gion, knowl­edge and cre­ation,” Time Chick­en ben­e­fits from an appro­pri­ate­ly bom­bas­tic orig­i­nal score per­formed by the Prague Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra and the seem­ing-eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny of its admit­ted­ly clay-based, all-poul­try cast.

Black’s copi­ous cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences and sci­ence fic­tion tropes are every bit as delec­table as a Mughal style egg-stuffed whole chick­en slow cooked in a rich almond-pop­py seeds-yogurt-&-saffron gravy.

Kudos to the film­mak­er, too, for eschew­ing the uncred­it­ed dub­bing that made fel­low clay­ma­tor Nick (Park)’s Chick­en Run a crossover hit, trust­ing instead in the (unsub­ti­tled) orig­i­nal lan­guage of his sub­jects.

Read­ers, watch this hilar­i­ous lit­tle film and weigh in. Which came first? The chick­en? Or the egg?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

Watch The Touch­ing Moment When Physi­cist Andrei Linde Learns That His The­o­ries on the Big Bang Were Final­ly Val­i­dat­ed

Hear Carl Sagan Art­ful­ly Refute a Cre­ation­ist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Dar­win­ian Con­cept of Evo­lu­tion is Pro­found­ly Ver­i­fied”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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NASA Releases a Massive Online Archive: 140,000 Photos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Download

in Astronomy, Photography, Science | April 21st, 2017

Last sum­mer, astronomer Michael Sum­mer wrote that, despite a rel­a­tive­ly low pro­file, NASA and its inter­na­tion­al part­ners have been “liv­ing Carl Sagan’s dream for space explo­ration.” Sum­mers’ cat­a­logue of dis­cov­er­ies and ground­break­ing experiments—such as Scott Kelly’s year­long stay aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Station—speaks for itself. But for those focused on more earth­bound con­cerns, or those less emo­tion­al­ly moved by sci­ence, it may take a cer­tain elo­quence to com­mu­ni­cate the val­ue of space in words. “Per­haps,” writes Sum­mers, “we should have had a poet as a mem­ber of every space mis­sion to bet­ter cap­ture the intense thrill of dis­cov­ery.”

Sagan was the clos­est we’ve come. Though he nev­er went into space him­self, he worked close­ly on NASA mis­sions since the 1950s and com­mu­ni­cat­ed bet­ter than any­one, in deeply poet­ic terms, the beau­ty and won­der of the cos­mos. Like­ly you’re famil­iar with his “pale blue dot” solil­o­quy, but con­sid­er this quote from his 1968 lec­tures, Plan­e­tary Explo­ration:

There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yel­low; two of them are so close togeth­er that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a mil­lion moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of dia­mond. There are atom­ic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thir­ty times a sec­ond. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atom­ic com­po­si­tion of bac­te­ria. There are stars leav­ing the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are tur­bu­lent plas­mas writhing with X- and gam­ma-rays and mighty stel­lar explo­sions. There are, per­haps, places which are out­side our uni­verse. The uni­verse is vast and awe­some, and for the first time we are becom­ing a part of it.

Sagan’s lyri­cal prose alone cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion of mil­lions. But what has most often made us to fall in love with, and fund, the space pro­gram, is pho­tog­ra­phy. No mis­sion has ever had a res­i­dent poet, but every one, manned and unmanned, has had mul­ti­ple high-tech pho­tog­ra­phers.

NASA has long had “a trove of images, audio, and video the gen­er­al pub­lic want­ed to see,” writes Eric Berg­er at Ars Tech­ni­ca. “After all, this was the agency that had sent peo­ple to the Moon, tak­en pho­tos of every plan­et in the Solar Sys­tem, and launched the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.”

Until the advent of the Inter­net, only a few select, and unfor­get­table, images made their way to the pub­lic. Since the 1990s, the agency has pub­lished hun­dreds of pho­tos and videos online, but these efforts have been frag­men­tary and not par­tic­u­lar­ly user-friend­ly. That changed this month with the release of a huge pho­to archive—140,000 pic­tures, videos, and audio files, to be exact—that aggre­gates mate­ri­als from the agency’s cen­ters all across the coun­try and the world, and makes them search­able. The visu­al poet­ry on dis­play is stag­ger­ing, as is the amount of tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion for the more tech­ni­cal­ly inclined.

Since Sum­mers laud­ed NASA’s accom­plish­ments, the fraught pol­i­tics of sci­ence fund­ing have become deeply con­cern­ing for sci­en­tists and the pub­lic, pro­vok­ing what will like­ly be a well-attend­ed march for sci­ence tomor­row. Where does NASA stand in all of this? You may be sur­prised to learn that the pres­i­dent has signed a bill autho­riz­ing con­sid­er­able fund­ing for the agency. You may be unsur­prised to learn how that fund­ing is to be allo­cat­ed. Earth sci­ence and edu­ca­tion are out. A mis­sion to Mars is in.

As I perused the stun­ning NASA pho­to archive, pick­ing my jaw up from the floor sev­er­al times, I found in some cas­es that my view began to shift, espe­cial­ly while look­ing at pho­tos from the Mars rover mis­sions, and read­ing the cap­tions, which casu­al­ly refer to every rocky out­crop­ping, moun­tain, crater, and val­ley by name as though they were tourist des­ti­na­tions on a map of New Mex­i­co. In addi­tion to Sagan’s Cos­mos, I also began to think of the col­o­niza­tion epics of Ray Brad­bury and Kim Stan­ley Robinson—the cor­po­rate greed, the apoc­a­lyp­tic wars, the his­to­ry repeat­ing itself on anoth­er plan­et….

It’s easy to blame the cur­rent anti-sci­ence lob­by for shift­ing the focus to plan­ets oth­er than our own. There is no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion of cli­mate sci­ence denial­ism or nuclear esca­la­tion. But in addi­tion to map­ping and nam­ing galax­ies, black holes, and neb­u­lae, we’ve seen an intense focus on the Red Plan­et for many years. It seems inevitable, as it did to the most far-sight­ed of sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers, that we would make our way there one way or anoth­er.

We would do well to recov­er the sense of awe and won­der out­er space used to inspire in us—sublime feel­ings that can moti­vate us not only to explore the seem­ing­ly lim­it­less resources of space but to con­serve and pre­serve our own on Earth. Hope­ful­ly you can find your own slice of the sub­lime in this mas­sive pho­to archive.

 

via the Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Icon­ic 1968 “Earth­rise” Pho­to Was Made: An Engross­ing Visu­al­iza­tion by NASA

NASA Releas­es 3 Mil­lion Ther­mal Images of Our Plan­et Earth

NASA Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover “Unpaywall,” a New (and Legal) Browser Extension That Lets You Read Millions of Science Articles Normally Locked Up Behind Paywalls

in Education, Magazines, Science | April 17th, 2017

Ear­li­er this month, Impact­sto­ry, a non­prof­it sup­port­ed by grants from the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion and the Alfred P. Sloan Foun­da­tion, launched, Unpay­wall, a free brows­er exten­sion that helps you “find open-access ver­sions of pay­walled research papers, instant­ly.”

As the co-founders of Impact­sto­ry describe it, Unpay­wall is “an exten­sion for Chrome and Fire­fox that links you to free full-text as you browse research arti­cles. Hit a pay­wall? No prob­lem: click the green tab and read it free!”

Their FAQ gets into the mechan­ics a lit­tle more, but here’s the gist of how it works: “When you view a pay­walled research arti­cle, Unpay­wall auto­mat­i­cal­ly looks for a copy in our index of over 10 mil­lion free, legal full­text PDFs. If we find one, click the green tab to read the arti­cle.”

While many sci­ence pub­lish­ers put a pay­wall in front of sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles, it’s often the case that these arti­cles have been pub­lished else­where in an open for­mat. “More and more fun­ders and uni­ver­si­ties are requir­ing authors to upload copies of their papers to [open] repos­i­to­ries. This has cre­at­ed a deep resource of legal open access papers…” And that’s what Unpay­wall draws on.

This seems like quite a boon for researchers, jour­nal­ists, stu­dents and pol­i­cy­mak­ers. You can down­load the Unpay­wall exten­sion for Chrome and Fire­fox, or learn more about the new ser­vice at the Unpay­wall web­site.

Note: Over at Metafil­ter, you can find a good list of sources of, or meth­ods for, obtain­ing free aca­d­e­m­ic con­tent.

via Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics/Metafil­ter

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil Degrasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark & More

in Philosophy, Science | April 12th, 2017

What do we live in: the only uni­verse that exists, or an elab­o­rate com­put­er sim­u­la­tion of a uni­verse? The ques­tion would have fas­ci­nat­ed Isaac Asi­mov, and that pre­sum­ably counts as one of the rea­sons the Isaac Asi­mov Memo­r­i­al Debate took it as its sub­ject last year. Though the so-called “sim­u­la­tion hypoth­e­sis” has, in var­i­ous forms, crossed the minds of thinkers for mil­len­nia, it’s enjoyed a par­tic­u­lar moment in the zeit­geist in recent years, not least because Elon Musk has pub­licly stat­ed his view that, in all prob­a­bil­i­ty, we do indeed live in a sim­u­la­tion. And, if you can’t trust the guy who hit it big with Tes­la and Pay­Pal on the nature of real­i­ty, who can you?

Well, you might also con­sid­er lis­ten­ing to the per­spec­tives of New York Uni­ver­si­ty philoso­pher David Chalmers, MIT cos­mol­o­gist Max Tegmark, and three the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists, James Gates of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land, Lisa Ran­dall of Har­vard, and Zohreh Davou­di of MIT.

They, with mod­er­a­tion by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, dig into the sim­u­la­tion hypoth­e­sis for two hours, approach­ing from all dif­fer­ent angles its ori­gin, its plau­si­bil­i­ty, and its impli­ca­tions. Davou­di, who has done seri­ous research on the ques­tion, brings her work to bear; Ran­dall, who finds lit­tle rea­son to cred­it the notion that we live in a sim­u­la­tion in the first place, has more of an inter­est in why oth­ers find it so com­pelling all of a sud­den.

Whether you believe it, reject it, or sim­ply enjoy enter­tain­ing the idea, you can’t help but feel a strong reac­tion of one kind or anoth­er to the sim­u­la­tion hypoth­e­sis, and Tyson con­tributes his usu­al humor to knock the dis­cus­sion back down to Earth when­ev­er it threat­ens to become too abstract. But how should we respond to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of liv­ing in com­put­ed real­i­ty in the here and now (or “here” and now,” if you pre­fer)? The Matrix pro­posed a kind of sim­u­la­tion-hypoth­e­sis world whose heroes break out, but we may ulti­mate­ly have no more abil­i­ty to see the hard­ware run­ning our world than Mario can see the hard­ware run­ning his. “If you’re not sure whether you’re actu­al­ly sim­u­lat­ed or not,” says Tegmark, “my advice to you is to go out there and live real­ly inter­est­ing lives and do unex­pect­ed things so the sim­u­la­tors don’t get bored and shut you down.” In these unre­al times, you could cer­tain­ly do worse.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Are We Liv­ing Inside a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: An Intro­duc­tion to the Mind-Bog­gling “Sim­u­la­tion Argu­ment”

Richard Dawkins and Jon Stew­art Debate Whether Sci­ence or Reli­gion Will Destroy Civ­i­liza­tion

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Richard Dawkins on Why We Should Believe in Science: “It Works … Bitches”

in Science | April 11th, 2017

Appear­ing at Oxford’s Shel­don­ian The­ater in 2013, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins field­ed a ques­tion that’s now being asked unnerv­ing­ly often in our anti-Enlight­en­ment age.

Audi­ence mem­ber: “The ques­tion is about the nature of sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence. You both said, and I think most peo­ple here would agree with you, that we’re jus­ti­fied in hold­ing a belief if there is evi­dence for it, or there are log­i­cal argu­ments we can find that sup­port it. But it seems like this in itself is a belief, which would require some form of evi­dence. If so, I’m won­dering what you think would count as evi­dence in favour of that and, if not, how do we jus­ti­fy choos­ing that heuris­tic with­out appeal­ing to the same stan­dard that we are try­ing to jus­ti­fy?”

Dawkins: “How do we jus­ti­fy, as it were, that sci­ence would give us the truth? It works. Planes fly, cars dri­ve, com­put­ers com­pute. If you base med­i­cine on sci­ence, you cure peo­ple; if you base the design of planes on sci­ence, they fly; if you base the design of rock­ets on sci­ence, they reach the moon. It works … bitch­es.”

Now, some­one please send that memo to the folks who call the shots.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Dawkins’ Famous “What If You’re Wrong” Speech Ani­mat­ed in the Style of South Park

Grow­ing Up in the Uni­verse: Richard Dawkins Presents Cap­ti­vat­ing Sci­ence Lec­tures for Kids (1991)

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

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Edgar Allan Poe Published a “CliffsNotes” Version of a Science Textbook & It Became His Only Bestseller (1839)

in Literature, Science | April 6th, 2017

A fas­ci­nat­ing 20th cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary strain, “doc­u­men­tary poet­ics,” melds jour­nal­is­tic accounts, pho­tog­ra­phy, offi­cial texts and mem­os, pol­i­tics, and sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal writ­ing with lyri­cal and lit­er­ary lan­guage. Per­haps best exem­pli­fied by Muriel Rukeyser, the cat­e­go­ry also includes, at cer­tain times, James Agee, Langston Hugh­es, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and—currently—Claudia Rank­ine and “pow­er­house” new poet Sol­maz Sharif. It does not include Edgar Allan Poe, famous­ly alco­holic 19th cen­tu­ry mas­ter of the macabre and “father of the detec­tive sto­ry.”

But you’ll for­give me for think­ing, excit­ed­ly, that it just might, when I learned Poe had pub­lished a text called The Conchologist’s First Book (1839), a con­den­sa­tion, rearrange­ment, and “remix­ing,” as Rebec­ca Onion writes at Slate, of “an exist­ing… beau­ti­ful and expen­sive” sci­ence text­book, Thomas Wyatt’s Man­u­al of Con­chol­o­gy, includ­ing the orig­i­nal plates and a “new pref­ace and intro­duc­tion.”

My mind reeled: what won­drous hor­rors might the morose, roman­tic Poe have con­tributed to such an enter­prise, his best-sell­ing work, it turns out, in his life­time. (For which Poe was paid $50 and, typ­i­cal­ly, received no roy­al­ties). What kind of exper­i­men­tal mad­ness might these cov­ers con­tain?

As I might have assumed from the book’s total obscu­ri­ty, Poe’s writer­ly con­tri­bu­tions to the project were mea­ger. For all his genius as a sto­ry­teller, he could be a long-wind­ed bore as an essay­ist. It seems he thought this aspect of his voice was best suit­ed to the orig­i­nal writ­ing he did for Conchologist’s First. His biog­ra­phers, notes Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus John H. Lien­hard, all “mut­ter an embar­rassed apol­o­gy for Poe’s shady side-track—then hur­ry back to talk about The Raven.” Onion quotes one biog­ra­ph­er Jef­frey Mey­ers, who writes, “Poe’s bor­ing pedan­tic and hair-split­ting Pref­ace was absolute­ly guar­an­teed to tor­ment and dis­cour­age even the most pas­sion­ate­ly inter­est­ed school­boy.”

As for its “shadi­ness,” the book also elic­its embar­rass­ment from Poe devo­tees because, as esteemed biol­o­gist and his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Stephen J. Gould wrote in his excul­pa­to­ry essay “Poe’s Great­est Hit,” it was “basi­cal­ly a scam,” though “not so bad­ly done” as most allege. The nat­u­ral­ist Wyatt, a friend of Poe’s, had begged his pub­lish­er to release an abridged stu­dent edi­tion of his orig­i­nal lav­ish and pricey $8 text­book, which had not sold well. When the pub­lish­er balked, Wyatt con­tract­ed Poe to lend his name and con­sid­er­able edi­to­r­i­al skill to a more-or-less boot­leg “Cliff­s­Notes” ver­sion to be sold for $1.50. To make mat­ters worse, Poe and Wyatt were both accused of pla­gia­rism, hav­ing “lift­ed chunks of their book from an Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist, Thomas Brown,” Lien­hard points out.

Gould defend­ed Poe as a rewriter of oth­ers’ work. “Yes, Poe pla­gia­rized,” as Lien­hard sum­ma­rizes the argu­ment. He pre­sent­ed Brown’s, and Wyat­t’s, work as his own, but, “flu­ent in French, [he] went back to read Georges Cuvi­er, the great French nat­u­ral­ist” and made his own trans­la­tions. He wrote his own intro­duc­to­ry mate­r­i­al, and he reor­ga­nized Wyatt’s book in such a way as to pro­vide “gen­uine­ly use­ful insight into bio­log­i­cal tax­on­o­my.” Poe’s edition—with its “for­mi­da­ble sub­ti­tle,” A Sys­tem of Tes­ta­ceous Mala­col­o­gy, arranged Express­ly for the Use of Schools—actu­al­ly proved a hit with stu­dents, and like­ly not only because it sold cheap. It was the only pub­li­ca­tion in Poe’s life­time to make it to a sec­ond edi­tion.

Maybe human­ist read­ers approach the work with bias­es firm­ly in place, expect­ing a genre that’s dry by its very nature to con­tain all the lit­er­ary bril­liance and enter­tain­ing intrigue of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lien­hard sug­gests as much, describ­ing irri­ta­tion at how his “lit­er­ary friends” ignore the sci­en­tif­ic work of writ­ers like Thore­au, Thomas Paine, Goethe, and poet Oliv­er Gold­smith. “Poe’s excur­sion into nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy,” he writes, “was an embar­rass­ment to peo­ple who are embar­rassed by sci­ence in the first place.” Maybe.

Both Gould and Lien­hard shrug off the less-than-scrupu­lous cir­cum­stances of the book’s cre­ation, the lat­ter cit­ing a “cyn­i­cal remark” by play­wright Wil­son Mizn­er: “If you steal from one author, it’s pla­gia­rism. If you steal from many, it’s research.” At least he doesn’t go as far as Mark Twain, who once wrote in defense of Helen Keller, after she was charged with lit­er­ary bor­row­ing, “the ker­nel, the soul—let us go fur­ther and say the sub­stance, the bulk, the actu­al and valu­able mate­r­i­al of all human utterance—is pla­gia­rism.”

Read the first, 1839 edi­tion of The Conchologist’s First Book, pub­lished under Edgar A. Poe, at the Inter­net Archive, and the revised sec­ond, 1840 edi­tion at Google Books.

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

Walt Whitman’s Unearthed Health Man­u­al, “Man­ly Health & Train­ing,” Urges Read­ers to Stand (Don’t Sit!) and Eat Plen­ty of Meat (1858)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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