Intuition

Author: Allegra Goodman
Year: 2006
Genre: Literary fiction

Intuition is the story of an academic controversy in which one graduate student accuses another of falsifying results. There's a lot of talk in the book about how science is a search for "truth," while I've always understood it to be a search for "facts." In this case, truth is hard to come by: not only the scientific truth of the results of the experiment in question, but even the more mundane truth about what happened in the laboratory.

Goodman draws up her characters masterfully. What I liked most about it is that there are no clear good guys and bad guys. Instead, you sympathize first with one character, then with another. I really wanted to take sides one way or the other, but I couldn't do it; the characters were too complex.

Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature

Author: Robin Brande
Year: 2007
Genre: YA fiction

Mena begins her ninth grade year in a bit of an awkward situation: she comes from an evangelical family, but all the kids from her church are ostracizing her. ... Freaks of Nature is her diary, and as we follow the story, we learn what all the trouble is. It's the story of a girl who's learning to think for herself, and beginning to create an adult relationship with her parents.

I don't read a lot of this kind of book, so there's not much for me to compare it to. I do know that Brande is a bit misleading on the science. Of course, the evolution unit in Mena's biology class becomes a battleground for the fundamentalist kids, and evolution itself is treated as a metaphor for personal change. BUT! That means there's a lot of equivocation between character development and actual biological evolution, which does not happen in one individual's lifetime! I feel like the science teacher needs to come out at one point and say "Yes, that's very good, you feel like you're evolving, but that's not what I mean when I talk about natural selection."

Meaghan and I talked a lot about who the target audience must be for a book like this. It's certainly not addressed to the hard-core fundamentalists, who would probably take exception to their being portrayed as snotty teenagers. In the end, we decided that it might be intended for kids like Mena, who come from a religious background but are starting to question. On the other hand, it might be meant for kids like her boyfriend Casey, who know that most religious belief is ridiculous, but haven't had much to do with believers before.

Better

Author: Atul Gawande
Year: 2007
Genre: Science / Current events

A doctor takes a long, hard look at the modern-day practice of medicine and catalogs its weaknesses. He asks a lot of embarrassing questions like "Why don't doctors wash their hands as much as they should?" and "How much money do doctors deserve to make?" and "Is it really worth the effort to eradicate polio?" Gawande is a very readable writer and clear thinker, and following the path of his researching and soul-searching can be educational.

I bought this as a father's day present for my dad, who is also a member of the medical profession. He found it notable that Gawande, a surgeon, would draw attention to his own weaknesses. In particular, Gawande tells the story of a patient who developed a post-operative infection, and admits the possibility that he himself is to blame for spreading it.

In the end of all his investigation, Gawande makes some pretty interesting points. I don't remember all of them (and can't check now, as I've given the book away!) but here's what I remember: don't be negative; take a critical look at what you're doing, in a way that's interesting to you. He intends his advice to be for doctors and other medical professionals, but I think they're more widely applicable, and I've been trying to apply them to my own profession of teaching.

Quicksilver

Author: Neal Stephenson
Year: 2004
Genre: Historical fiction

Stephenson claims to be a science fiction writer, but I have to disagree. Like Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver is not science fiction so much as historical fiction about scientists. Maybe he calls it science fiction because his audience is the same; SF or no, Quicksilver can unquestionably be shelved under "zany fun for geeks."

What a tangle of subplots: there's the Puritan in Restoration England, the early history of the Royal Society, 17th-century financial intrigue a la A Conspiracy of Paper, Louis XIV court intrigue that's not too far removed from Mel Brooks, and two pirate stories. Half the fun is keeping all that in your head.

I'll see if I can still remember it when I get around to reading Book Two.

Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding

Author: Georgia M. Green
Year: 1996
Genre: Linguistics

It's pretty clear that the meaning of words is conventional. I use the word computer to refer to this thing that I'm typing on because when I write that word to you, you know what I mean. The first time I realized this important fact about language, it seemed like the end of the discussion because it explains so much. On the contrary, though - it's just the beginning.

Pragmatics is the field of linguistic inquiry that explores how language is used to construct meaning between individuals. This can mean the flexibility in the meaning of individual words: we know what computer means, but when I talk about the New York Times, do I mean:

• a copy of the newspaper (I bought the Times today)
• the information contained in it (I can get the Times online)
• the paper's editorial board (The Times says the Democrats are right)
• the business that publishes the paper (The Times owns the Boston Globe)
• or what?

Mostly, I judge from the context of the conversation and from what I know of you to determine what you're probably trying to express. This sort of conversational mind-reading guessing game is going on all the time; it's what allows us to express nonverbal ideas in a verbal medium, and to produce infinitely many thoughts with a finite number of words.

Pragmatics also deals with the ways people use language to achieve social goals, from a simple request to an attempt to persuade or change someone's mind. The assumptions we make about other people's prior knowledge are pragmatic, as are the form and function of politeness.

Georgia Green's book explores all this and more. It's a rewarding read for anyone who is interested in the hidden details of language and the assumptions behind its use, as long as they're not put off by a modicum of technical language or too cool to read textbooks for fun. (I'm clearly not.)

The Linguistics Wars

Author: Randy Allen Harris
Year: 1993
Genre: Linguistics

I came to this book hoping that Harris would be the Stephen Jay Gould of linguistics: someone who understands the field well, and can explain major ideas in their historical context. Upon reading, though, The Linguistics Wars strikes me more as an academic Homicide: an intimate portrait showing that science is a dirty business done by real, flawed human beings.

Our story begins with Noam Chomsky as a rising star of linguistics and philosophy in the 1950s, and then focuses primarily on the well-established Chomsky c. 1970 and his conflict with a group of former students who broke off to follow a research program called "generative semantics." While the substance of generative semantics and its differences from Chomsky's "interpretive semantics" program do receive some attention, Harris spends far more time on the personal antipathy between Chomsky and the generative semanticists, most notably George Lakoff. I was left with an impression that, whatever the respective merits of the generative and interpretive theories may have been, the actual unfolding of the debate had more to do with personality than with science.

Not that there's anything wrong with that -- necessarily. An early stage of the debate, it seems, was scientifically productive. The dislike that grew between the two camps did inspire its share of nasty ad hominem and polemic, but also caught linguists by their competitive instinct, resulting in some of the field's most original and influential research. With time, though, scientific debate gave way to personal sniping, and eventually, the generative program fizzled and the "wars" faded away.

The moral of the story is that scientific "progress" is largely a product of the culture that the scientists inhabit. (Maybe the comparison of Harris to Gould is not so far wrong, then; see my review of The Mismeasure of Man.) In the case of Chomsky et al. vs. Lakoff et al., that means the culture of research in modern theoretical syntax; and as Harris points out, it's not inaccurate to say that Chomsky, the ultimate victor in the Linguistics Wars, had founded that culture. In a larger sense, though, it also means the culture of the United States in the 1960s and '70s. While Chomsky was (and remains) an outspoken political ultra-liberal, Chomsky-the-academic is deadly serious and strictly authoritarian. (Perhaps he inspired the discussion in Lakoff's Moral Politics of people who are both politically progressive and academically conservative.) Harris contrasts this with a picture of the generative semanticists as academic hippies, bringing the "sex-drugs-rock & roll" counterculture and its collectivist ethos to their way of doing linguistics. Their hypotheses were grand and their failures public; they promised a map of the human mind that, in the end, they could not deliver.

The Golden Ratio

Author: Mario Livio
Year: 2002
Genre: Science / Math

Before I read this book, I'd heard about a lot of the astonishing mathematical properties of Φ, as well as the Golden Ratio's aesthetic appeal. What struck me reading Livio's book is not the math itself (as interesting as that was; I haven't studied math seriously in many years). No, what really caught my attention was the number of times that Φ has been cited as the basis for great works of art, that turned out to be pure B.S. Consider the following:

• Φ is not the ratio of the height of the Parthenon to its width.
• Φ has no role in the design of the Pyramids.
• While Da Vinci did illustrate a mathematical book on Φ (The Divine Proportion by Luca Pacioli), he did not use it as a guide to composing the Mona Lisa or anything else.
• Mozart and Mondrian didn't use it, either.

So, The Golden Ratio succeeds as a debunker's compendium. Livio makes the history of Golden Ratio fanaticism seem like so much Da Vinci Code-style overblown hokum. (All the more ironic that Dan Brown's praise for The Golden Ratio is given pride of place on the front cover.)

After that, the best part of the book for me was the end, where Livio digresses into fractal geometry and the enduring philosophical conundrum of why mathematics (a purely abstract human invention) mirrors the physical universe so precisely. These fundamental questions are more interesting to me than any laundry list of Φ trivia.

How Language Works

Author: David Crystal
Year: 2005
Genre: Nonfiction (Science/Linguistics)

I've read several introductory books on linguistics, and this is by far the broadest. Such books usually describe neurology, phonology, morphology, syntax, acquisition, and historical linguistics, and offer a nod to sociolinguistics. Crystal casts his net much wider, addressing writing, sign language, bilingualism and its politics, foreign-language teaching, the maintenance and extinction of rare languages, and the prescriptive-descriptive debate. (He's got a bullet with Lynne Truss's name on it.)

The Mismeasure of Man

Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Year: 1981
Genre: Science

After the last book I read on standardized testing, I came to this book assuming that the arguments against IQ would be more or less the same as the arguments against the MCAS. Standardized testing in general is problematic, I thought; it tends to be culturally biased and limiting, and when it's used as the sole (or primary) measure of intellectual competence, it invariably gives a one-sided view of the test-taker, conflating true mental ability with mere test-taking savvy. From this perspective, what does it matter if the test is administered by psychologists or by schoolteachers?

Instead, Gould's history of mental testing, from 19th-century craniometry to the eve of The Bell Curve (I believe he addresses The Bell Curve explicitly in a later edition), left me with an appreciation for just how progressive the MCAS is. While it may be narrow-minded and unfair, at least it was established with the goal of raising the performance of the weakest students to meet a universal minimum standard. It's meant to measure learning and achievement in a given subject area, not native mental ability. IQ, on the other hand, has historically been viewed (in Gould's words) as an innate, general, cognitive ability - something that underlies all an individual's intellectual accomplishment, and that cannot be increased by more or better instruction. Just the opposite: low IQ scores have been used to justify everything from segregated professional and vocational educational tracks, to racial discrimination and forced sterilization. Whatever its actual result, MCAS's intent is to help all students learn; IQ has overwhelmingly singled out low-performing children to receive even lower-quality education.

In my review of Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, I mentioned that I was reading "another book that deals with similar themes." The Mismeasure of Man is that book. The two biologists engage different but related themes: while Wilson writes about the place he envisions for scientists in the study of culture, Gould addresses the influence of a cultural environment on the practice of science. The interpretation of IQ scores as measuring a single general intelligence, and their use (like that of craniology before them) to rank human beings in order of innate intellectual capability, was the product of an age whose experts ranked all life according to the "great chain of being," culminating with whites over blacks and men over women. Although test results allowed numerous potential interpretations, scientists' prejudices led them to the one that seemed "obvious" at the time. Gould doesn't mention them explicitly, but one could view the theories of multiple intelligences and "learning differences" as the "inevitable" views of a more pluralistic generation. Despite our best attempts at impartiality, cultural norms and preconceptions drive our interpretations; the data themselves are just numbers.

Consilience

Author:Edward O. Wilson
Year:1998
Genre:Science

I didn't get to finish this book because I moved from one town to another, and I had to return it to the library, and it was overdue anyway. But I'm reading another book now that deals with some similar themes, and I wanted to get this down before I start to lose it. I promise to go back and read the last thirty pages.

Consilience is the more or less personal manifesto of Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, who believes that all the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities should be united in one great chain of human endeavor. As a scientist, he holds science-centric views - he's especially unkind to the social sciences, which he considers a castle built on sand - but he does make some interesting points about how much the different fields of knowledge have to learn from one another. After all, the social sciences and humanities are basically elaborations on human nature, and what is human nature but a product of genes and environment?

The unifying thread here is epigenetic characteristics, the inherited traits that influence human learning and behavior. They are not rote instincts, like the bees' dances that do not change over generations, but exist on the boundary between genes and culture. The language-learning instinct, for instance, is an epigenetic characteristic, but the particular language that each individual learns is dependent on their cultural environment. Other examples that Wilson provides are the incest taboo (in spite of Freud, he says, this is not purely cultural) and fear of snakes. The point is that while human beings are diverse, the diversity is not limitless, and exists within boundaries that are more or less prescribed by our biology.

The great challenge, then, is to use the varied tools of neuroscience, anthropology, criticism, art, and philosophy to explore the boundary regions. Rather than being taboo areas that academics shy away from, they should be (Wilson says) the most active areas of study. Furthermore, as a natural scientist, he holds that all of these researchers should take their cues from empirical evidence of how the mind/brain works.

As a linguist, I find this idea appealing (and more or less inevitable). Linguistics is just such an interdisciplinary field as what Wilson is proposing. After all, language is a key component (perhaps the defining component) of human nature, and its students include cognitive neuroscientists, anthropologists, literary theorists, philosophers, and everyone in between.

Wilson himself is an interesting figure these days. With the likes of Richard Dawkins having such a loud voice in the science vs. religion debate, Wilson recalls his upbringing as a born-again evangelical and subsequent scientific training and "conversion" to humanistic deism. While he himself is not a science-bashing religious freak (he does take specific objection to the Intelligent Design movement), he does have respect and understanding for people of faith. As he outlines in his chapter on the relationship between epigenetics and ethics, he sees some benefit in scientists' and theologians' listening to one another. (This perspective has got him on the cover of this month's Seed Magazine.)