Ruchira and I have been volleying e-mail messages behind the scenes regarding a cluster of recent articles dealing with "science and ..."—fill in the blank with a miscellany of topics you might not have expected to find associated with science just a decade or two ago: mens rea and "neurolaw," laughter, the weather of the next mega-annum... Neither of us is equipped with sufficient time to comment thoroughly on the subject, so instead I'll do so cursorily and leave it up to readers and commenters to, well, fill in the blanks, if you so choose.
The New York Times recently ran a long story by Jeffrey Rosen on forensic neuroscience and the use of brain scans as legal evidence in a trial. It is a fascinating and extensive treatment of the subject, although it suffers occasionally from the "gee whiz!" tone that often plagues popular science writing. (One of the protagonists, according to Rosen, "is a disciplined and quietly intense man, and his enthusiasm for the transformative power of neuroscience is infectious.") Despite the tone, the treatment of a controversial subject—the notion that if intention has a purely material causal explanation, then we shouldn't be punishing people according to their intentions—is fair and balanced.
Personally, I enjoyed the antagonists, such as the one depicted here:
“There’s nothing new about the neuroscience ideas of responsibility; it’s just another material, causal explanation of human behavior,” says Stephen J. Morse, professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “How is this different than the Chicago school of sociology,” which tried to explain human behavior in terms of environment and social structures? “How is it different from genetic explanations or psychological explanations? The only thing different about neuroscience is that we have prettier pictures and it appears more scientific.”
See the entire article for a much more nearly complete picture of the controversy.
Shortly after Rosen's article appeared, the Times published a brief account by John Tierney of more or less scientific work being done on laughter. According to Tierney, "Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science." After reading the article, Ruchira remarked that she
found it fairly unconvincing—a few isolated particulars extrapolated to huge generalities. I agree that there is an element of "getting along" in our laughter—by signaling our willingness to disarm. But what drives one to laughter is not that easy to predict.
I agree, and I also lament the rude incursion of science into one of the few perhaps suitably mysterious realms of quotidian pleasure, the joke. Besides, I thought the muffin joke that leads the story was funny, at least in print, where "Holy cow" meekly stands in for what any reasonable comedian would utter in a real world telling. And why does my one-year-old son laugh hysterically if not because something is funny to him? How does that have "little to do with humor," as Tierney remarks of most laughter? Even if laughter is "an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit," haven't Tierney and the scientists so somberly devoted to studying the phenomenon considered that instinctive impulses, survival, and social dynamics are often wildly funny topics? What else is a desert island joke, if not a clever encapsulation of precisely those factors?
Then Ruchira brought to my attention this review of Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future. Although Prof. Wunsch in his review praises much about the book:
[The authors'] extended examples of the misuse of science are both convincing and depressing. The book is a welcome antidote to the blind use of supposedly quantitative models, which may well represent the best one can do, but which are not yet capable of producing useful information.
...he is also critical of its own mistaken premises. For example:
The authors' examples are not really problems of science but of the application of science to a practical end (a definition of engineering); politics, economics, the legal system and even psychology are involved. When science is not ready to answer specific questions, but the political universe insists that policies must be put in place (How large a catch can the fishery sustain? Is malaria in Africa a greater problem than HIV? How rapidly will this beach erode?), the outcome is almost inevitable: Someone will rush forward claiming that the answer is at hand, and the political system, driven to cope with a public threat or desire, will likely implement some insupportable policy. When the science is incomplete, one enters the world of P. T. Barnum, medical nostrums and the carnival.
This distinction sits well with me, not that there is any good reason to trust my intuitions. In any case, the review made me laugh, too, with its example of an application of science to useless questions:
Examples abound of theories being applied grossly beyond the limits of their demonstrable usefulness, leading to absurd results or producing "answers" to questions that are themselves absurd (What will be the hydrological cycle in Yucca Flat one million years in the future?).
I won't bother explaining why this struck me as funny, but perhaps it does have something to do with the fact—as scientifically sound a fact as there can be—that I won't survive to check the result.
Dean:
It is funny that I originally invited you to be an author on A.B. after you and I engaged in a couple of long, protracted arguments about the role of science in the arts, literature and popular culture in general. Although I am inclined to give more credence to scientific studies of mundane behavior, I agree with you that journalists and scientists themselves often have a tendency to go overboard with their interpretations and conclusions.
The "Laughter" article irritated me right off the bat with the following opening sentence.
So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, “Wow, it’s hot in here!”
And the other muffin replies: “Holy cow! A talking muffin!”
Did that alleged joke make you laugh? I would guess (and hope) not.
Why not, I asked? On what authority did the author declare that we shouldn't find the joke funny? Very similar to the irritation I feel when snooty art mavens and critics superciliously tell us what is "art." The flaw in the article was to not make a distinction between "humor" which is independent of who is present and "laughter" which for the most part is a social reaction.
You already quoted me on my take on whether laughter is exclusively a social activity and if humor is independent of the setting. I often laugh by myself, alone at home when I read or hear something funny. True, there is an impulse to immediately call or e-mail someone to share the joke. So, yes, laughter is best enjoyed in company. But the ability to detect and appreciate humor can happen in solitude. When my sister and I are together, we go into hysterics so frequently and over such "unfunny" things that our husbands and children are convinced that we put up a cliquish wall against the rest of them. But that is not true because we do that just by ourselves even when no one else is around.
There is one thing true in the article to some extent. The boss and underling angle. It is true that the weak are more likely to laugh than the powerful in identical social settings and a rich man's joke is always funny. But the weak can also manipulate a situation to their advantage with laughter. Women know very well that they can make a man "do" things for them by laughing at his jokes. They can also intimidate. There is nothing that will turn a man's knees to jelly faster than believing that a gaggle of females is giggling at him. Most of this happens without forethought or planning and it transcends age, social settings and class barriers - in school, at parties, at the hardware store or at the auto repair shop.
The article on mathematical modeling and the pitfalls of overinterpretation is very illuminating.
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | March 16, 2007 at 05:28 PM