Rostrum
It's becoming increasingly important to not only become intelligent, but also wise. In this podcast, Spencer and Arjun tackle contemporary topics through the lens of students early in their academic careers. They incorporate experiences from their personal lives, scientific papers, and philosophy in order to create a space for rational reflection. Just don't forget that they don't know everything.
Rostrum
The Role and Function of Science
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Science is a critical part of contemporary society. It is the main method that we use to determine what is true and how the world functions. Recently, science and its practitioners have been growing more ostracized from the general North American public, both due to politics and elitism. In this episode, Arjun and Spencer set out to dissect this issue in an attempt to understand the role of science in informing reality. With a focus on the practice as a process over a product, it emerges as a tool for creating plausible theories, emphasizing its place not as the arbiter of ultimate truth, but as a self-correcting method continually open to challenge.
It's been a while, Spencer. Honestly. Uh I think the last time we recorded together was probably a couple of months ago. It must have been back in December, right?
SPEAKER_01I think so. A month ago, but yeah, that'll do.
SPEAKER_00Okay, it feels like it's been forever. But it's good to be back. And today we're gonna be tackling a topic that is pretty important to us, to a lot of people, and is especially important considering the political climate right now. We're gonna be talking about the nature of science.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, it's exciting. Um again, just to remind viewers, I'm based in the States, Arjun is based in Canada, and the situations are a bit different between the two countries, but um there's a political side to it, there's the uh philosophical side to it. And which do you want to start with, Arjun?
SPEAKER_00I think it would be good to take a historical approach here, kind of understand what the motivations behind science were, beginning all the way back in the age of the Greek philosophers with Aristotle and Socrates and Plato.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So the Greeks are funny. I mean, obviously you had like the theory of like the humors and like the um I think the guy that got closest was Democritus, and I'm free balling here, but I think he came up with the atomic theory, um, where he's like everything's little particles. Um you can correct me if I'm wrong on that, but I think that's true.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you're right on that one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But the Greeks, uh, among other cultures, did science. They m mathematics, I'll say, was their stronger suit, and engineering as well. Uh but yeah, they their their view of science was very much um uh tied to philosophy and religion.
SPEAKER_00They wanted to find a way to explain the world, right? And I think this is where you see more uh of an overlap, at least in the mainstream at the time, between philosophy, theology, and what we would call science in the modern day. There was more like proto-science back then, because it there was less of a focus on experiments and more of a focus on theory. But anyway, yeah, they wanted to explain how the world worked, and to do that they invoked God quite a bit, or gods, they invoked a pantheon, and they used the myths that they envisioned in order to explain not only how the world worked, but how we fit in the world. And from that, you know, they spawned generative explanations of how we ought to live, of how the world worked mechanistically, and how we could move and manipulate objects fromin it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And not that this changes, I'll say, the philosophical view of things, but at least the Western interpretation, science comes from the word skiantia, it's a Latin word meaning knowing or to know. And this sort of process about which science occurs, of you know, anything from um hypothesis-based theories to, oh, you know, cross-referencing now to modern literature where every paper has to have 50 papers. The way we, the way the Greeks viewed science and the way we still view science, just how they viewed philosophy, was you take some old dead dude's stuff and you build off that. I'm sorry I'm quoting so many people here now, but um I think it was Aurelius that was quoted saying that we gain easily referring to knowledge and wisdom, what our fathers labored for greatly. So with science, you know, we build on what has already been built. So I think that the the view the Greeks had around philosophy translated as well, because they're like uh Aristotle and Plato bounced off each other, obviously, because one's the disciple, one's the student, you know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think it's interesting to note that at least I think Socrates never actually wrote a book. He never wrote anything down, at least we have never discovered anything he wrote. It was actually Plato who would transcribe all their conversations and his Socratic method where he'd go into the marketplace, the grocery store, whatever, and he would just ask people these bizarre philosophical questions about who they are, what how they know what they know. He would piss them off, from what I understand. Piss them off a lot.
SPEAKER_01He was killed for it. He was killed for it.
SPEAKER_00That's true. He was a village asshole.
SPEAKER_01I mean, i the average Socrates, the dialogues, if you read them, which I'm sure you have, it goes Socrates goes on a tangent, and the person's like, Yes, Socrates, and then he continues ranting. Like, I don't know. The best way I can describe it is if, well, kind of like this podcast, some random person comes up to you and starts ranting about the climate, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think if just considering how bizarre that was, if if someone came up to you on the street and started asking you who you were, I think we would rightly call them a complete weirdo. But when Socrates does it, nah, he's a genius. He's he's incredible, he's he's a visionary ahead of his time. Uh you see what they get away with.
SPEAKER_01Well the overlap between intelligence and insanity is pretty thin sometimes. I'll I'll say it's kind of the same line of to do something new, you have to do something new. And you can be Diogenes and, well, be jerking off in a barrel in the middle of the street, who existed at the same time as all these other philosophers were talking about. You know, uh eke homo, you know, behold a man. You know, I'm sure you know that example with a chicken.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um uh it was he'd called a man a featherless biped, and Diogenes plucked a chicken live and set it on the Senate chamber and let it run around. And he's like, eke homo, you know, behold a man. I don't know who that is. I'll have to look into that one. Holy cow.
SPEAKER_00Uh well. Let's let's pretend that's never happened.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, no. Oh my goodness. All the all the famous scientists have something wrong with them. I mean, if you look at Nikola Tesla, um world's pickiest eater, I think he ate like three or four things. Like that man was really autistic. Brilliant, but I mean, if you put Tesla Nikola Tesla in the modern day, he would exclusively eat dino nuggets, french fries, and pizza, I swear to God. It might even be white pizza, he might not even like tomatoes. So I I think with all scientists, not to talk about the nature of science, but out of the historic, in even in the historical lens. Isaac Newton, for example, brilliant, created fitness, also known virgin, and spent thousands of hours on alchemy. And it was so embarrassing for his family, they tried to hide it for generations. Eventually it came out that yeah, he was really trying to do transmutation of metals. Um, to be a good scientist, or at least a scientist that does something, you have to be a little crazy.
SPEAKER_00I agree. And that's sorry, go.
SPEAKER_01No, it's to to work in a lab or to work on a project, you have to be crazy because why the heck would you do that? You know, if you have good talent and skills in a lab, go work for, you know, DuPont or something and actually make money. You know?
SPEAKER_00Right. I think it's the pursuit of knowledge that is really meaningful to a lot of scientists to know more, to gain a better grasp of what's going on in the world, and then share that information with other people. And Spencer, I think you raise a really good point that we have to take an anthropological perspective here when we talk about science, because science is something that's constantly self-correcting, it's constantly changing what it finds to be right, and we'll talk about like what is right in science in a bit. And we can't exclude the fact that the scientists themselves are part of the science. Science isn't something that just happens out there. It's something that scientists, we are involved in constantly. And we play a role in shaping the biases and the values that we consider necessary for doing science.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and just like in physics, uh there there is no perfectly closed system. Uh science does not operate in a vacuum. You cannot reach absolute zero. I mean, all these things. Politics plays a part. Um I'll give you something local. Um, the Holmesburg Prison Study. Holmesburg Prison is a prison that exists in Philadelphia County, where I live, and they did a whole bunch of testing on like skin human um, you know, products and such, basically torturing prisoners for a few decades. And uh to think ethics doesn't have something to play in that would be misguided. We learned valuable things for science, of course, but we also tortured minorities for some number of years. I mean the Tuskegee study is a little bit more famous at this point, but same deal there, you know.
SPEAKER_00I had heard of it briefly. I didn't know much about it. And I think a lot of things like this have happened throughout history where we do end up making progress in biology or chemistry or neuroscience, but we often do horrible things to get there. And that's where you run into the old adju adage, excuse me, the and it doesn't justify the means, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean the mod modern day science, I mean, if you're working with vaccine, if you're working with immunology or certain things, you're gonna be torturing rhesus monkeys at some point. Inadvertently or not, you know, you're gonna be like, oh, I wonder if we can do neurodegeneration if we blind rhesus monkeys and just harvest stem cells from them. You know, and it it's horrible. But then obviously science, you have to contend with morals. And that's the nature of science. Is like, would you rather test on rhesus monkeys or test on humans? And well, you can probably surmise my answer, you know?
SPEAKER_00And this is where I want to bring in a philosophical point and something that actually I despise very much: the fact value dichotomy. I think the fact value dichotomy is extremely flawed. I think in the Enlightenment, when science was reinvigorated and during the scientific revolution, the idea came into being, probably due to Descartes and other dualisms, that facts and values are dichotomized. They're wholly separate. Not that they're distinct, they are distinct, but that they are wholly separate. And when you consider the role that scientists themselves play, and the fact that we have to take some things at face value, we have to believe in some things like induction at face value in order to do science, you realize that there are values that underpin all of the science we do, and science is the method by which we obtain facts, quote unquote. So facts and values can't be wholly separate.
SPEAKER_01No, there's no way. I mean, for example, um there's an art school that used to be there's pre- and post Sharia Afghanistan, and this was post-Sharia Afghanistan, in which women's women were still going to college that quickly disappeared after that. But you had an art school, and part of our school is you learn to paint the nude human, you know. We like ourselves a lot, I guess. We like to paint ourselves. And a model was brought in wearing a um a nihab, full, draped, couldn't see anything. And the art teacher is like, okay, draw the female form. And the students kind of looked at each other like, what is going on? So, in the same way that, you know, you had that, and that's a very extreme example, but uh academics believe, and so do colleges, that they're immune from political involvement. You know, the Stanford Prison experiment, it's like, oh, we won't have any blowback. There's nothing wrong with this. It's a bunch of college students messing around, you know. So I think the sooner that academia realizes that we're not immune to moralistic values and judgments, both from internal and from the public, the sooner we get better at doing science.
SPEAKER_00Yep. I think this was something that Oppenheimer ran into as well. Do I just do things because other people tell me to and because knowledge needs to progress? Or should I actually consider the morals of what I'm doing? It's difficult. There sometimes there was no clear answer about what you should do. But I think what's important is that you at least consider it and that you talk about it with other people. This shouldn't be something that you keep to yourself, especially when the results of your experiments and the results of your theory can be so consequential.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I'll say also the the type of knowledge should be questioned too. Um, for example, people were very critical of NASA when they first started, because they're like, hey, we have all these problems here. Why are we going to the moon? And the answer was politics. He wanted to beat the Soviets there, blah, blah, blah, Cold War. Um the same can be said for certain types of knowledge, which would be interesting to know, but we don't really need to. Like, hey, I wonder if like you remove someone's frontal lobe, how long they can function. Can they survive? Can't can you do that? It would provide no scientific benefit if we did know what would happen with that. I'm sure there's an answer out there, but I I don't think we need to know that. And that's also blindly doing something, quote unquote, for the sake of science leads to things like Unit 731 from Japan, stuff like that, you know, where you use science as your own personal ends, which I think can be harmful. Or um, I forget, I forget the guy's name, but the Chinese scientist who like messed around with the embryo DNA, you know what I'm talking about?
SPEAKER_00No, um, oh, actually, yeah, I think I heard of this briefly in the news, but could you tell us a little bit more about it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so genetic editing on embryos is generally frowned upon, like CRISPRing kids, which I get, you know, um the laws on that are kind of non-existent, but the general consensus is no. And some Chinese doc went rogue and did it, and the kids were born, and he's like, hey guys, I crispered a kid, and the international community's like, you did what? You know, um, and there's no need to CRISPR a kid, at least at that point. Because you you get again to these moralistic questions you're asking, like, well, you know, can I edit them? You know, where where does science end and morals start? And that's also the nature of science is quite a bunch of us academics where we're like, I don't care, test it, do it. And then you get the rest of the general public's like, what the heck are you doing? You know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think this might lead a as well to a divide between the scientific community and the general public. And you get allegations of elitism and stuff like that from the general public. Sometimes they're right, but sometimes they're also wrong. Sometimes concepts are just a little bit more technical, and we need certain technical language to explain that. But the job of a good scientist and a good scientific communicator should be to clearly explicate and explain those ideas to the general public so that they understand, you know, vaccines aren't evil. It's not the government that's tracking you. They're actually tools designed to help save your life and prevent you from getting really, really horrible diseases.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and to on the vaccine thing, if anyone's listening to this as an anti-vaxxer, I'd request you to listen to somebody else because there's no saving you at this point. Uh no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Uh now, I think vaccines are very you saw a failure of the American public to understand something that's for their benefit. Uh Dr. Fauci nearly got spit-roasted for it, you know? Um God bless that man. I think it's very interesting with the widespread availability of information, people tend to understand less of it. That's also been very interesting to see. If you anybody can go on Nature or PubMed or whatever, pick a site, I don't care, um, and look at these clinical trials as they come out and look at all these papers, but they're like, eh, Facebook, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, social media definitely plays a role in propagating misinformation and disinformation. I think part of it is because there might be foreign interest in the dumbing down of the American population.
SPEAKER_01No, no country would want us to get dumber and not understand that.
SPEAKER_00Surely Russia wouldn't want the American public to be stupid.
SPEAKER_01There's no way. See dissent and hatred amongst the populace. Oh. Oh boy, let's invade Greenland. Let's break up NATO. I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure Russia has nothing to do with this. My God. Ugh. Man, it is a weird time to be alive. Um, it really is.
SPEAKER_00It's bizarre. I don't know what's gonna happen in the next couple of years. I think this this enables us to actually turn to another point. What really is science then? And how should the public try and understand science, what it is? Can we give like an explanation or a kind of thesis of what science is?
SPEAKER_01I'll use the atomic model again because it's the easiest to explain. Democritus came up with, hey, I believe there's little tiny particles that make up everything. But the Plato model, was it Plato who had like earth, fire, water, and air or something? Who was it?
SPEAKER_00I think that was Aristotle. I'll double check. I'll double check.
SPEAKER_01You know, I think it's Aristotle. It's one of one of the Greeks. And then eventually we figured out, huh, I think elements exist, and huh, I think of the plum pudding model, which oh, I think maybe it's the orbital model, and now we've got the electron cloud model, and there's probably something new coming out in the next year or two anyway. Um But at each of those times, that science today we know was incorrect, but then with the technology they had, you know, it was correct to them. Because, you know, the plum pudding model, well, they shot electrons at gold foil and it deflected weirdly, and they're like, well, I think there's a positively charged core. So I don't know if this plum pudding model makes sense anymore. I think it's uh, you know, the nucleus model is know it. Um so I think in understanding science, you have to understand the context in which it's presented. Of two the scientists of the day, they thought it was right. Here's how we can improve, but we shouldn't necessarily say, well, these guys are idiots. I think that encourages positive progress and collaboration, of saying, well, crap, I now know, you know?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. I think you're absolutely on on the ball of this one. Science isn't something that's static, it's a dynamic system. It and more importantly, it's not a product, it's a process. It's all about how you are doing it, not exactly what you get in the end. So I think we can conceive of science as a as a process, something that seeks to more deeply understand the world. And it uses both theory and experiments, like our data that we collect from the world and from our observations, and the underlying theories, explanations of what's going on, that allows us to generalize that data to really understand what's going on at a more fundamental level. And then that can also generate predictions, and we test those predictions using our experiments, and our experiments tell us whether maybe there's something wrong here, or maybe you were on the right track, and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_01Put yourself in Mexico City approximately a thousand years ago, right? You're as tech. Congratulations, you eat uh as you eat corn and beans and all this other fun stuff, and it's this really big pyramid in the center. And every day, someone gets their heart torn out while still beating, push down the steps and present to the sun gods. The sun will rise. And you know what's crazy? The sun rises every day. So obviously, by sat by pulling this dude's heart out, we must the sun must rise, right? So it's it's gotta be the hearts. It's gotta be the hearts, you know, and occasionally the sun goes out, right? And we don't know what that is. We think the sun god took the sun away. Now we know it's an eclipse, but oh my god, but if we sacrifice a ton of hearts when that happens, then the sun comes back. So we need to sacrifice more hearts, yeah, when the sun's taken out. And to the Aztecs, that was science. They were great astrologers, by the way. But it is equally as valid for the Aztecs to have come up with that than for the Europeans to have come up with other things that they did. And I think the stigmatism, the stigma, not stigmatism, that's eyes. Sorry, the stigma of, well, your views are bunk leads people to become anti-vaxxers and stuff as such. Because not knowing is not knowing. You have to come out and help people and meet them where they're at and train them in what's correct. And if you don't do that, you galvanize people against you know, science as it should be.
SPEAKER_00Right. Right. Science uh, and I think that this is where a lot of the general public misunderstands what science is trying to do. Science is not trying to tell you necessarily what is true. And this is a very subtle point. Science is instead trying to generate the most plausible explanation as to what's going on. And plausibility is an idea, it's a judgment of relevance. Okay, you have multiple lines of converging independent evidence to an explanation that is fluent, that can be understood well, that can be mapped out in some cohesive form, and then it generalizes to a lot of different fields as well. So, for instance, evolution. Evolution is an example of a very plausible framework because the previous explanation for how beings came to be is that there is an intelligent designer, God. But here comes Darwin. He's off the Galapagos. Or was it the Galapagos?
SPEAKER_01The Beagle went through most of South America. So the Galapagos was where he came up with the finches. Also, the if if you you should read Journey of the Beagle, you should also read Origin of Species. Found fossils that linked up the continents. Pangea was certainly a thought in his head, but that wasn't published till later. But yeah, he saw stuff and he's like, hey, this kind of I don't know, this whole evolution thing makes sense. But the political climate was so that he hid it for a number of years. You know? So the public isn't always ready for science, you know. Um, I believe it was, was it Crick who had said there's IQ differences based on race? I'm pretty sure that was Crick. Yeah, it was and he lost all credibility, was stripped of all of his awards, everything like that. And it's like, well, now we know that someone from Sub-Saharan Africa is probably not going to have as high of an IQ based off of like, if they were raised there, based off of malnutrition and poor schooling. But I think it's it's it's dangerous to be a scientist because if you have an opinion someone doesn't like, you're toast, like with Fauci, you know?
SPEAKER_00No. Being a scientist is difficult because you have to be able to put forth an argument, a plausible explanation as to what's going on or data or whatever.
SPEAKER_01And towards people that have no idea what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_00No, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01It's it's like everyone's debating the safety of GLP1 inhibitors. And I'm like, can you tell me metabolism? What's a glycosidic bond? What's a I don't know. Can you tell me how the liver produces and the pancreas produces the enzymes that it does? And no, they can't. But the public has a right to know if something's dangerous. But I believe the internet, this is kind of off topic here, I apologize. The internet has made everybody an expert because they can Google something and run the Chat GPT or a Gemini and say, generate me a summary. And they'll copy paste that and say, well, this is what I think based off my research. And well, for both of us that are four years into eight plus more years total of school, we're looking at them like, what on earth are you doing? You know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it doesn't make sense. And I think expertise isn't it's not the ability to come up with the right answer in a specific field. That's that's not what it is. Expertise is is the ability to reason through to that answer. Let me let me give a really simple example, okay? Imagine you have a mathematician here, like a professional PhD mathematician. Okay, they've worked on a proof to prove uh some topological thing. But the details don't matter. They've worked on a proof and it's difficult and they've done it. Great, published. The communities is congratulate them. Hooray, hooray, hooray. And then here comes Bob. Okay, Bob is a guy who wants to be a mathematician, let's say, and he uses ChatGPT to generate the answer to this question. He generates the proof using ChatGPT. And he says, look, I proved it as well. I'm also a great mathematician. Is Bob an expert in math? Not really. No. Bob. Well, Bob got the right answer. Bob didn't reason through it himself. He didn't think, okay, how do I go from here to here to here to here? Bob was more concerned with the product rather than the process. And expertise is specifically the ability to reason through to that final answer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think what's important is that anyone, citizen science is really important. Anyone should be encouraged to engage in science, you know. Um Cornell Bird Labs, they do the great backyard bird count. I I know on the East Coast, I'm not sure about where else. Go out there with a for a day with a lawn chair and a pair of binoculars and look at birds and look at species distribution. You know, I was just down in Curacao with uh my university for a week working with uh sea turtles and trying to figure out cancer, you know, and sea turtles. And but there were citizens there too, just random Dutch people. We're like, hey, I I know how to swim. Can I help you get turtles? Awesome, man. You know, I love seeing people involved in science, but I also don't like how easy it is for, let's say, a doctor to say, well, I think it's this based off of my insert years of training. And in a public forum, someone can say no. And that's the entire argument. No, I don't believe you. And oftentimes that argument wins because they're either unwilling or unwittingly just the answer is no, I don't think so. And you don't have to provide any proof. Whereas to vouch for the veracity of something, you have to provide oh my god. How much proof?
SPEAKER_00A lot, a lot. I think there's a dual kind of set of issues going on. One, the society community can be a little too obtuse sometimes, can be a little bit too technical, it can be elitist sometimes for sure. On the other hand, the general public can be uh often unwilling to really engage with the science at hand.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I how do you bridge that issue? I don't know, like juice up Bill Nye and Adam Savage and people like that and say, yeah, guys, go out and entertain them, you know, give them the science programming, uh, give David Attenborough a bunch of Vikadin and tell them to go have fun, you know. Um I love David Attenborough. Um he's wonderful. But no, I mean, how do you get people in? It's from childhood, it's in the education system, it's in the popular media, it's National Geographic, it's Wired magazine, it's Scientific and American, it's, you know, you want people to be involved in science. I don't think that people should necessarily be involved, like, I don't need people shadowing me in the lab. I'm good. But I think that you should give scientists the opportunity in a public forum to say, hey, here's the cool stuff we're working on, guys. You might find it interesting. And they remove a lot of the technical details because they're irrelevant. The average citizen doesn't care about a pathway for a redox reaction. They care about the new explosive you might have made, right?
SPEAKER_00Right, right. So it seems that science has to be something that's relevant, that's of import to the lives of the people, the general public. If we're just throwing a bunch of technical terms for some obtuse, you know, neural pathways, or maybe some weird electron microscopy experiments, then obviously people won't care as much. So we as scientists have to make it relevant to the people's lives. We have to be like, okay, the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of uh understanding reality is important to you. And here's how it affects your lives, or here's how it can be interesting to you.
SPEAKER_01Here's why you should give a hoot, you know? But no, I uh that's all from me. But thanks for listening to us rabble. I don't know how many people I've quoted today, but there was no script.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_01And I I'm sorry for the horrible sounds from my end here. I'm in a negative pressure. Well, depends on which side of the wall you're on. The they try to keep air in the lab here because we have nasty diseases and they don't want it leaking out. So that's this horrible fan you're hearing. Just so you all know.
SPEAKER_00I hope my audio is a little better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Let me let me get the lab safety manager to turn off all of our uh pressure, pressure stuff. You know, it tuberculosis reappears on Philadelphia. Lovely.
SPEAKER_00All right, and I think with that, that's a good place to end regarding science and how we interface with it in the public sphere. Just remember that as always, the best course of action is to probably remain rational, to remain self correcting and open to debate and competitions your ideas. That's the best way to figure out what is more plausible and what isn't.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, stay in school, kids, and eat your weaties. Thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_00Yep. See you guys later.
