Carl Zimmer on Unscientific Hollywood

November 7, 2010 • 3:58 am

We hear a lot about how infusing the popular media with science—improving its image in the movies, having rock stars sing out for science, getting pulchritudinous cheerleaders to flap their pom-poms for physics—will be an important remedy for Americans’ abysmal ignorance of science.  Carl Zimmer begs to differ, at least about movies.  In this week’s Nature, Zimmer discusses his experience as a judge at the Imagine Science Festival. While he’d like movies to be a good vehicle for promoting science, he just doesn’t see it.

For all that science and technology have delivered to Hollywood, scientists have received little back. Researchers portrayed in films bear scant resemblance to those in real labs. Some on-screen scientists are villains that must be destroyed by common-sense heroes. Others threaten nature with Promethean recklessness. Yet others are mavericks who find cures for cancer single-handedly in jungle tree-houses. And movies often distort science itself. Tornadoes, volcanoes, spaceships, viruses: all obey the laws of Hollywood, not the laws of Newton or Darwin.

Scientists have gnashed their popcorn buckets, wishing for something better. In 2008, the US National Academy of Sciences set up the Science and Entertainment Exchange to bring scientists and Hollywood film-makers together for fruitful exchanges of ideas. Gambis’s film festival serves a similar mission: its website announces that it “encourages a greater collaboration between scientists who dedicate their lives to studying the world we live in and film-makers who have the power to interpret and expose this knowledge, ultimately making science accessible and stimulating to a broader audience”.

I’m not convinced such collaborations will achieve this goal often, or even whether they should. Exhibit A: Harrison Ford. Earlier this year, he played a biochemist searching for a cure for a genetic disorder in Extraordinary Measures, a fairly accurate story inspired by a book by reporter Geeta Anand. In 2008, Ford also played a scientist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a fairly accurate account of a comic-book fever dream. Extraordinary Measures earned a meagre US$12 million, whereas Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull earned $317 million. Hollywood is a place of business, not charity, and the marketplace speaks clearly: people want their scientists with bullwhips, not pipettes.

The next paragraph is the crux: there’s not necessarily a huge public appetite, actual or latent, for the kind of science the popularizers want to infuse into movies:

Even if Hollywood directors dedicated themselves to achingly realistic biopics about Peter Medawar or Henri Poincaré, that might not be a good thing. Films should not be propaganda, bludgeoning us with messages about how valuable certain things or people are. At their best, films embody the conflicts in our societies, and give form to our inner lives in all their ragged glory. They can use real aspects of the world as their raw material, but holding them drearily to account is a mistake. Citizen Kane is about a newspaper editor; it would not have been a masterpiece if Orson Welles had kept asking himself “Does this make journalism accessible to a broader audience?”.

Science and morality: a Science Friday discussion

November 7, 2010 • 3:57 am

Yesterday’s NPR Science Friday, moderated by Ira Flatow, has a really interesting 48-minute discussion, “Can science shape human values? And should it?”  The lineup has the heavy hitters Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape, physicist Lawrence Krauss, philosopher Simon Blackburn, and psychology macher Steven Pinker.  They’re all eloquent:  and if you’re not one who already knows a lot about the debate, this is radio programming of the highest order. There are also call-in questions.

A lot of issues with Harris’s book come up: how do we measure human “well being”?  Is that really the best criterion for morality? And what about those many, many cases for which we’re simply unable to determine which action promotes the greatest well being?

At 35:30, the discussants take up the question, “How can science and religion inform each other?”

Hitchens update

November 6, 2010 • 10:11 am

In this month’s Vanity Fair, Hitchens writes about “Manners and the Big C,” that is, how does one talk to a person who has advanced cancer?

But it’s not really possible to adopt a stance of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don’t really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. So I get straight to the point and say what the odds are. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five. Quite rightly, some people take me up on it. I recently had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my niece’s wedding, in my old hometown and former university in Oxford. This depressed me for more than one reason, and an especially close friend inquired, “Is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?” As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it, too.

The fire is still burning, though.  Here’s Hitch (debating Shmuley Boteach on September 16) taking apart Louis Farrakhan and the “respect” accorded to religious leaders:

“And Joseph Ratzinger, his Holiness the Pope, has just got off the plane in England today to announce that atheists are Nazis. An overdressed little ponce who was himself a member of the Hitler Youth—dares to speak this way?”

You can follow his doings at Daily Hitchens.

Peregrinations

November 6, 2010 • 6:02 am

Tomorrow I’m off to Colombia for two weeks: a conference in Medellin, a seminar in Bogotá, and a short vacation-y stint in Cartagena. (It would be very foolish to visit a country like that, give a talk, and just come home without some exploration.)  I’ll post as often as I can, but, as they say on television, “Stay with us.”  Drs. Cobb and Mayer have graciously offered to fill in during my absence.

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas . . .

My NYT review of What Technology Wants

November 6, 2010 • 4:59 am

Up at the Sunday New York Times Book Review—it appears online a day early—is “Better all the time“, my review of Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants.

It’s not a bad book.  In fact, parts of it are really interesting: the stuff on the history of technology, for instance, including Kelly’s stint with the technology-dubious Amish. But for me What Technology Wants was seriously marred by Kelly’s relentless progressivism, including his idea that evolution “strives” for certain outcomes (complexity, beauty, specialization, ubiquity, etc.), and that technology strives for exactly the same outcomes.  His view of evolution is unidirectional and teleological, and if that’s not the case, which it isn’t, then his idea that technology and evolution both follow universal “laws” (I think Kelly, a devout Christian, sees these laws as God given) breaks down.

An anecdote: shortly before the book was published, Kelly spoke about it at the New York Public Library. Radio journalist Robert Krulwich was there to moderate, and mentioned to Kelly that, contrary to his thesis, most “orthodox biologists” feel that evolution has no inherent direction.  Kelly blurted out, “Well, they’re wrong!”

The illustration, by Joon Mo Kang, is nice:

Caturday felid trifecta: Lynx kittens, Amur leopard cubs, and a cowboy kitten

November 6, 2010 • 4:54 am

The Minnesota zoo recently saw the debut of lynx kittens (Lynx canadensis), born May 13. Look at the size of those paws (which reminds me of a joke):

Amur leopard cubs (Panthera pardus orientalis) at the Wildlife Heritage Foundation, Ashford, UK (warning: cheesy music).

And a mammal (Felis catus) riding a turtle, or, as the Brits call it, a “tortoise”:

h/t: Mike Natt for the cowboy kitten

The accommodationist manual of style

November 5, 2010 • 7:02 pm

Salty Current has penned a very lolzy guide for believers and accommodationists, “How to write about Gnu atheists.”  A short excerpt:

Similarly, gnu atheism shouldn’t be presented as an intellectual position. Repeatedly emphasize their hostility to organized religion as the source of their disbelief. It helps if you acknowledge that there are some legitimate reasons for this hostility – shows you to be fair and balanced while leaving aside those pesky ontological matters.

You’re also safe presenting gnu atheists as cold, hyper-rational, solitary automatons who lack an appreciation of beauty or sense of wonder. Pay no attention to those who are artists, writers, or musicians, or to any of their works describing the wonder of scientific understanding and the sense of cosmic connectedness that follows from this deeper empirical knowledge. Leave aside the enormous spectrum of atheist writing on any number of ethical issues. And no need to discuss gnu atheists as people with families, friends, and communities. There’s nothing dishonest about this. You’re writing about that one dimension that is the guiding focus of their lives: rejecting religion. . .

Remember: this is about gnu atheists. The focus should be on them. Questions concerning the existence of deities or the epistemic status of religious beliefs are vulgar and hurtful.

h/t: JJE

Greta Christina on The Controversy

November 5, 2010 • 12:37 pm

It’s not going away for a while, and yesterday, at AlterNet, Greta Christina took up the question, “Can atheism be proven wrong?”  What she means by that, with reference to recent debates, is whether there could be convincing empirical evidence for a god or gods.

Greta says “yes,” though she sets the bar quite high and, despite disagreeing with P.Z. Myers about whether any conceivable observation might convince her of a god, nevertheless agrees with him that there are formidable problems with seeing the idea of god as a “coherent hypothesis.”

And the so-called “sophisticated modern theologies” define God so vaguely you can’t reach any conclusions about what he’s like, or what he would and wouldn’t do, or how a world with him in it would be any different than a world without him. They define God so abstractly that he might as well not exist. (Either that, or they actually do define God as having specific effects on the world, such as interventions in the process of evolution — effects that we have no reason whatsoever to think are real, and every reason to think are bunk.)

And when I ask religious believers who aren’t theologians to define what exactly they believe, they almost evade the question. They point to the existence of “sophisticated modern theology,” without actually explaining what any of this theology says, much less why they believe it. They resort to vagueness, equivocation, excuses for why they shouldn’t have to answer the question. In some cases, they get outright hostile at my unmitigated temerity to ask.

But she accepts the possibility of evidence for a god, and it’s not just because it’s good politics for atheists to seem open-minded about this:

So to persuade us — me, anyway, and I suspect many other atheists — that a religion was correct, it would have to do more than show evidence of a few miracles in our time. It would have to explain why those miracles were happening now… and yet had somehow never happened before. It would have to explain why the world had always been best explained by physical cause and effect, but now, overnight, that had changed. Even if a 900-foot Jesus appeared in the sky tomorrow, healing amputees and unambiguously stating his message in all languages and whatnot, a religion would have to explain why God was making all this happen now…and not at any other time in human history.

Now — and here, again, is a point I think PZ is missing — the fact that religion has utterly failed to do this in thousands of years doesn’t mean that it never, ever could. I could imagine, for instance, a malevolent trickster god, who’s deliberately hidden all traces of his existence from us for hundreds of thousands of years…but who today, just to screw with us, has decided to show his existence by healing amputees, moving Earth into Pluto’s orbit without anyone getting chilly, writing his name in the sky in letters 100 feet tall in every language known to humanity, and making all members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, alone among all other religions, healthy, wealthy and successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

She broaches the idea of advanced space aliens looking like gods, but doesn’t deal with it—she’d simply prefer (as I do) to see evidence for a god as we do all other evidence for theories: as provisional:

I don’t want to get into that particular argument [the idea of advanced space aliens that have “godlike” powers] right here. What I do want to point out is that my conclusion — my acceptance of the trickster god hypothesis in the face of healed amputees and changed orbits and Loki’s name in the sky and so on — would be provisional. It wouldn’t be a fundamental axiom or a tenet of unshakable faith. It would be a provisional conclusion, based on my best understanding of the best currently available evidence. If I concluded that the trickster god hypothesis was the best explanation of these weird phenomena, and then someone showed me convincing evidence that it was really super-advanced alien technology…I’d change my mind. I would renounce Loki. It’d be a provisional conclusion; a falsifiable hypothesis.

Can we then call Greta an “accommodationist” between the provisional-accepters and the no-frickin’-wayers?  LOL!

Since I’m summarizing Greta’s ideas here, it would be good to leave comments on her own blog (and feel free to duplicate-post them here).