River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part three

This novel, which I introduced previously, is a kind of novel only a practicing and experienced scientist could write.

 

The author, Stan Rice, explains all the science in the book, even high-performance liquid chromatography, so that anyone can understand it. He does a particularly good job of explaining evolutionary biology, which is not surprising since he is the author of nonfiction books about evolution such as Encyclopedia of Evolution. One example is when one of the characters explains the evolutionary basis of the human aversion to incest. But what Rea’s stepfather tried to do—rape her—is not biological incest, since she is genetically unrelated to him.

The characters all have a healthy sense of humor—except Earl, of course.  For math teachers Conway and Thurman, the sense of humor is an unstoppable spring. Science offers lots of opportunities for humor, especially the Meeh coefficient and the way Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used trigonometry to measure the buttocks of an African woman rather than to touch her. The Meeh coefficient, the wacky mathematicians insist, requires the measurement of the surface area of a naked human body. Rice takes his fellow scientists no more seriously than did the British humorist David Lodge, author of novels such as Small World: An Academic Romance. The academic world is a place where you can be weird.

Unlike some of Rice’s other novels, this one does not have a lot of religion in it. But, like probably all Rice’s novels, it addresses the meaning of life. As Rea tells her audience at the end, “A happy life consists of doing ordinary things in a grateful manner.”

Vulgarization

 I am a vulgarizer. That is, my science books are intended for ordinary intelligent people (the original Latin meaning of vulgar), not for other scientists. This is true for all five of my published books (see links at www.stanleyrice.com), and for the sixth book that is under contract. I have written very few journal papers for other scientists to read. Most of my journal articles have been about science education, that is, for students and teachers. The reward for me was not to hear from a fellow scientist, “Good paper!” but to hear from a high school student who wanted to do a project based on one of my American Biology Teacher papers. My eight magazine articles in Skeptical Inquirer were a humorous approach to literalist creationism. And, of course, this blog and my YouTube channel are for all of you, not just for scientists.

In France, where I now live, la vulgarisation is not a bad word. It describes the work of writers and Youtubeurs such as myself or, in France, Jamy Gourmaud (see my earlier essay) who want to make science not only comprehensible but exciting to non-scientists. Traditionally, in America, scientists were supposed to look down their noses at non-scientists, especially artists and musicians. That is, not only their professional advancement but their sense of self-worth relied on the number of scholarly books and papers they had written, even when nobody outside their field could read or understand them. Popular books didn’t count. Only peer-reviewed papers and books in your field of expertise counted.

Increasingly, fields of expertise grow narrower and narrower. Decades ago, many scientists read papers from many different fields of science. It wasn’t just astrophysicists who read Edwin Hubble’s paper about the red shift. But, in writing my new book, I ended up citing a paper that had been published in the Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Obviously, I found the paper only by the use of Google Scholar.

At the same time, younger scientists are becoming disillusioned by the restriction of their audiences. They, like me, not only enjoy reaching out to the rest of the world, but feel a sense of emptiness at not doing so.

Heather O’Leary, a young anthropology professor at the University of South Florida published a paper that she knew hardly anyone would read. It was about the effects of toxic algal blooms in the Gulf on the tourism economy. It was, as she described it, mostly just records of visitors saying, over and over, that they didn’t like the smell of dead fish. So she decided to set her research data to music. She asked a composition professor to write the music and the university band director to perform it. This met with a lot of enthusiasm. And, now that NPR has covered the story and embedded a link to the paper, she will probably get a hundred times as many readers as she would otherwise have reached.

The message behind the work is that climate change will, among many other things, kill a lot of fish and spoil beaches that would otherwise enhance the local economy. But if you listen to the music, which is more or less a transcription of her data, you will not get this message. It sounds to me like a hundred other modernistic musical works (and I was in bands for almost two decades). To me, it is much more fulfilling to write simple (some would say, simplified) books that will, in fact, leave readers with a better understanding of the world.

Viva la vulgarisation!

An Earth Day Science March in Tulsa

Around the country, scientists and citizens celebrated Earth Day by joining in a March for Science. There were hundreds of such events. In Oklahoma, one of the most anti-environmental state (especially on the government level, but also on the citizen level), there were two, and one of them was in Tulsa today.

It was exactly the kind of Earth Day that one of our senators, Jim Inhofe, one of the world’s most famous climate deniers, would have considered to be a sign from God. After months of record-breaking high temperatures in Oklahoma, including January temperatures in the 90s, the weather suddenly became chilly. Yesterday brought heavy rains and today it reached a high of 52. Inhofe would have said that God meant this as a message to us that Inhofe’s anti-global-warming message is divinely-inspired. Where is global warming now, he would ask. He would, however, look around in vain for a snowball to throw as he once did on the Senate floor the way he did a few years ago.

But despite the chill, hundreds of, maybe a thousand, people came out for the march at Fred Johnson Park, at 61^st St. and Peoria Ave. First we all gathered in a large circle and held hands around Johnson Park. A drone photographed us from overhead. (It was not a government surveillance drone.) A musician sang This Land is Your Land, which as a biodiversity ecologist I always found puzzling: the land belongs to all the species, not just to humans. Some of the verses of this song are borderline socialism, and were sung originally by Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoma native of whom this extreme right-wing state pretends to be proud. Then we crossed Riverside Dr. (legally) as passing vehicles honked in support (I think; at least some of them waved) and walked in a loop.

For me the best part (aside from seeing many old friends and making new ones) was the placards that people made for themselves. Such creativity! The independent thinking that went into them contrasts sharply with the mindless uniformity of Trump posters. The only element of uniformity was that many Planned Parenthood supporters carried the same posters. But here are some of the placards that I saw:

“Got plague? Yeah, me neither. Thank a scientist.”

“There is no Planet B.”

“Science already made America great.”

“You are the result of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.”

“Patriots love science.”

There was even a dog with a cardboard poster that said Bark Bark Bark.

Here are some photos of placards.

Another important theme was that women should be encouraged to be science leaders. One young woman carried a placard with a quote from Rosalind Franklin. And another carried this poster:

Environmental protection is a big issue in Tulsa. Terry Young, who was Tulsa Mayor from 1984 to 1986, told the story of Helmerich Park, at the corner of Riverside Dr. and 71^st Street, a place that my wife and I pass often on the walking trail. We always see a lot of people using the park, including a lot of volleyball players in the sand court. It is one of the places Tulsa can be proud of. But apparently, according to one speaker, the city council met one night and simply declared that the park was not being used and that it should be sold to a developer. The publicity for this sale claimed that the land would be used for an REI outdoor recreation store. As it turns out, the developer planned a mall—one of many new malls in Tulsa—including five acres of asphalt parking. Former Mayor Terry Young is involved in two lawsuits against this development. He decried the ascendancy of ignorance in our national thinking. And yet, ignorance can be a good thing. Scientists admit ignorance but then set out to make discoveries to counteract the ignorance. As Alan Alda, an actor turned science activist, said, “Ignorance is a wonderful thing with curiosity attached to it.” Young pointed out the problems with this decision included the following:

• The rationale for the sale—that the park was not being used—was patently false.
• The taxpayers, whose money bought the park in the first place, were not consulted about this sale. Even though the city is the owner and the city can do whatever it wants with its money and the taxpayers have no right to complain, the taxpayers feel tricked by this decision. The city can do whatever it wants but the citizens can also vote however they want. And the voters do not want a “we’ll do whatever the hell we want with city land” government.
• Private donations were used to purchase the park land. The donations were for the park, not for the city’s general fund.

There have been successes. The Carrie Dickerson family led a campaign to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant at Inola, northeast of Tulsa. The reasons were not just the usual concerns about nuclear waste, but also about how the reactor would have required immense amounts of water, a resource of which Oklahoma periodically runs short. They won! But we cannot assume that successes will continue.

I want to thank the organizer, Nancy Moran, who must have worked tirelessly on almost nothing else except this event. And she is organizing another event, the Climate March, next week, also here in Tulsa. It feels good, really good, to know that there are so many of us, even though we are a minority, who care about what we are doing to the Earth, which conservatives pretend to believe is God’s Creation.