Author
|
Topic: Re: Snails, whales and males (Read 826 times) |
|
rhinoceros
Archon
Gender: 
Posts: 1318
Reputation: 8.27
Rate rhinoceros
My point is ...
  
|
 |
Re: Snails, whales and males
« on: 2003-09-01 14:26:12 » |
 |
This is from the Guardian, August 30, 2003
Rhyme or reason
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1031688,00.html
Full article also archived here:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=29186
Steve Jones is trapped in a labyrinth of facts about snails, whales and males
<snip>
Plenty of middle-aged scientists face that dilemma. They have two choices: administration or vulgarisation. I turned to the second. Twelve years ago, when my first book, The Language of the Genes, was published, popular science had a few first-rate writers and a modest rack of published works. Now it's an industry.
<snip>
I write like the Human Genome Project. It sequenced our DNA by chopping it into arbitrary lengths and assembling the fragments into a coherent whole by looking at the overlaps between each bit. I do much the same - dig out a mass of apparently unrelated pieces of information about snails, whales, males or whatever, hurl them into the air and bolt the fragments together in various ways until some internal logic emerges.
That's pretty close to defining the scientific method itself. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr compared it to washing dishes: dirty plates, dirty water, dirty cloth - and, miraculously, clean crockery (philosophy, he said, is the same, but without the water). Bohr's detergent - the magic ingredient of science - is fact, a corpus of more or less undisputed truths about nature that can be added to, reinterpreted and even subtracted from when - delightful moment - an error turns up in a rival's work.
<snip>
[Who would have guessed] that men die at a greater rate than women from all causes except childbirth (including being struck by lightning - proof of a gene for thunderbolts)?
I enjoyed digging out such arcane information and (I hope) assembling it into a coherent whole. Often, though, I found myself in terra incognita, surrounded by unfamiliar beasts. I had wandered unthinking on to the territory of the Arts Faculty, a dangerous place for any scientist. In that generous land, opinion is sacred while facts are, if not free, then on a far longer leash than we are used to. Confident statements by one author are denied with equal certainty by another. Do wife-beaters have more testosterone? Is circumcision good for sexual health? Do women and men use their brains in the same way? Are boys born with ambiguous genitalia happy when they are surgically changed into girls? The answers to each of those questions are yes, no and maybe, depending on whose data you choose to believe - and it cannot all be right.
To kick a particularly limp straw man when he is down, I quote Lacan on the penis: "The erectile organ comes to symbolise the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in its form of an image, but a part lacking in the desired image: that it is equivalent to the square root of minus 1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier." But that is too easy. The problem is a deeper one and goes to the heart of science: those involved are letting their opinions cloud their facts; for them, what should be is what is. That doesn't happen much in chemistry, but does creep into biology (into genetics in particular) - and the study of males is awash with it.
To give the Arts Faculty its due, I was filled with panic when someone asked me to write a novel. I do, however, have a proposal for a technical book about snails, if anybody is interested.
|
|
|
|
|
Walter Watts
Archon
Gender:
Posts: 1571
Reputation: 8.89
Rate Walter Watts
Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
|
|
Re: virus: Re: Snails, whales and males
« Reply #1 on: 2003-09-02 04:22:35 » |
|
Fun with snails, and other bio-geometric bodies.......
Yee-Haw ;-'>
http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.F99/Erbas/KURSATgeometrypro/golden%20spiral/logspiral-history.html
Walter
rhinoceros wrote:
> This is from the Guardian, August 30, 2003
>
> Rhyme or reason
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1031688,00.html
>
> Full article also archived here:
>
> http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=29186
>
> Steve Jones is trapped in a labyrinth of facts about snails, whales and males
>
> <snip>
>
> Plenty of middle-aged scientists face that dilemma. They have two choices: administration or vulgarisation. I turned to the second. Twelve years ago, when my first book, The Language of the Genes, was published, popular science had a few first-rate writers and a modest rack of published works. Now it's an industry.
>
> <snip>
>
> I write like the Human Genome Project. It sequenced our DNA by chopping it into arbitrary lengths and assembling the fragments into a coherent whole by looking at the overlaps between each bit. I do much the same - dig out a mass of apparently unrelated pieces of information about snails, whales, males or whatever, hurl them into the air and bolt the fragments together in various ways until some internal logic emerges.
>
> That's pretty close to defining the scientific method itself. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr compared it to washing dishes: dirty plates, dirty water, dirty cloth - and, miraculously, clean crockery (philosophy, he said, is the same, but without the water). Bohr's detergent - the magic ingredient of science - is fact, a corpus of more or less undisputed truths about nature that can be added to, reinterpreted and even subtracted from when - delightful moment - an error turns up in a rival's work.
>
> <snip>
>
> [Who would have guessed] that men die at a greater rate than women from all causes except childbirth (including being struck by lightning - proof of a gene for thunderbolts)?
>
> I enjoyed digging out such arcane information and (I hope) assembling it into a coherent whole. Often, though, I found myself in terra incognita, surrounded by unfamiliar beasts. I had wandered unthinking on to the territory of the Arts Faculty, a dangerous place for any scientist. In that generous land, opinion is sacred while facts are, if not free, then on a far longer leash than we are used to. Confident statements by one author are denied with equal certainty by another. Do wife-beaters have more testosterone? Is circumcision good for sexual health? Do women and men use their brains in the same way? Are boys born with ambiguous genitalia happy when they are surgically changed into girls? The answers to each of those questions are yes, no and maybe, depending on whose data you choose to believe - and it cannot all be right.
>
> To kick a particularly limp straw man when he is down, I quote Lacan on the penis: "The erectile organ comes to symbolise the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in its form of an image, but a part lacking in the desired image: that it is equivalent to the square root of minus 1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier." But that is too easy. The problem is a deeper one and goes to the heart of science: those involved are letting their opinions cloud their facts; for them, what should be is what is. That doesn't happen much in chemistry, but does creep into biology (into genetics in particular) - and the study of males is awash with it.
>
> To give the Arts Faculty its due, I was filled with panic when someone asked me to write a novel. I do, however, have a proposal for a technical book about snails, if anybody is interested.
>
> ----
> This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2003 board on Church of Virus BBS.
> <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=display;threadid=29187>
> ---
> To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
--
Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
"Reminding you to help control the human population. Have your sexual partner spayed or neutered."
---
To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
|
Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
|
|
|
Blunderov
Archon
Gender:
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.90
Rate Blunderov
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
|
|
RE: virus: Re: Snails, whales and males
« Reply #2 on: 2003-09-02 05:03:17 » |
|
Walter Watts wrote
<snip>
Fun with snails, and other bio-geometric bodies.......
Yee-Haw ;-'>
http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.F99/Erbas/KURSATgeometrypro/g
olden%20spiral/logspiral-history.html
</snip>
<q>
A special case of equiangular spiral is the circle, where the constant
angle is 90 Degrees.
</q>
And here I was thinking it was the other way around. It is very trying
when disillusion follows so hard upon the heels of disappointment.
Fond Regards
Blunderov
---
To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
|
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
