Science vs The Genius Narrative

Let’s think of a story about a great scientist.

It doesn’t have to be fiction.  Think about Galileo, when everyone around him said the sun orbits the Earth, risking prison and exile to prove otherwise.  Think about Einstein, a random patent clerk coming out of nowhere to totally upend modern physics.  Or, if fiction is your thing, imagine Professor Challenger doggedly trying to convince the Royal Academy that dinosaurs still live.  Or Milo Thatch getting laughed out of the room for his crazy theories about Atlantis.

There is something all of these stories have in common.  The entire scientific establishment believes one thing. A lone genius believes the other. Everyone shouts him down until finally, the genius shows them all.

That’s the exciting science story.  And it’s a story that is uniquely emblematic of what scientists believe about themselves.  That everyone can be mistaken, that one thoughtful, brilliant person can prove them wrong. And that person becomes a hero for future generations.

It’s effective, too.  The lone genius story fits nicely into our love of underdogs, of heroes who overcome the odds when everyone has counted them out.  No doubt these stories have done a lot to glamorize science, and given kids role models to start them down the path to discovery.

But they have also done a lot of harm.

The valuable lesson in these stories is to question everything, because anything you have been taught might be wrong.  But imagine you aren’t trained in science.  You see one researcher come out with a wild new study linking, say, vaccines to autism.  Totally earth-shaking.  And you see a bunch of stuffy old “establishment” types shout that researcher down.  They get everyone to renounce his findings, destroy his career, make him a laughing stock.

You immediately know what movie you’re watching.  You know who the hero is, and who the villains are.  You know not to trust the overwhelming consensus, because in every story you’ve ever heard about science, the consensus was proven wrong. The crazy guy nobody believes? He is always right.

Evolution, genetically modified food, global warming.  There are smart people who have counterfactual beliefs on these topics.  And it’s not because they don’t believe in the scientific method.  It’s because science itself has told them to be skeptical of widely-held beliefs.

If you spend ten years of your life studying environmental science so you could spend five more years conducting an experiment that adds one more data point to the evidence that human beings are causing climate change, you’re a very successful scientist.  But you aren’t going to have a movie made about you.  And you aren’t going to get invited to come onto a cable news talk show.  It’s not a narrative that resonates, but it’s what 99 percent of real science is.

I’m not suggesting that we all blindly respect expert consensus.  That is, after all, antithetical to the scientific process.  But we do need to be a little more careful about the types of studies we consider groundbreaking, and the types of people we view as lone geniuses.  Have we actually done our homework, or just read about something on a Tumblr post?  Are the research methods sound?  Is the study funded by a biased special interest group?  Do we even know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it?

Because science is different from literature.  Just because it makes a good story doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile.

Augury

Two nights ago, I had a conversation with a barred owl.  It was only singing in its ascending cadence, not its trademark “who cooks for you.” I answered back as best I could, using my cupped hands as a whistle.  That’s a trick I’m proud of.  The owl called and I responded, and we talked like that for a few minutes.

Then last night, as I drove past that same area, a barred owl swooped down from a tree and stood in the gravel road in front of me.  The intricate stripes all over its body made it look like a topographical map of itself.    Surely it was the same one I’d talked with.  It stared into my headlights with its perfectly round face for five or six seconds before flying away. 

I put the car in park for a little bit, unable to move.  The moment, locking eyes with that huge bird, was so pregnant with meaning, but I couldn’t quite grasp it.  Looking back now, in the light of day, I can feel that near-revelation slipping away from me.

But it left me feeling like I understood augury.  According to the Greeks and Romans, you could predict the future by watching birds, observing their behavior, listening to their calls.  They say Tiresias discovered how to do it.  An owl's call or a dove's flight could mean any number of things, for good or ill, setting new dates for battles or elections.  The Roman army used to carry chickens around, just so magicians could observe signs in when and how they ate.

And, like any other form of magic, it’s easy for us to distance ourselves from it, here in the 21^st century.  For those of us who mostly just see pigeons and grackles, augury seems wildly naïve.  Of course, like many elements of our mysticism-filled past, it still echoes in our language.  The word “auspicious,” for example, comes from Latin for “watching birds.”

But I think the Romans were on the right track.  In fact, after last night, I’m sure of it.  It’s not that the barred owl was trying to tell me the future, exactly.  But there was something behind it, some greater, wild, terrible something.  And the way to experience it is by carefully watching the natural world, turning yourself to the life that surrounds you.

Observation is the key to understanding, that much is clear.  Not just looking at the life around us, but paying attention.  There is some magic in the complexity of an ecosystem, in the vast sweep of geological time, that is invisible at first glance.  The more you look, the more you see, until you start scratching at Melville's little layer lower, tracing the features of the unknown as they slip from behind the pasteboard masks of the everyday.

Augury, at its literal and etymological heart, is just looking at birds.  It's a place to start.