The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003 (The Best American Series) - Softcover

Dawkins, Richard; Folger, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618178929 ISBN 13: 9780618178926

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2003

Synopsis

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundred of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003, edited by Richard Dawkins, is another "eloquent, accessible, and even illuminating" collection (Publishers Weekly). Here are the best and brightest writers on science and nature, writing on such wide-ranging subjects as astronomy's new stars, archaeology, the Bible, "terminal" ice, and memory faults.

Natalie Angier Timothy Ferris Ian Frazier Elizabeth F. Loftus Steven Pinker Oliver Sacks Steven Weinberg Edward O. Wilson

About this title

About the Author:

RICHARD DAWKINS taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. Among his previous books are The Ancestor’s Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devil’s Chaplain. Dawkins lives in Oxford with his wife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward.

TIM FOLGER is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines. He lives in New Mexico.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

In introducing this anthology of American scientific writing I invoke two
recently dead heroes, one a scientist and American, the other a writer, not
trained in science and not from America but a lover of both. Carl Sagan gave
one of his last books the characteristically memorable subtitle Science as a
Candle in the Dark. Douglas Adams chose to study English literature at
Cambridge, but he explained to me, in a televised conversation in 1997, that
his reading habits have now changed: "I think I read much more science than
novels. I think the role of the novel has changed a little bit. In the nineteenth
century the novel was where you went to get your serious reflections and
questionings about life. You"d go to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Nowadays, of
course, you know the scientists actually tell us much, much more about
such issues than you would ever get from novelists. So I think for the real
solid red meat of what I read I go to science books, and read some novels as
light relief."
Even while listening to him, I reflected on my frustration, going into
bookshops and trying to find scientific books. If there is a science section at
all, it is dwarfed not only by fiction, history, biography, "self-help," cookery,
and gardening, but also by "new age," "occult," and religion. It has become a
commonplace that astrology books outsell astronomy by a large margin.
Turning back to Adams, I asked him, "What is it about science
that really gets your blood running?" and he replied: "The world is a thing of
utter inordinate complexity and richness and strange- ness that is absolutely
awesome. I mean, the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of
such simplicity but probably absolutely out of nothing is the most fabulous,
extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might
have happened — it"s just wonderful. And I feel, you know, that the
opportunity to spend seventy or eighty years of your life in such a universe is
time well spent as far as I am concerned!"
Carl Sagan obviously shared those sentiments and devoted much
of his career to expounding them, but The Demon-Haunted World, whose
subtitle I quoted, has a darker theme. The darkness of ignorance breeds fear.
In the words of a prayer which I early learned from my Cornish grandmother,

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties And things that go
bump in the night Good Lord deliver us.

Some say it is Scottish, not Cornish, but the sentiments are anyway
worldwide. People are afraid of the dark. Science, as Sagan argued and
personally exemplifled, has the power to reduce ignorance and dispel fear.
We should all read science and learn to think like scientists, not because
science is useful (though it is), but because the light of knowledge is
wonderful and banishes the debilitating and time-wasting fear of the dark.
That uncompromisingly articulate chemist Peter Atkins has a utopian vision
of a scientifically enlightened world which I share: "When we have dealt with
the values of the fundamental constants by seeing that they are unavoidably
so, and have dismissed them as irrelevant, we shall have arrived at complete
understanding. Fundamental science can then rest. We are almost there.
Complete knowledge is within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across
the face of the Earth, like the sunrise."
Unfortunately, science arouses fears of its own, usually because
of a confusion with technology. Even technology is not inherently frightening,
but it can, of course, do bad things as well as good. If you want to do good,
or if you want to do bad, science will provide the most effective way in either
case. The trick is to choose the good rather than the bad, and what I fear is
the judgment of those to whom society delegates that choice.
Science is the systematic method by which we apprehend what is
true about the real world in which we live. If you want consolation, or an
ethical guide to the good life, you can look elsewhere (and may be
disappointed). But if you want to know what is true about reality, science is
the only way. If there were a better way, science would embrace it.
Science can be seen as a sophisticated extension of the sense
organs nature gave us. Properly used, the worldwide cooperative enterprise of
science works like a telescope pointing toward reality; or, turned around, a
microscope to dissect details and analyze causes. So understood, science
is fundamentally a benign force, even though the technology that it spawns is
powerful enough to be dangerous when abused. Ignorance of science can
never be a good thing, and scientists have a paramount duty to explain their
subject and make it as simple as possible (though no simpler, as Einstein
rightly insisted).
Ignorance is usually a passive state, seldom deliberately sought
or intrinsically blameworthy. Unfortunately, there do seem to be some people
who positively prefer ignorance and resent being told the truth. Michael
Shermer, debonair editor and proprietor of Skeptic magazine, tells of the
audience reaction when he unmasked a professional charlatan onstage. Far
from showing Shermer the gratitude he deserved for exposing a fake who was
conning them, the audience was hostile. "One woman glared at me and told
me it was "inappropriate" to destroy these people"s hopes during their time of
grief."
Admittedly, this particular phony"s claim was to communicate
with the dead, so the bereaved may have had special reasons for resenting a
scientific debunker. But Shermer"s experience is typical of a more general
mood of protective affection for ignorance. Far from being seen as a candle in
the dark, or as a wonderful source of poetic inspiration, science is too often
decried as poetry"s spoilsport.
A more snobbish denigration of science can be found in some, but
by no means all, literary circles. "Scientism" is as dirty a word as any in
today"s intellectual lexicon. Scientific explanations that have the virtue of
simplicity are derided as "simplistic." Obscurity is often mistaken for
profundity; simple clarity can be taken for arrogance. Analytical minds are
denigrated as "reductionist" — as with "sin," we may not know what it means,
but we do know that we are against it. The Nobel Prize–winning immunologist
and polymath Peter Medawar, not a man to suffer fools gladly, remarked
that "reductive analysis is the most successful research stratagem ever
devised," and continued: "Some resent the whole idea of elucidating any
entity or state of affairs that would otherwise have continued to languish in a
familiar and nonthreatening squalor of incomprehension."
Nonscientific ways of thinking — intuitive, sensitive, imaginative
(as if science were not imaginative!) — are thought by some to have a built-in
superiority over cold, austere, scientific "reason." Here"s Medawar again, this
time in his celebrated lecture "Science and Literature": "The official Romantic
view is that Reason and the Imagination are antithetical, or at best that they
provide alternative pathways leading to the truth, the pathway of Reason
being long and winding and stopping short of the summit, so that while
Reason is breathing heavily there is Imagination capering lightly up the hill."
Medawar goes on to point out that this view was even once
supported by scientists themselves. Newton claimed to make no
hypotheses, and scientists generally were supposed to employ "a calculus of
discovery, a formulary of intellectual behaviour which could be relied upon to
conduct the scientist towards the truth, and this new calculus was thought of
almost as an antidote to the imagination."
Medawar"s own view, inherited from his "personal guru" Karl
Popper and shared by most scientists today, was that imagination is seminal
to all science but is tempered by critical testing against the real world.
Creative imagination and critical rigor are both to be found in this collection of
contemporary American scientific literature.
For a non-American to be invited by a leading American publisher
to anthologize American writings about science is an honor, the more so
because American science is, by almost any index one could conjure,
preeminent in the world. Whether we measure the money spent on research
or count the numbers of active scientists working, of books and journal
articles published, or of major prizes won, the United States leads the rest of
the world by a convincing margin. My admiration for American science is so
enthusiastic, so downright grateful, that I hope I may not be thought
presumptuous if I sound a note of discordant warning. American science
leads the world, but so does American anti-science. Nowhere is this more
clearly seen than in my own field of evolution.
Evolution is one of the most securely established facts in all
science. The knowledge that we are cousins to apes, kangaroos, and
bacteria is beyond all educated doubt: as certain as our (once doubted)
knowledge that the planets orbit the sun, and that South America was once
joined to Africa, and India distant from Asia. Particularly secure is the fact
that life"s evolution began a matter of billions of years ago. And yet, if polls
are to be believed, approximately 45 percent of the population of the United
States firmly believes, to the contrary, an elementary falsehood: all species
separately owe their existence to "intelligent design" less than ten thousand
years ago. Worse, the nature of American democratic institutions is such
that this perversely ignorant half of the population (which does not, I hasten to
add, include leading churchmen or leading scholars in any discipline) is in
many districts strongly placed to influence local educational policy. I have
met biology teachers in various states who feel physically intimidated from
teaching the central theorem of their subject. Even reputable publishers have
felt sufficiently threatened to censor school textbooks of biology.
That 45 percent figure really is something of a national educational
disgrace. You"d have to travel right past Europe to the theocratic societies
around the Middle East before you hit a comparable level of antiscientific
miseducation. It is bafflingly paradoxical that the United States is by far the
world"s leading scientific nation while simultaneously housing the most
scientifically illiterate populace outside the Third World.
Sputnik, the Russian satellite launched in 1957, was widely seen
as a salutary lesson, spurring the United States out of complacency and into
redoubled educational efforts in science. Those efforts paid off spectacularly,
for example, in the dazzling successes of the space program and the Human
Genome Project. But more than forty years have passed since Sputnik, and I
am not the only Americophile to suggest that another such fright may be
needed. Short of that — well, in any case — we need excellent scientific
writing for a general audience. Fortunately that high-quality commodity is in
abundant supply in America, which has made the compiling of this anthology
both easy and a pleasure. The only difficulty, indeed the only pain, has been
in deciding what to leave out.
Should a collection such as this be timely or timeless? Topical
and of-the-moment? Or sub specie aeternitatis? I think both. On the one
hand, the volume is one of a series, tied to a particular year, sandwiched
between predecessors and successors. That nudges us in the direction of
topicality: what are the hot scientific subjects of 2003; what are the current
political and social issues that scientific writings of the previous year might
illuminate? On the other hand, science"s ambitions — more so, I venture,
than any other discipline"s — approach the timeless, even the eternal. Laws
of nature that changed from year to year, or even from eon to eon, would
seem too parochial to deserve the name. Of course our understanding of
natural law changes — for the better — from decade to decade, but that is
another matter. And, within the unchanging laws of the universe, their
physical manifestations change, on time scales spanning gigayears to
femtoseconds.
Biology, like physics, anchors itself in uniformitarianism. Its
defining engine — evolution — is change, change par excellence. But
evolution is the same kind of change now as it was in the Cretaceous, and as
it will be in all futures we can imagine. The play"s the same, though the
players that walk the stage are different. Their costumes are similar enough
to connect, say, triceratops with rhinoceros, or allosaurus with tiger, in
ecological continuity. If an ecologist, a physiologist, a biochemist, and a
geneticist were to mount an expedition to the Cretaceous or the
Carboniferous, their 2003-vintage skills and education would serve them
almost as well as if they were going to, say, Madagascar today. DNA is
DNA, proteins are proteins. They and their interactions change only trivially.
The principles of Darwinian natural selection, of Mendelian and molecular
genetics, of physiology and ecology, the laws of island biogeography, all
these surely applied to dinosaurs, and before them to mammal-like reptiles,
just as they apply now to birds and modern mammals. They will still apply in
a hundred million years" time, when we are extinct and new faunistic players
have taken the stage. The leg muscles of a tyrannosaur in hot-breathed
pursuit were fueled by ATP such as any modern biochemist would recognize,
charged up by Krebs cycles indistinguishable from the Krebs cycles of
today. The science of life doesn"t change from eon to eon, even if life itself
does.
So far, so timeless. But we live in 2003. Our lives are measured in
decades and our psychological horizons crammed somewhere between
seconds and centuries, seldom reaching further. Science"s laws and
principles may be timeless, but science bears mightily upon our fleeting
selves. The science and nature writing of 2002 is not the same as it was ten
years ago, partly because we now know more about what is eternally true,
but also because the world in which we live changes, and so does science"s
impact upon it. Some of the essays and articles in this book are firmly date-
stamped; some are timeless. We need both.
Nature writing perennially returns to the theme of conservation and
extinction. Of all arguments in favor of preserving species from extinction, I
am moved more by aesthetic sentiment than by utilitarian advocacies of
the "You never know whether something in the rain forest might eventually
turn out to be useful to humanity" kind. But aesthetic isn"t a big enough word,
nor is sentiment. Douglas Adams"s Professor Chronotis used his time
machine for only one regular purpose: he would visit pre-seventeenth-century
Mauritius, weep over the dodo, and return. The sense of irreparable loss —
grief — our descendants will feel for elephants and whales brings today"s
imagination up short. Today we are still privileged to watch these great
creatures, dodos for future generations to weep over. And we are still finding
out new and extraordinary things about them, as "Four Ears to the Ground"
and "Fat Heads Sink Ships" both show.
My ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0618178929
• ISBN 13: 9780618178926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352