Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, Story 7. Olga the Science Cat

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website here). Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

 

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy (all reviewed earlier), Olga the Science Cat (reviewed here), Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

Rice wrote a book about the scientific method. But how much better it would be to have the scientific method explained to you by a cat! No, not a talking cat like the gorilla in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. In Olga the Science Cat, the cat com-mew-nicates by grabbing items and leaving them on the floor or table in such a way as to answer human scientific questions. After Olga helps the kids with their science fair projects, she helps save the little girl’s life by dragging a hamburger sack from the garbage, with its evidence of salmonella poisoning.

Rice is not known for juvenile literature. This is the only piece of juvenile literature I have seen from him.

The Stars in their Courses

This is from an email I wanted to send to the office of the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters. However, neither he nor the department had any way for the public to contact them. They hand down their decisions from an undefiled lofty summit, without any input from the public they supposedly represent.

Walters has become infamous for mandating that all Oklahoma Public School classrooms teach from the Bible, and he means this literally. He has sought bids for the state to buy 55,000 Bibles to distribute among Oklahoma classrooms. But to my knowledge he has not provided any guidance about how to do this in a manner that is acceptable to him, personally.

I pushed the limits of truth in this letter. I retired from public university teaching in Oklahoma. My university classroom would not, itself, have been required to teach from the Bible. I taught biology and evolution, not astronomy, but there was some cosmology and astronomy in my courses.

“Dear Superintendent Walters,

“I have been an Oklahoma science teacher for many years. Among the subjects that I have taught are biology and astronomy.

“In order to comply with your order, I would have to use the Bible as the basis for astronomy. I assume from what I have heard that you are a creationist who accepts the recent miraculous creation of the Earth. But that is not what I am writing about.

“Instead, my understanding is that even creationist astronomy does not include astrology, that is, the belief that stars and planets directly influence human affairs.

“Imagine my surprise when I re-discovered Judges 5:20. (I have read the Bible twice, but I forgot about this verse.) Judges is a book, which you would consider historical (it is not psalms, proverbs, or prophecy) about the Israelite conquest of Canaan. This passage is from the victory song of Deborah (a woman army leader) and Barak about a recent Israelite victory over the Canaanites. It reads, “From heaven fought the stars, from their courses they fought against Sisera.”

“Am I supposed to teach that astrology is, under some circumstances, true? If so, perhaps the state should also require classroom horoscopes and, if so, your department would issue the official horoscopes for public school use.

“If, instead, you consider this passage to be poetic allusion, then I would have no difficulty with this passage. However, how is a public school teacher to decide which Biblical passages are literal and which are poetic allusion? Your department should also issue official guidelines about this as well, perhaps an official state manual for Bible interpretation.

“Could you help me out in my confusion?”

There is much legal uncertainty about whether Walters will have to rescind his command for public school Bible instruction.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is the phrase that celebrity physicist Richard Feynman used to describe the joy of scientific research. But it also describes the joy of science education. Feynman was as brilliant of a scientist as you could hope to meet, and to him mathematical equations were as obvious as the nose on your face. But he knew very well that science education did not consist of learning piles of facts. He knew it was a matter of joy: professors and students alike should share this joy. This is what I always tried to do as a science educator, even to the extent of trying out what some colleagues thought of as stunts.

This is the reason that Bill Nye the Science Guy is more popular among people in general than any professor could hope to be. Professors try to impress their colleagues; but Bill Nye’s audience is ordinary intelligent people.

Jamy Gormaud is France’s answer to Bill Nye. He started off as a reporter, then discovered the joy of science—just as Carl Zimmer and David Quammen started off as fiction writers and found their calling in science writing. Today, with his YouTube channel, Jamy uses humor—a lot of it—to communicate not only science but also history to a large audience. My wife and I started watching his videos in order to learn French, by slowing down the videos and reading subtitles. But I appreciate his joy of science. In one of his books (Mon Tour de France: Des Curiosités Naturelles et Scientifiques) he has assembled a tour of France to see scientific curiosities. Several dozen videos later, he is still one of our favorite video hosts. Jamy describes the pleasure of learning new things as “la connaissance qui soulève l’esprit” (knowledge that lifts the spirit). He practices “la vulgarisation de la science.” Vulgarization is not a bad word in French, although American professors and writers hate to be accused of vulgarization. It just means making science understandable and interesting to non-specialists.

He takes his readers to old places to see new things. He starts his book in the marshlands of northeastern France mainly because he saw some great sunrises there when he was a kid. This chapter is about why sunrises (and sunsets) are red. Maybe you know why, and maybe you don’t. My answer was mostly right.

Sunlight is intensely white, which results from the mixture of all visible wavelengths of light. But when sunlight encounters atmosphere, it scatters. Blue wavelenths, at one end of the spectrum, scatter more than the others, which is why the sky around the noontime sun on a clear day is blue and the sunlight itself is yellowish: the sunlight is white minus some of the blue color. When sunlight has to travel through more of the atmosphere, as when it comes in at an angle at sunrise or sunset, not only do the blue wavelengths scatter but also the others, except those at the red end of the spectrum. If you did not know this, you might have felt your brain grow a little bit right then. Thanks to Jamy, and maybe to some outstanding science teacher you may have had in the past.

Jamy, and other good science educators, also draws in perspectives from outside of science. It was Isaac Newton who explained that white light is all the rainbow colors mixed together. We do not perceive it as a range of colors, but as bands of color. It turns out, for reasons I explain in my book Scientifically Thinking, that our brains create the illusion of bands of color, which helps our brains make sense of the world. But, Jamy wondered, why did Newton say there were seven bands of color? Clearly there are bands, but can you really see seven bands? Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Long before Newton, Robert Boyle had written that a rainbow has five bands of color. Jamy explained in his book that Newton was very religious—he wrote more pages about religion than about science—and to him seven had great Biblical significance. That is, Newton had a little bit of religious illusion even in his hard scientific observations.

He must be very satisfied in his work. To the extent that my videos fulfill the same role as his, I am satisfied. Even though I have retired, I continue to be a science educator, in the tradition of Jamy Gourmaud.

Professor God

The way God is depicted by conservative Christians, he would have been the worst professor ever.

Suppose I, before I retired from professoring, had taught a class the way God supposedly teaches. According to conservative Christians, nearly everyone who has ever lived has been or is damned on account of disagreeing with one of numerous essential doctrines. This, of course, includes the people who never had a chance to even hear about these doctrines. Suppose I taught a course in which I locked the door and kept most of the students from attending the class. Then, I would give exams so hard that most of the class that got in the door failed the exams. What would my supervisor have said if 99% or more of the grades in my class were F? This would have been justification for corrective, and probably disciplinary, action on the part of the administration. Professor God could say, I taught the truth to pre-selected (predestined) students and if I didn’t like their answers, I flunked them, and that’s that.

It gets worse. I recently watched The Ten Commandments, the Cecil B. DeMille movie starring Charleton Heston and some inspiring sidekicks like Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, and, of course, Yul Brynner. I know it is fashionable today to spurn the “sand and sandals” epics of the mid-twentieth century. Those movies, of which The Ten Commandments was the most prominent, are easy to ridicule, especially when Heston (as Moses) seemed to be, after he became holy, nearly a log with a mask, speaking in Biblical phrases, and the narration, in faux King James English, were nearly intolerable. In this movie as in movies such as The Robe, the good characters seemed like robots. At least in The Robe, Jay Robinson played a really wickedly funny Emperor.

 

But I admit a secret admiration for sand and sandals movies. If only the line between good and evil were as clear as it appears in The Ten Commandments, and if only God’s presence were as easy to see as the red light on top of Mount Sinai!

In The Ten Commandments, God taught through proclamation. It would seem that Professor God was like the old-fashioned professor, one whom everyone would now hate, wearing his academic gown and proclaiming truths for students to write down. Almost no professor does this anymore.

Today, the ideal of education is to reveal the facts of the world and let the students explore them, figuring it out for themselves. In reality, they need some framework, some guidance for their explorations, but not rote memorization. It is amazing how long it took for academics to figure this out. One of the few academics before Thomas Henry Huxley (inventor of the modern biology teaching laboratory) who made the students explore the world for themselves was Aristotle. He invented the field trip. He had his students (in Asia Minor, not Athens) go to the seashore and the mountains, find things, and try to figure them out. They collected beetles (as Darwin did two millennia later) and birds’ nests. They dissected snakes. There was not yet any textbook to tell the students what they were supposed to find.

But Professor God would not have allowed this. If we see something in the world that puzzles us, we are not supposed to wonder about it, but simply accept what the ecclesiastical authorities, posing as God’s representatives, tell us. If you draw your own conclusions, you flunk. If you even ask inconvenient questions (how could a God of Love create an eternal Hell?) you flunk. Which means you burn in Hell forever.

Many of us believe that God, if there is one, invites us to look at all the facts of the world, explore them, draw our own conclusions from them, in discussion with one another. But this is not Professor God in the conservative Christian universe.

Maybe There Will Be a Mass Exodus

In an earlier essay, I speculated that, despite Trump’s attack on science education and research, insisting that both education and research should be focused entirely on his loudly-stated beliefs rather than on any data from the real world, there would probably be no mass exodus of scientists out of the United States into (for example) China (see my science blog entry). But events of recent weeks have caused me to rethink this.

Trump announced the appointment of his chair of a task force that will recommend reforms for higher education. That man is Jerry Falwell, Jr. Yes, the president of Liberty University, and the son of its late former president, Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell Jr. has said that he will redesign higher education so that it is focused on the Bible, and will bring higher education “back to some form of sanity.” And what this undoubtedly means is that, in order for students to receive loans to attend colleges and universities, they will have to attend colleges and universities that promote the utter and absolute truth of Creationism. Science education will quickly collapse, and therefore science educators will quickly leave the United States (this is my plan) or else find some other kind of job (I have not ruled out the possibility of being a science-education supermarket produce stocker, leading customers on economic botany tours in the produce section). If the entire function of science education is to indoctrinate college students in creationism, then scientific research will quickly collapse in the United States. Other countries, more welcoming to science, will benefit immensely from the inevitable brain drain.

What could possibly go wrong?

The creationists do not really want to see God, Jesus, or the Bible exalted in science education. They do not want the Bible to be taught. They want their interpretation of the Bible to be taught. Creationists consider themselves personally inerrant, incapable of error, when they open a Bible and start talking. There have been many interpretations of Genesis 1, for example, and the history of these interpretations goes back hundreds of years. But creationists consider all these other interpretations of the Bible to be wrong. The creationists, and they alone, are chosen by God to tell people what to believe about the Bible. Jerry Falwell Jr. thinks that we should all bow down and revere Him, Falwell, as the single approved explicator of God’s truth.

I don’t have a problem with Jesus. I don’t have a problem with the Bible, which may be inspired by God or may be an historical record of people trying to understand God. I have a problem with creationist Republicans elevating themselves to Godlike status and pushing God out of the way. This is the “form of sanity” that Falwell intends to impose on all scientists, educators, and students.

Yes, I am accusing creationists of blasphemy.

I don’t have a problem with Jesus. I don’t have a problem with the Bible, which may be inspired by God or may be an historical record of people trying to understand God. I have a problem with creationist Republicans elevating themselves to Godlike status and pushing God out of the way. This is the “form of sanity” that Falwell intends to impose on all scientists, educators, and students.

I teach about evolution, biodiversity, and global warming. Will I soon be considered an enemy of the state? History is full of scientists who have been crushed by religious power, from Galileo to Vavilov. Meanwhile, J’ose lire la Bible moi-même.

Are We All Deluded?

Sam Kean’s new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain As Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery, is a gold mine of stories about the weird things that our brains can make us do, everything from cortical blindness to alien hand and walking dead syndromes. In people with cortical blindness, the eyes and optic nerves work fine, but the portion of the brain that consciously interprets vision is impaired. The brain has a whole separate set of nerves that process the emotional response to vision, however; people with cortical blindness can therefore smile in response to another person’s smile even though they cannot consciously see it. In alien hand syndrome, a person cannot recognize their own hand—usually the left one—as being part of his or her own body; and in walking dead syndrome, the person cannot recognize the body itself as his or her own.

Perhaps most important, although not the most interesting story in the book, was the experiment that demonstrated that our brain’s conscious decision to do something occurred after the subjects had begun to do the action. That is, the brain’s decision was actually a post-hoc rationalization. This calls into question the entire concept of free will. It appears that we choose to do something only after our subconscious minds have decided to do that thing. Of course, this does not mean we have no conscious control over ourselves. Our conscious minds can prevent us from doing the things we have started to do; that is, however much free will is called into question, self-control is certainly real. As the author says, we may not have free will, but we have free won’t. Also, our conscious minds can create a general pattern of thought that, while it may not control every individual action, certainly influences our general behavior.

The main point of all these fascinating stories is, in the author’s own words: “But if the history of neuroscience proves anything, it’s that any circuit for any mental attribute—up to and including our sense of being alive—can fail, if just the right spots [of the brain] suffer damage…your actions, your desires to act, and your conviction of having acted can all be decoupled and manipulated.”

I have, through reading this book, come to understand myself better. Temporal lobe epilepsy includes the experience of auras that are religious in their effects and intensity—religious delusions. While religion does not consist only of delusion, it has been stimulated by delusion. Famous religious figures, such as the Apostle Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc, and writers such as Dostoevsky to whom religion was of overwhelming importance, showed symptoms of epilepsy. Though I do not have epilepsy, I have some symptoms that suggest my right temporal lobe might be hyperactive in something of the same way as certain epileptics. For example, throughout my life I have had experiences of religious ecstasy. I also have to take an anticonvulsant medication that is prescribed, in higher dosage, to epileptics. And I have a mild case of polygraphia—the compulsion to write everything down, all day every day—that some epileptics also have. Finally, there might be a genetic basis for this; my paternal grandfather was religiously crazy. Somehow just knowing this makes me feel more comfortable inside my skin.

Kean’s book, like the books of Mary Roach, show that the best modern science writing is based on stories and are written to be fun. Filled with fragments and imprecise language, this book would make some science editors howl, but is exactly the kind of book that would make anyone want to learn more about science. This is the kind of science book that I have not yet written myself.

The feeling I bring away from Kean’s book is liberation. I feel no need to blame myself for feeling or believing things that may be outrageous, nor do I have to blame others for theirs. What we need to do is to override anything outrageous that our minds manufacture. The idea that we choose our beliefs rationally seems to be entirely wrong, even though reasoning is a contributing factor. As a scientist and educator, I feel liberation, because I do not need to actually convince or convert anyone to my way of thinking. What I need to continue doing is to provide information and opportunity that will allow my students and my readers to convert their thinking, should that prove possible. If I continue to provide information about the world and its history, humans and their history, and continue provoking new thoughts, I have done my entire job.