Beard of the Week XXXI: Beauty in Science
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This week's beard belongs to geneticist Sean Carroll, professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of the book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which is what this post is really about. The book, that is to say, although it does demonstrate that I'm not above finding a scientist attractive for his mind and his beard.
Once again I'm catching up on reporting about my reading. It's been a few months since I actually finished reading Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful : The New Science of Evo Devo (New York : W.W.Norton & Company, 2005, 350 pages). Here is my book note, with more comments and more quotations. ("Evo Devo" = evolutionary developmental biology.)
It's a book I can recommend very heartily. I was fascinated and delighted by all the things I learned. It seemed that here at last is the answer to how a fertilized egg could turn into a recognizable animal shape, which I've long wondered about. But it also shed so much light on how DNA controls development, and how evolution works through developmental means, that I'm still absorbing the implications. It's a very powerful approach to understanding otherwise difficult to comprehend effects.
I thought it was a brilliant book. If I hadn't also read a couple of other wildly brilliant books last year, I would proclaim it the most intellectually influential and stimulating book I read all year.
Here's one left-over quotation that I found appealing, about the idea of beauty in science, a perennially slippery question for most scientists: we all believe in it, but find it hard to say just what it looks like.
But beauty, in science, is much more than skin-deep. The best science is an integrated product of our emotional and intellectual sides, a synthesis between what is often referred to as our "left" brain (reasoning) and "right" brain (emotional/artistic) hemispheres. The greatest "eurekas" in science combine both sensual aesthetics and conceptual insight. The physicist Victor Weisskopf (also a pianist) noted, "What is beautiful in science is the same thing that is beautiful in Beethoven. There's a fog of events, and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in your that were never put together before."
In short, the best science offers the same kind of experience as the best books or films do. A mystery or drama engages us, and we follow a story toward some revelation that, in the very best examples, makes us see and understand the world more clearly. The scientist's main constraint is the truth. Can the nonfiction world of science inspire and delight us as much as the imagines world of fiction?
One hundred years ago, Rudyard Kipling published his classic Just So Stories,, a collection of children's tales inspired by his experiences in India. Kipling's enchanting stories ranged from "How the Leopard Got His Spots" and "How the Camel Got His Hump" to "The Butterfly That Stamped," and wove fanciful tales of how some of our favorite and most unusual creatures acquired prominent features. As delightful as the Just So explanations are of how spots, stripes, humps, and horns came to be, biology can now tell stories about butterflies, zebras, and leopards that I contend are every bit as enchanting as Kipling's fairy tales. What's more, they offer some simple, elegant truths that deepen our understanding of all animal forms, including ourselves. [p. 14]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
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on Thursday, 31 January 2008 at 22.18
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A beard AND a brilliant book. I'm in heaven.
His discussion of beauty in science is quite beautiful in itself. I'm reading a book currently which points out the similarities and differences between science and literature. Perhaps I'll have to quote a bit of it soon, when I get to reviewing it.