Great God, I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn
-W. Wordsworth
I wrote in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s name for President of the United States in the past election, and I make an effort to keep up with Nate Silver’s blog. I consider these some examples, among many, that I want to be thought of as a logical thinker. Science and technology often leave me in awe, lamenting the fact I was not touched with the type of genius to recognize patterns like Gauss, or conjure experiments like Faraday. I trust deductive reasoning and the scientific method, and love reading Nature magazine.
“What a Piece of Work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
(Hamlet II, II)
However, a Romantic reaction persists in my thoughts. “...And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (Hamlet II, II). In history this reaction has taken many forms. St. Augustine reacted to the logic and vanity of Rome by disallowing Aristotle into his City of Man; John Keats toasted to “Newton’s health, but confusion to his mathematics”, and now David Orr declares “education is the problem” impacting our environment, and in a recent article Beth Hoffman stated “science has a credibility problem”. And they always have a point, even if, like St. Augustine, they can delay the progress of Western scientific thought by a millennium.
A former student of mine, Kate Nelson, showed me the seemingly magical qualities of emergence and the limitations of reductionist science. How does one explain the phenomenon of an entity greater than the sum of its parts? How do a series of cells come together to create consciousness in my brain? How do you explain the 2009-2010 Phoenix Coyotes? How, with no intelligence whatsoever, do individual grains of sand organize themselves into ripples on sand dunes? They cannot be explained by isolating a single cell, Shane Doan, or a grain of sand. Focusing too closely on one variable distracts from macro behaviors. When countless micro behaviors happen simultaneously, impacting each other, unintentional and unforeseen behaviors can appear at the macro level. They need to be studied as a system with all the variables… but this isn’t easy. The mathematics and scientific tools needed to understand these complex networks remain quite young.
Image by Kate Nelson
Non-chaotic systems can be predicted. The time it takes the earth to complete a full revolution is rhythmic and therefore fairly predictable. If I wanted to predict the time it would take for 100 rotations, I simply take the time it takes for one rotation and multiply it by 100. In a chaotic system prediction takes much more work. Steven Strogatz calls this the “demoralizing implications of the Butterfly Effect”. The successful prediction of a chaotic system depends on our tolerance for error, our ability to understand the initial conditions, and a time system called “Lyapunov time,” which reflects the limits of predictability. The work needed to predict chaotic systems does not grow linearly, like periodic systems, but exponentially. If we want to predict such a system for twice as long it will not take twice the effort; it will take ten times the effort. Four times as long? One thousand times the effort. Forget about extending predictions 100 times longer. So we rely on reductionism.
The hubris of reductionist science impacts Nutrition and Education perhaps more dramatically than any other fields. Nutritionists attempting to find which nutrients or vitamins we should ingest more or less of inevitably contradict themselves month by month. We have oxymoronic products like “low carb bread” because sometime in 2003 we decided carbs made people fat. In the 1950’s all fats were the same and they all led to heart disease. In order to perform trials, nutrition scientists isolate certain nutrients, but this ignores the emergent qualities of food, or to a larger extent, diet, and to an even larger extent, lifestyle. Diets based on this science of reductionism are bound to fail. I’m inclined to side with the Romantic reactor Michael Pollen here: “Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants”, and submit to the limitations of human comprehension.
Additionally, education specialists continually separate individual variables to uncover the reason US students frequently underperform on standardized tests. How can we test, or educate, a teacher to be respected by his students when the circumstances surrounding respect are so varied? How can we isolate family life, with all its complexity, and without a single case being exactly the same as another, in order to test its impact on test performance? There are infinite ways to teach a student to solve for X, and the effectiveness of each depends on many factors (ie: readiness of the student, relationship between student and teacher, time of day et cetera). These questions deal with emergent qualities. The education of our youth is part of a far more complicated system than any reductionist approach will explain.
Culture is an emergent system: cooking, eating, festivals of entertainment, and playing or listening to music combine to make a culture greater than the sum of its parts. The varying pieces interact and change each other dynamically and constantly. Linear thinking would have us believe the goal of eating is calories; the goal of education is to produce productive workers; the goal of sports is winning. This perspective ignores camaraderie, participation, community, loyalty, family, and the infinite other qualities contained in cultural acts. The imperative we all feel to be logical and deduce causalities needs to always be tempered with humility.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet I, V)
We all want to be logical thinkers, and worship Nate Silver, and win our fantasy league, and eat according to the latest food science. But we also need to heed Ygritte’s warning (“You know nothing, John Snow”); we should be loyal to a player in spite of declining statistics; we should have a huge Italian meal with great friends and great conversation; we should allow curiosity and learning to be dynamic, exciting, and ever changing. We should not feel the need to reduce these joys to their parts. These things combine to make people wonder—love—laugh—things greater than their causes. For the next year I’m going to try and just enjoy them.