Carson Chow thinks he has solved the obesity puzzle.
In an interview in the Science section of today’s NY Times, Carson Chow claims to have solved the obesity puzzle: Why is the obesity rate increasing in the U.S.? Chow’s mathematical analysis found that since the 1970s food production in the U.S. has increased considerably and that we consume most of that increased production. While he gestures to changes in consumption patterns, such as eating out and fast food, Chow’s concludes that we consume too many calories:
…it’s something very simple, very obvious, something that few want to hear: The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States.
…
Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it! This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight.
From the interview, I don’t see what the mathematician’s expertise contributed beyond some abstract social authority accorded to mathematicians. Chow’s conclusions is, as he says, obvious. Along with being obvious, his conclusion merely echoes the decade-old findings of USDA. The Agricultural Fact Book 2001-2002 covers food production increases and consumption patterns. In the U.S. daily per capita consumption has risen more than 530 calories since the 1970s. Further, the same report details how the foods we consume have changed: record levels of caloric sweeteners, record levels of calories from restaurants, record levels of refined grains (see Is Grandma to Blame for Obesity Today for more details).
More disturbingly, Chow ignores the social factors that complicate this picture. Obesity rates are not consistent across socio-economic and ethnic groups. Despite Chow’s claim to the contrary, various research details declining physical activity rates for children and adults. Some of that decline is related to our increasingly sedentary careers. Rates of decline seem correlated to demographic factors.
While the proximate cause for rates of obesity is increased calorie consumption, the ultimate causes are more difficult to determine. Chow alludes to some of the complicated social, cultural, and political causes for our increasing calorie consumption but doesn’t pursue them. A real solution to the obesity puzzle will have to identify and address the complex roots of our increasing weight gain.
For a different critique of Chow’s conclusion, see The Mathematician’s Obesity Fallacy in Scientific American.
[Reposted at PACHS.]
In a recent column at Nature, Daniel Sarewitz worries about the effect that systematic bias is having on science: “Beware the Creeping Cracks of Bias.” According to Sarewitz, scientists can no longer point the finger at traditional causes but now should “recognize bias is an inescapable element of research.” He finds biomedical research most susceptible to bias (an position echoed in the comments) but implies that even physical sciences suffer from bias. Sarewitz’s bold column raises some excellent issues.
Daniel Sarewitz’s recent column on bias.
What is bias? For Sarewitz bias is over-reporting of false positive results, which result from “a powerful cultural belief … that progress in science means the continual production of positive findings.” In the biomedical realm, false positive results cannot be replicated or turn out to be invalid when applied to more complex systems. “A biased scientific result is no different from a useless one.”
According to Sarewitz, bias is not a function of scientific research so much as a characterization of the results of that research. Useful, reproducible results are not biased. Useless and irreproducible results are biased and threaten to erode public trust in science and scientists.
Such an understanding of bias is naive. Bias shapes the construction of every experiment and the interpretation of every result. Such bias is not necessarily malicious but is inescapable. Bias produces not merely systematic errors or useless results. Bias often guides the very research questions, the construction of procedures thought useful in investigating those questions, and regularly produces useful results.
Equating bias with utility ignores history and the manifold ways bias has produced useful if sometimes harmful results. For a few more infamous examples, see “What are Science’s Ugliest Experiments.”
I missed Helen Sword’s short article last month when it first appeared: “Yes, Even Professors Can Write Stylishly.” She laments the stodgy (her word) style many academics use and rejects the common claim that academic prose needs to be jargon-laden:
Unfortunately, the myth persists, especially among junior faculty still winding their anxious way up the tenure track, that the gates of academic publishing are guarded by grumpy sentries programmed to reject everything but jargon-laden, impersonal prose. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly everyone, including the editors of academic journals, would much rather read lively, well-written articles than the slow-moving sludge of the typical scholarly paper.
She encourages academics to pay attention to their audience, to use their writing to communicate concrete ideas, and to “cultivate an authoritative yet conversational voice.”
Academic history should have little difficulty achieving such goals. But I still wonder if we are facing a broader problem that can’t be solved merely by improving our style. Despite Collingwood’s claims in his autobiography about all sciences being a form of historical knowledge, history did not enjoy the rise in social authority and reputation that he predicted.
Shot@Life’s latest video campaign.
The Shot@Life Campaign is the latest effort to vaccinate less fortunate children in developing countries. Part of the United Nations Foundation, Shot@Life hopes to expand access to vaccines by drawing on “the American public, members of Congress, and civil society partners.” While the Shot@Life seems to result from improved, modern public health, universal vaccination especially for poorer children has clear historical antecedents in 19th-century Philadelphia. Sometime around the middle of the century physicians signed a petition urging Pennsylvania’s senate and house of representatives to support “the universal extension of vaccination” against smallpox.
Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in the late 1700s—1796 is usually cited as his first successful vaccination. Jenner’s technique was soon introduced into the Boston area. Before long Philadelphia appointed people to locate unvaccinated children so that “physicians duly appointed [could] call upon and vaccinate them free of charge.”
A 19th-century petition urged the state government to pay for vaccinating poor children.
The petition is remarkable for how contemporary it sounds. It raises issues of public health and welfare, government required vaccination programs, vaccinating school children, and the real financial costs of vaccinating children. A copy of this petition signed by 20 local physicians survives in Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections. It would be interesting to know if other copies of this petition survive, perhaps in the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and to begin to reconstruct the history of smallpox vaccination in the Philadelphia area.
Here is the full text of the petition:
To the Senate and House of Representatives of Pennsylvania
The undersigned, citizens of Pennsylvania, and practicing physicians, believing that the only safe means of guarding agains the loathsome and fatal disease, smallpox, is by the universal extension of vaccination—which, while it gives absolute protection to a large majority of those who undergo it, in nearly all instances affords security against death and deformity—would respectfully petition your honorable bodies to pass an Act providing for the more general extension of vaccination by the public authorities throughout the Commonwealth. We would call the attention of your honorable bodies to the fact that, in the city of Philadelphia and adjoining incorporated districts, municipal regulations have for many years been in operation for the extension of vaccination gratuitously to the poor, the children of whom are sought out by persons appointed for that purpose, and those found unprotected reported to physicians duly appointed to call upon and vaccinate them free of charge. Similar usages exist elsewhere in this country; while in some of the most enlightened countries of Europe no child is admitted into a public school without bringing with it a certificate of having undergone vaccination.
Your petitioners believe that public provision for the extension of vaccination universally among the citizens of this Commonwealth would confer upon them an inestimable benefit, in consequence of the protection which would be afforded to all against the smallpox—a disease so dangerous and loathsome that its presence in any community is always a source of anxiety and terror. They therefore pray that your honorable bodies will take into consideration a measure of such serious import to the safety and welfare of the community at large, and especially to the less provident classes.
[Reposted at PACHS.]
The Wagner looms over 17th and Montgomery.
Yesterday I had the chance to visit The Wagner Free Institute of Science and to speak to a group of students from Drexel University. As part of a class on the history of museums, they had spent considerable time at the Academy of Natural Sciences—last year Drexel acquired (the official term is became affiliated with) the Academy. A visit to the Wagner is a bit of a shift. In the first instance, the Wagner is in a very different part of town. Whereas the Academy is on the parkway, next to the Franklin Institute and across from the Free Library, the Wagner is in a largely residential neighborhood in north Philadelphia. And unlike the Academy, which still bridges the worlds of scientific research and museum display, the Wagner has had to relinquish its scientific efforts and concentrates now on being a “museum of a museum.” Even in its heyday the Wagner was very different from the Academy—it had different goals and served a different demographic.
The Wagner “is not a reflection of the past but the past itself.”
Stepping into the Wagner feels like stepping into the past. As the webpage says, the museum “is not a reflection of the past but the past itself.” The institute was founded in 1855 by William Wagner, a wealthy merchant who had amassed a large collection of natural specimens. He established his institute to bring science education to the masses. Admission and lectures were and remain free, and all lectures were held at times when working Philadelphians could attend. Initially, he housed his collection and held his lectures in his home. As his collections and his audiences grew, he had to find a new place for both. The current building was built in 1865. Later the first branch of the Free Library system in Philadelphia opened at the Wagner.
Famously, Joseph Leidy became the director of the Wagner in 1885, when William Wagner died. Leidy supported original research, which was published in the institute’s journal, The Transactions of the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and reorganized the collections. Leidy used the collection to make a visible and physical argument for evolution. He grouped the organisms according to type and arranged them in cases of increasing complexity. He arranged the fossils according to their age. The result is a two-fold argument for evolution. In one half visitors encounter increasingly complex organisms. In the other half visitors move through geological time.
Knowing that Leidy reorganized the collection reveals how museums shape knowledge and provides a way to think about about how and why Leidy’s argument for evolution would have been compelling, about how artifacts deliberately arranged make an argument more powerful or persuasive. At first glance, the arrangement of artifacts seems natural—students today typically show up accepting some form of evolution, even if they can’t articulate it clearly. The challenge is getting students to understand that in reorganizing the collection Leidy redefined the important relationships between artifacts—what those artifact meant.
One way students can begin to see the deliberateness of the collection is by opening the drawers under the display cases. In a sense, the drawers contain the superfluous artifacts. They are the Wagner’s stores. Opening these drawers reveals the chaotic nature of unorganized artifacts and, consequently, the artificiality of organized specimens. Frequently the items in the drawers bear little relationship to those displayed in the case and have fascinating notes on scraps of paper identifying the objects. A number of drawers contain items “from Wagner’s original collection” that “have not been cataloged.” I try to get students to think about how the objects in the cases can be related to those in the drawers and why somebody chose to display some of the objects and not others and what would happen if everything were on display?
A visit to the Wagner is always a poignant reminder of the amount of effort and the resources needed to maintain a collection. One reason the Wagner is “the past itself” is because its endowment has never been sufficient to keep it up to date. It is a museum of a museum because its development ossified in the late 19th or early 20th century, when resources were too constrained to enable it to continue developing. It is an endearing image of the past because it couldn’t continue to be a reflection of the present.
In late 1951 Bertrand Russell composed “A Liberal Decalogue” in response to growing fanaticism. We would all do well to recall daily Russell’s ten commandments for the teacher:
- Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
- Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
- Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
- When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
- Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
- Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
- Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
- Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
- Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
- Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Today, at the end of the semester as I read final papers, number 8 stands out as particularly poignant:
“Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.”
It reminds me of Jorge Louis Borges’s story, “Circular Ruins,” when the stranger recounts his disappointment in confronting assent:
The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.
After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree.
In all interactions thoughtful opposition and intelligent dissent is better than polite agreement, but especially in the classroom.
(For more on Russell’s decalogue, see A Liberal Decalogue.)
Without further comment:
The American university teacher who gives honor grades to students who have not yet learned to write English, for industrious compilations of facts or feats of memory, is wanting in professional pride or competence.
Samuel E. Morison, History as a Literary Art (1946), 3.
The current unease about history’s declining fortunes echo an anxiety that has afflicted the profession for nearly a century. This anxiety seems perennially familiar: overly specialized monographs filled with turgid prose are driving away readers, graduate education is doing little to improve the situation, and, consequently, history no longer commands the respect it once did. The present situation might be more precarious, but the general themes of this crisis have been rehearsed before.
The Writing of History (1926) raises familiar concerns.
In 1920 the AHA formed a committee to learn what could be done to “awaken young students and historians to a realization of the part good expression must play in enabling history to maintain a place in the world of letters.” History’s readership was already in decline and with that decline in readership so too was history’s standing as a respectable subject. Six years later the committee produced its report, Writing of History (New York, 1926). The report diagnoses the problem, tracing the cause back to undergraduate and graduate education that has beaten any appreciation of style out of students and future historians.
By 1926 John Spencer Bassett looked back longingly to a former era when
historians like Bancroft and Prescott stood side by side with the great poets at the top of the world of letters. From the men of their day they received esteem, public honors, and wealth. They lived like proconsuls over provinces of literary expression. To-day the historian’s influence has waned. He is no longer to be compared with the lordly proconsul, but rather to the hard-working centurion, whose labors held together the military units on which rested the Roman authority in the province.
We can hardly imagine a world in which historians stood anywhere near “the top of the world of letters” and “received esteem, public honors, and wealth.” If Bassett lamented the historians fall from proconsul to centurion, imagine his horror knowing that historians today rarely rise even to the level of optio. However much Bassett feared civilization had decayed, he could still assume readers would know the terms proconsul and centurion. Today even writing for historians Bassett would be wise to link proconsul, centurion, and optio to their wikipedia pages.
Theodor Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902.
Bassett’s utopian past was best represented by the great German historian Theodor Mommsen. Stories of Mommsen’s fame are not hard to find. When Mark Twain visited Berlin in 1892 he was amazed by the reverence shown to Mommsen. One evening at a banquet in honor of two leading scientists, Hermann von Helmholz and Rudolf Virchow, the crowds of students attending rose to celebrate Mommsen’s entrance into the banquet hall. Mommsen’s lectures drew enormous audiences that overflowed the auditoriums and spilled out into the streets. These people turned out to hear lectures on the Roman Republic, on coinage, on inscriptions, on constitutional and criminal law. Mommsen wasn’t just a great historian; he was also a literary giant and incredible stylist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902. Mommsen was a giant amongst giants in an era that for whatever reason valued history more than the subsequent period. The 19th century was, as Anthony Grafton put it, the age of Clio.
By contrast, the 20th and 21st centuries have never been particularly fond of Clio. While there are undoubtedly many reasons for history’s declining fortunes, a seemingly pathological lack of literary style and an obsession with monographs are commonly identified as the root of history’s woes. Twenty years after the AHA report Samuel Eliot Morison once again blamed the educational system for destroying any sense of style. In History as a Literary Art (1946) he wrote:
There has been a sort of chain reaction of dullness. Professors who have risen to positions of eminence by writing dull, solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the profession, teach graduate students to write dull, solid, valuable monographs like theirs; the road to academic security is that of writing dull, solid, valuable monographs. And so the young men who have a gift for good writing either leave the historical field for something more exciting, or write more dull, solid, valuable monographs.
Like Bassett before him, Morison singled out William Prescott and George Bancroft as exemplary stylists and lamented “the introduction of pseudoscientific and psychological jargon” that had come to infect historical writing.
Sixty years later, postmodernism had replaced pseudoscientific and psychological jargon as the particular symptoms, but the diagnosis remained the same: impenetrable and esoteric prose was driving away readers and ensuring academic history’s marginalization. Accessible, interesting history is written by non-academic historians, often disparaged as journalists or merely writers. Style—vocabulary, language as well as form—is again implicated in William Cronon’s recent “Professional Boredom.” While he identifies other contributing factors, he concludes by drawing attention to style:
How do we avoid professional boredom? … By remembering that no matter what else we do, we are all teachers whose foremost responsibility is to share what we know in ways people can understand—and, more basic still, in ways that people will find interesting, even intriguing. By communicating as clearly and engagingly as we can. By telling good stories.
Are we asking too much of style? Do we expect it to bear more responsibility for history’s success or failure than it possibly can? Does our focus on style perhaps obscure larger, societal shifts away from traditional, academic history?
A recent article in the Guardian asked once again: “Should science journalists read the papers on which their stories are based?” This article grew out of debate at the Royal Institution “Scientists and journalists need different things from science” (see the storify version of that debate).
A recent debate about whether or not science writers should read scientific papers.
Apparently there was considerable disagreement about whether or not journalists writing about science should read (be able to read?) the scientific papers, the sources as one commenter put it, on which they were reporting. Reading the abstracts and the press releases was generally thought not to be sufficient. Many of the scientists and a number of the journalists insisted that people writing about science should read and work to understand the scientific papers on which their stories were based.
An analogous question that doesn’t get asked is: Should science writers, journalists, and scientists read (be able to read) and understand the historical sources on which their stories are based?
To admit that both those questions are meaningful is to recognize that history has a distinct expertise and that reading recent translations or excerpts of historical sources is not sufficient.
[Reposted from PACHS.]
The success of last week’s “Life, Sex, Death (and Food): A Historical Look at the Science that Drives Us” offers a chance to think about how to pair the history of science with science and comedy to bring both science and history of science to a broader audience. One possible result might be encouraging students to take both more seriously. What I am thinking here is different from my previous Thoughts on History of Science in a Science Curriculum, which assume students in a science classroom. Using comedy would also differ from simply making history of science interesting. Both these projects are worthwhile and would pay rich dividends. Here, instead, I am thinking about how to use comedy to generate interest in science and its history in “sci-curious” general audiences as well as students in high schools and colleges.
Festival of the Spoken Nerd mixes comedy and science.
In addition to our local successes—both last year’s and last week’s shows along with the local Science on Tap suggest a robust local audience—the Festival of the Spoken Nerd offers further evidence that comedy and science make a fruitful pairing. Judging from the Festival of the Spoken Nerd’s list of past shows, the trio has been quite active over the past year or so performing at science festivals and other public venues, often to sold-out audiences. If you want to sample their show, see the podcasts they have posted.
What would happen if we combined history of science, science, and comedy and brought such shows to high schools, colleges, and other public venues? There is no shortage of handwringing about declining interest in science and technology—usually in the form “How can we attract more students to STEM?”—both in higher education and in industry. Maybe a well crafted program that makes science and its history amusing and engaging could be part of the answer.
Each show could be built around a particular question or issue. Begin with a historical episode, presented by the historian of science. Follow with a comedy skit (a sketch, improv, songs, or …?). Then have the scientist present more recent efforts to understand that issue or question. Finally, perhaps, end with another short skit. While I think nearly any question or issue could be made interesting and funny, some lend themselves more readily to such a program. What would it look like if comedians from the Philly Improv Theater joined forces with local historians of science and scientists?
Maybe it would be fun and effective. Maybe I’m just looking for a way to avoid grading final exams.
[Reposted from PACHS.]
