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As you may have heard, a letter by Mathias Osvath from Lund University in Current Biology [summary] describes a Swedish chimp that planned attacks by stockpiling rocks or chips of concrete from its enclosure in a calm state and later throwing them at visitors while performing dominance displays. “Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with nonhuman animals.” This is an interesting finding and I can’t help but side with the chimp in railing against his viewers.
But this also brings another recent news story on chimps into sharp relief. As reported in today’s Science, the Humane Society of the United States is claiming that they have evidence of 338 possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act taking place at the New Iberia Research Center in Lafayette. I think most people have a sense of recognition when looking at great apes and this is one factor that makes them such controversial research subjects. One researcher was quoted in the Science story saying “We can’t afford to support an across-the-board ban. There are diseases that can only be studied in chimpanzees.” Bearing in mind that this is a one line quote in a news story, it is of course not sufficient justification in and of itself. There are lots of experiments that could only be done in people, but out of the possibilities, we rightfully accept only a small subset as ethical. Ajit Varki of UCSD (who doesn’t do invasive research with animals) gets it about right in my opinion:
He says no research should be done on chimps that we would not do on humans. “On the other hand, I would no more think of banning all research on chimpanzees than of banning all research on humans,” says Varki. “That would be a bad idea for the future of either species.”
This may be important to keep in mind, because a bill is in committee that would ban invasive research on chimps, where invasive includes “any research that may cause death, bodily injury, pain, distress, fear, injury, or trauma.” Again from the article:
Neuroscientist Todd Preuss of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta complains that the bill defines “invasive” too broadly. It would prohibit his and other groups from sedating chimpanzees to perform brain scans or drawing blood for behavioral experiments and endocrinology studies. He calls these interventions “minimally invasive.”
I can’t decide how I feel about this right now and I certainly can’t predict what my future mental state might be! Maybe I’m more like a squirrel than a great ape. I think I’ll go stockpile some food.
Back in May, Malcolm Gladwell wrote In the air, a piece in the New Yorker about how many big ideas seem inevitable. While we (rightly) attribute the moniker “genius” to many of the people who have invented or discovered important things in history, Gladwell argues that others would have almost surely come up with the same (or similar) ideas in short order, what science historians call “multiples”. A number of examples are tossed around, based on a list compiled in 1922 by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas:
Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Burgi in Switzerland. […] The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding, and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens, and Symmington.
The idea, then, is that big ideas are “in the air”, or that these “multiples” exist because the collective thinking is being steered in particular directions by previous discoveries and advances, letting multiple people working on the same problem independently find similar solutions. This is actually a fairly obvious idea (how many of us in science are worried about being “scooped” in some way or another?), but it isn’t usually the way we think about the history of science. As Gladwell points out, “[g]ood ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them.”
This idea of “multiples” was also used by sociologist Robert K. Merton to classify what genius actually meant. His belief was that a genius was invariably part of many different “multiples”, far more than an average scientist or inventor, and that the genius was no different than you or I except in their efficiency in generating good ideas. Merton’s example was Lord Kelvin, where, after analysis of Kelvin’s 600-odd scientific correspondences, concluded 32 multiples:
These 32 multiples involved an aggregate of 30 other scientists, some, like Stokes, Green, Helmholtz, Cavendish, Clausius, Poincaré, Rayleigh, themselves men of undeniable genius, others, like Hankel, Pfaff, Homer Lane, Varley, and Lamé, being men of talent, no doubt, but still not of the highest order… For the hypothesis that each of these discoveries was destined to find expression, even if the genius of Kelvin had not been obtained, there is the best of traditional proof: each was in fact made by others.
Gladwell relates all of this back to an extremely unique company called Intellectual Ventures, whose goal is to gather together many smart people and brainstorm ideas (in “invention sessions”) with the intention of following up on them themselves (they are apparently working on a new kind of nuclear reactor, and have more nuclear engineers than GE), or licensing their ideas to other companies. They’ve been generating interesting ideas at an amazing pace (some 500 patents are granted each year, and they have a backlog of 3000 waiting to go), bypassing the necessity for a single genius by increasing the number of Hankels, or Pfaffs, or Varleys, working together. These are still very clever people—in their ranks are a chemist from Stanford, doctors, lawyers, career scientists from Livermore who were trained by Edward Teller, etc—but the point is that none of them are Kelvin-style geniuses.
In my mind, this is also the way academic science works. It is increasingly rare to find lone geniuses working on their big ideas, and instead to find teams, often spanning multiple institutions or countries, doing the real interesting science. To make important contributions does not require that you be a Kelvin or a Feynman (they solve things the same way we do anyway) but to surround yourself with other clever people, and to have the wit and will to follow interesting problems.
Comment [1]
I can’t recall offhand, but it was probably in Genius where Gleick, or maybe some famous figure in the history of science, joked about the way Richard Feynman solved problems. It went something like this:
While this is obviously wouldn’t have worked for his brief stint as a biologist, for someone of Feynman’s intellect you might sometimes imagine it to be close to the truth for solving physics problems. In fact, Feynman solved problems the same way we all try to solve problems. From a wonderful essay titled Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, W. Daniel Hillis recounts Feynman’s internship at a startup computer company:
For Richard, figuring out these problems was a kind of a game. He always started by asking very basic questions like, “What is the simplest example?” or “How can you tell if the answer is right?” He asked questions until he reduced the problem to some essential puzzle that he thought he would be able to solve. Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. “Don’t bug me. I’m busy,” he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms.
This idea of solving little puzzles as the way we do science is something André and I often talked about as undergrads, and it still rings true for me. Turning a large problem into a host of smaller ones makes research seem far more tractable and gives real, shorter-term goals to keep me motivated.
The article also makes mention of “crazy” ideas, and how Feynman was excited by them:
His reaction was unequivocal, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested.
I think the combination of those two quotes forms a good philosophy for doing science. Crazy ideas are often interesting ideas (if they’re right it could be very exciting!), and after working on a problem and deciding it is too hard, you can’t be afraid to lose interest and try something else.
Comment [12]
George Wald made considerable progress in our understanding of the chemistry and physiology of vision (which just so happens to be the area I find myself in now). He won the Nobel Prize (physiology or medicine) in 1967, and his lecture in Stockholm opened with a beautiful description of experimental science:
I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer; then one asks the next question, and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that one has only to listen.
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
