Inspired by recent Science magazine cover and backlash

A recent issue of “Science” magazine (July 11, 2014) featured transgendered Indonesian sex workers (or at least their bodies below the chest region) on its cover.  The cover photo was referencing a topic heavily discussed in the magazine, that of HIV transmission and control.  The implication is that Indonesian transgender sex workers (presumably one example of many groups) have an HIV problem – that as a group they spread the virus, and governments are not doing enough to prevent the spread and provide treatment.  Complaints about the nature of the cover, through Twitter, revealed that some editors are clueless with regards to gender issues and sexuality.

Numerous problems with the cover exist.  Putting sexualized images on what is supposed to be a purely scientific magazine is questionable.  Sexualized images of a very oppressed minority group, and implicating them in the spread of HIV, is incredibly degrading to them as human beings (never mind that we can not see their faces, even more dehumanizing).  I do not know if the individuals depicted on the cover gave consent to be depicted as such.  Overall, it is dehumanizing and vilifying this group of people.

How could this have happened?  Doesn’t “Science” magazine have editors and people who might look at the cover before it goes to print and object?  In principle, yes.  In practice, apparently not, and this highlights problems with the scientific community – problems do privilege, closed-mindedness, and failure to educate about these things.  This post will not deal with specifics regarding this incident, but will analyze overall opinions within the community of scientists.

Science, as a discipline, wants to think of itself at meritocratic – scientists get where they are due to hard work and intelligence, not because of affirmative action or luck.  However, we can not ignore the fact that virtually all higher-level scientists are heterosexual males, specifically ones that do not recognize their own privileged status (recognizing it would remove the myth of advancement purely on merit).  As such, heterosexual male norms are the cultural standard – including viewing women as sex objects, using homophobic slurs to describe people, etc.  (I have personal experience with this.  Less so in graduate school, but at my most recent position at a government lab this was rampant.  We had one woman in a group of 30 or so scientists.  “Pussy” and “candy-ass,” among others, were used among scientists to describe others.  “My grandmother could [verb with comparative adjective, such as run faster] than you” was bandied around.  Hitting the racial issue as well, one remarked about putting a sample in a small gap that we should hire a small Asian girl with slim fingers to do it.  One told me that he wanted to work in Boulder over Silicon Valley because of the higher female-to-male ratio.  Never mind that women scientists/tech workers are more prevalent in Silicon Valley than the certain lab in Boulder – women are there to date, not to be colleagues.  I, as a human-rights-supporting, heterosexual white male, was often offended, told I shouldn't be, and felt like I could do nothing about it as it was ingrained in the culture.)  

The effect of these attitudes can have positive reinforcement (in the scientific sense, not in the standard use of the word “positive”).  Such cultural aspects if the scientific community can drive away some groups who are made to feel marginalized – women, gays, some ethnic/racial minorities, people with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, even men who simply do not like or fit into the culture.  Because of the myth of meritocracy and the need to justify outcomes, the ones who remain must justify their position, often times coming to the conclusion that the marginalized groups are simply weaker – which leads to further marginalizing in casual conversations, and the continued reinforcement of the culture.  The feeling that such groups are weaker (which can have manifestations such as stupid, poor work ethic, etc.), and the fact that interactions between scientists and others become very limited, can lead to an attitude of dehumanization of certain groups by scientists – the groups are there to be studied, or used for sex, paid low wages – simply because they are not good enough to be scientists.  (Scientists tend to think of themselves as better than the general public, for the reasons referred to above.  Egotism is a huge problem.)  The lack of understanding and empathy as described here is concerning, for one because many people who would become scientists will choose not to or will be purged from the pipeline, and for another because insensitivity leads to outreach problems like those represented in the “Science” cover – a very marginalized group (transgender people) are put on display and dehumanized without a second thought.

This is a problem, and some of us are able to admit it is a problem (many will not admit it is a problem).  One solution is broader education for scientists.  Make them take a [fill in group]-studies class.  Have them read literature about minority experiences and privilege.  It will be a slow, generational process of acceptance, requiring older opinions (many people educated in the 1960s, when sexism and racism were prevalent throughout society, still maintain active leadership roles in science and have passed their attitudes on to those now in their 30s and older) to retire and younger opinions to take over.  (I was surprised working at the government lab at people’s attitudes.  My college experience involved many lectures and workshops on privilege, discrimination, and casual –isms.  Courses I took on cultural anthropology and Black literature opened my eyes, as well as talking to people who grew up less privileged than myself.  If not for that educational experience I would probably be part of the problem.  I expected everyone to have had similar learning opportunities, but I was mistaken.  Working with those people was, in some sense, a good experience, as it showed me that certain attitudes are rampant, even among the supposedly highly educated.  Knowing that it was better in graduate school than amongst older workers is encouraging for the future, but it might be that I went to a relatively progressive graduate school.)

As a final note, turning large segments of the population off of science due to internal culture cannot be good for society.  We want more educated people pursuing scientific knowledge, and we want to encourage the best, brightest, and motivated (truly motivated, not falling into the artificial categories that make someone seem motivated within the culture), and these characteristics are not limited to white and Asian heterosexual men.

Richard "Tricky Dick" Feynman, and legacy

Richard Feynman’s legacy is has been discussed recently in regards to the fact that he was kind of a womanizing, sexist jerk, and what this fact means for how we judge his scientific work.  Richard Feynman, among modern physical scientists, is hailed as sort of a God who walked the Earth.  He was instrumental in formulating quantum field theory and interpreting quantum mechanics, was an excellent lecturer and teacher, providing good analogies and qualitative understanding of phenomena.  He also spent much of his spare time going to bars to pick up women, picking up undergrads at orientation parties, and other sexual exploits (details can be found in his autobiographical books like “Surely You’re Joking” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think”).  He was also kind of condescending to “lesser” fields such as psychology and the humanities.

Is this relevant?  At some level, yes.  Hailing Feynman as a hero among physical scientists inherently includes his personal life, which we should try to denounce for what it was. Many young scientists will read about his personal life and think how cool he was, and this can only lead to more gender disparities in the physical sciences, and the feeling that physical sciences maintain a culture of machismo, hostile to women, homosexuals, and some minorities.  (As a note, my high school physics teacher talked about how awesome Feynman was for picking up women in bars.  I did not realize it at the time, but that attitude is definitely hostile towards women in science, and women as anything more than sexual conquests in general.)

Feynman did come from a different time, so maybe we should cut him some slack on that front, but we should be able to realize that and say that that behavior is unacceptable in today’s world.  Should this discount his purely scientific legacy?  Absolutely not.  His work was fundamental and instrumental in our understanding of quantum mechanics, the modern foundation of, well, a lot (solid-state computers, among other things).  

Plenty of other individuals have had personalities that today we would find despicable, and plenty of us today do things that 50 years from now might be frowned upon.  If we discount accomplishments based on whether the accomplisher is a jerk, progress would halt (I do not know the details, but we would maybe have to remove the wheel, or Kepler’s laws, or the literary works of Hemingway from human knowledge).  An advancement is an advancement, regardless of the personality of the discoverer, and we need to accept that.  

Should we take measures to prevent some of these personal attitudes in the future?  Of course.  We can even hold people like Feynman up as people not to be emulated terms of personal life.  We all have personal lives and professional lives, and we often want to keep them separate (though it is becoming more difficult these days).  When discussing Feynman (or Einstein, or Hawking, or any other number of jerks who happen to be doing good science), focus on the science only.  When doing outreach and mentioning these individuals, focus only on their scientific work.  Then perhaps their legacies will be limited to scientific exploits, not personal ones.  If you need to mention personal exploits, discuss within the context why they are not to be emulated.  (Discussions along these lines also help in getting across concepts of privilege, which needs help to be acknowledged by many people.)  

SciFi

I’ve been reading some old science fiction recently, and it got me thinking about how the world is now versus how people in the 1950s-1970s thought it would be, and why many predictions have not met expectations.  It has also made me realize how far our knowledge of biology and physics has come (or not come, as the case may be).

Back when much of the “classic” science fiction (Asimov, Bradbury, Dick . . .) was written, we were in the Cold War, with nuclear attacks imminent.  We were also making huge strides in understanding fundamental physics, with new particles and elements created regularly.  It was the beginning of the study of biology at the molecular level, with the structure and function of DNA recently having been deduced.  Since then, little truly new knowledge in fundamental physics has been gained – the standard model, developed in the 1960s-70s has held firm, grand unification has not happened, and the main discovery has been that the universe is not only expanding but is actually accelerating in expansion.

According to the literature of the time, by now we should have colonized Mars and possibly extrasolar planets, thanks to improvements in rocket technology and abilities to overcome special relativistic limitations.  Such new physics has not emerged yet, so of course no new technology has emerged either.  This may also help explain why no alien species has yet visited us.  If new physics exists, it must be at higher energies (unattainable yet with our most powerful colliders), and any civilization would spend exorbitant amounts of energy in that discovery – and requiring even more energy to power any technology utilizing the new physics.  This, plus the great distances to travel, plus not knowing where you would want to go, makes alien encounters near impossible.

The other theme that appears in many works is that of robotics.  We should have walking, talking, nearly indistinguishable from humans robots either to serve us, decrease loneliness, or to uprise and try to kill us.  While raw computational power has increased (possibly more so than predicted), artificial intelligence has not.  We just recently had a chatbot “pass” the Turing test (though in many opinions, looking at some chat transcripts, the judges must be fools), but most judges were clearly not fooled.  Siri and the Jeopardy-playing Watson can understand key words but have not mastered true conversational speech.  We do not yet have self-driving cars, due to the difficulty of machine learning – the auto driver must learn certain things and discard others and deciding which information to discard is difficult.  The human brain does it automatically – and this just shows how far we are from knowing how the human brain processes and retains information.  The old science fiction writers thought we would have figured that out by now, and would have mood-altering and memory erasing/implanting technologies available.  Once we know how the human brain works, designing artificial ones would be simple – and we are slowly moving in that direction.  However, the artificial brains in science fiction always have imperfections, either intentional or not, so that one can distinguish real humans from the artificial ones, even if the artificial ones are biological in nature.  Much (though not all) old science fiction still retained the notion that humans are special in some way – they can have empathy, or feel love, or otherwise have emotions beyond simple biochemical processes in a way that artificial life can not, though there is very little scientific basis for that construct.

This brings us to the treatment of “life” in the past.  When I was in school, “life” was defined as something that uses energy, grows, reproduces.  Now, the definition of “life” is controversial, e.g. are self-replicating molecules “alive?”  Alien life in most old science fiction was also. Compatible with terrestrial life.  We shared the same biochemistry, could contract the same diseases, could even reproduce together in some stories.  Modern information shows that this is unlikely to be true.  Even if alien life is carbon based, there is almost no way that we would share the same biochemical processes, such a use of ATP as an energy currency, the same genetic code, the same amino acids, or even the same chirality of biomolecules.  All this would make an alien encounter useless – neither set of species could use the other set for food, reproduction, or anything besides raw chemical fuel – completely unlike what is portrayed in any alien encounter science fiction of which I am aware.  Part of the explanation may be that these realizations are recent – the next generation of writers may include such caveats.  It may also be that stories where aliens arrive, and just die from oxygen exposure, are not interesting.  But we do know better now, and criticisms should reflect that fact.

There may or may not be a place for 1960s-style, interplanetary, alien encounter science fiction these days.  I do not know. Certainly they can make for interesting fiction, and can delve into philosophical questions about what make us “human.”  Stories about robots might be more realistic but will need to be set farther in the future than anyone 50 years ago could predict.  Again, these stories can make for good, interesting fiction that can address some philosophical questions about life.  Continued reading and writing of fiction, combined with facts of modern science, will continue to improve our minds and provide interesting insights.