I welcome liberal arts graduates’ forays into science, I do. I thought it brave and provactive of John Carey, erstwhile Merton Professor of Modern English at Oxford, to declare that the most imaginative and interesting writing in recent times was in the sciences, or produced by popularisers of science.
That said, when I read even a throwaway remark like this:
BBC News reports that the gene that allows most Westerners to consume cow milk effectively only appeared in the last few thousand years
Apparently it gave humans such an enormous advantage that it subsequently spread like wildfire through Western Europe.
Tom Coates, links for 2007-02-28
I shudder. It reminds of the time I was my University’s captain on the quiz show University Challenge, back when the question master was Bamber Gascoigne. I asked him in the green room (wine and free fags) why the programme didn’t have more science questions. “We don’t consider science to be part of general knowledge”, he drawled.
Since then, in the reincarnated version of University Challenge, Gascoigne’s replacement, fearsome political interviewer Jeremy Paxman stumbles bravely through the many science and maths questioned now included. A good thing too.
Science is beginning to win the day, and it pulls the Arts in its wake - and the so-called Social Sciences are reeling under the onslaught of sheer empiricism and sense, the confusion so memorably and amusingly exemplified by the great Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax.
There are setbacks. The speedy departure of Larry Summers from Havard after his defensible remarks about contributory factors to the predominance of men in senior faculty positions in Maths and Sciences was a deplorable but temporary burp from the self-ordained progressive, noisy and supposedly left-leaning bien-pensants.
The facts are the facts. Read Nick Cohen’s recent interview with Simon Baron-Cohen about autism and the ‘male brain’. The things Baron-Cohen is saying now simply could not have been said a few years ago. Witness the disgusting treatment meted out to E.O.Eilson when he wrote Sociobiology: The Modern Synthesis.
So back to the point. Things Arts graduate might bear in mind. The BBC is never in the vanguard of Science reporting and more often than not gets it wrong.
The emergence of the lactase persistence variant is a relatively recent evolutionary event, appearing in Northern Europeans only 10,000 to 12,000 years ago (approximately with the time that animals were domesticated).
Nutrigenomics, reporting on a study in PubMed dated February 2002
4 Comments
I’m confused. As I I’m confused. As I understand it, I linked to an article about an idea that wasn’t particularly new but was still mostly accurate? I found it interesting and evidently so did the BBC and many of their readers. What exactly did I do wrong this time?
You thought it new. You You thought it new. You didn’t do the most minimal research (ie Google). You attributed your discovery to the Beeb, your old employer.
I linked to an article that I linked to an article that I thought was interesting. I don’t research in enormous detail every thing that I link to, nor do I claim to. I didn’t even say it was new. I said that the BBC had reported something I found interesting. If I’ve made a substantial error in retrospect I go back and fix it and apologise. I’m comfortable with this as an approach and I’m going to continue using it. The BBC dig is—I think—unfounded. I’ve never worked for BBC News, and I have worked for emap, Time Out and Yahoo. I’ve also been in discussions in the past about working with Guardian. If I was never able to link to or reference anything any of these people did (or any of the other people or companies I know or have played with in the industry - Flickr, del.icio.us, Blogger, Twitter, Six Apart, TIOTI, Nokia etc. etc.) then I’d pretty quickly run out of things to talk about.
Ok, the expectation about Ok, the expectation about background research might be too much. Perhaps, then, it’s the ignorance in the first place that’s irritating. When mixed with hubris.