The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow’s crack about Richard Dawkins:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”
I don’t quite understand the problem, here. I mean, he’s right– stamp collectors, the lot of ’em…
Consider this a sort of poor man’s Casual Friday psych experiment– I’m curious as to whether the death of sarcasm can be quantified by the number of people who post angry comments without reading the extended entry.
Of course this is an asinine thing to say. I have very little use for Dawkins, so I’m not terribly upset to see someone take cheap shots at him, but going on to say that biology as a whole is stuck in the 1800’s is just… well, the arrogance would make Lord Rutherford himself hesitate.
I don’t really have a larger point to make, here. I just couldn’t resist a poke at the biologists. It’s been a very long week.
Heh. Indeed, if you take the first-year course in Biology, and the first-year course in Physics, at many colleges, you will get the opposite impression. Intro biology courses include all kinds of stuff about DNA and genetics and molecular biology and such — 20th century discoveries. Whereas most intro physics courses often jsut do mechanics (17th century physics) and E&M (19th century physics).
(This is less and less true nowadays; increasingly, intro physics courses for non-majors do include some “modern” physics.)
-Rob
Some parts of biology are still stuck in the 18th century. Of course I’m mainly just thinking of botanists and their requirement that new species descriptions be done in Latin.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. When I did my undergraduate degree in biology, I was required to take courses in math, physics, chemistry, and biochemistry, in addition to the courses in my area of concentration. The chemists had to take courses in math, physics, and chemistry. The physicists had to take courses in math and physics. And the math majors only had to study math. This can be further extended to disciplines within the life sciences (biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, physiology, ecology).
Maybe we should require all science majors to take courses in biology and chemistry.
Ha! Physicists. Just philosophers with restrictions, really…
PZ at Pharyngula certainly read the extended entry – I think he is pissed off since Barrow is trying to push religion into science with finetuning arguments: “Don’t be cowed because religious images are often naive or simple. They are merely a shadow of something far more sophisticated. And, as in science, as more knowledge accumulates, old ideas often turn out to be part of the deeper truth that eventually emerges.”
i wasn’t upset. i happen to think that on average physicists are smarter, just because the less attractive girl is now the prom queen doesn’t mean that we should knock the fading stunner 🙂
rpm, have you heard the old joke?
biologists defer to chemists
chemists defer to physicists
physicists defer to mathematicians
and mathematicians defer to god
but as i noted in my post, barrow’s jibe might have been somewhat derived from the reality that the average physicist is by definition of being a physicist a superbright, that doesn’t imply that in the barrow vs. dawkins debate physicists would lean toward barrow (i pointed out that surveys of scientists show little difference between physicists and biologists re: the god hypothesis, it is the mathematicians who tend to be the believers).
Being a lowly biologist myself, I will just note that there is a long tradition of physicists making important contributions in biology (Schroedinger, Pauling), but I can’t think of any reverse cases — that is, biologists who made important discoveries in physics. (That doesn’t, of course, mean that there aren’t any, and I’d love to hear about some.)
As a physicist who now works in an interdisciplinary field and interacts daily with biologists, I have met many very bright physicists and many equally bright biologists. I have also met very bright physicists who have made some very dumb and ignorant
remarks. If one regards the development of falsifiable hypotheses to be a characteristic of science, then John was obviously being self-referential in his quip to Dawkins; though
John has on occasion done some proper science (for example, his work on anisotropies
in the microwave background)
Disclaimer: I am a former graduate student of John.
1) pauling was a chemist 🙂
2) you left out francis crick, physicist -> biologist
3) in evolutionary biology r.a. fisher took his degree in math but worked for a little while in statistical mechanics (which probably influenced his later work in population genetics)
As a physicist who now works in an interdisciplinary field and interacts daily with biologists, I have met many very bright physicists and many equally bright biologists. I have also met very bright physicists who have made some very dumb and ignorant
remarks. If one regards the development of falsifiable hypotheses to be a characteristic of science, then John was obviously being self-referential in his quip to Dawkins; though
John has on occasion done some proper science (for example, his work on anisotropies
in the microwave background)
Disclaimer: I am a former graduate student of John.
Razib: Pauling was a physical chemist, that’s close enough for a dumb biologist like me! (Thanks for spotting that, and for the Crick and Fisher examples.)
“I can’t think of any reverse cases — that is, biologists who made important discoveries in physics”
Fisher and Popper has worked with biology, and perhaps generated general results. I believe there are math/CS results, obviously genetic algorithms and perhaps population dynamics.
Bill Hooker: …there is a long tradition of physicists making important contributions in biology (Schroedinger, Pauling), but I can’t think of any reverse cases — that is, biologists who made important discoveries in physics. (That doesn’t, of course, mean that there aren’t any, and I’d love to hear about some.)
Robert Brown/Brownian motion.
The explanation had to wait for Einstein, but Brown certainly made the discovery, in some pretty basic physics.
I can think of few things that constitute a greater waste of time than for scientists in different disciplines to engage in pissing contests.
Tano says: I can think of few things that constitute a greater waste of time than for scientists in different disciplines to engage in pissing contests.
Spotted Quoll says: Hear, hear. There are much more important issues to deal with. Like doing the basic science.
If you can only think of a few things that are a bigger waste of time than scientists poking fun at one another, you’re just not trying hard enough…
(Again, this is not really a serious post, nor is the comment thread serious.)
I hate the misconception that scientists in one field are necessarily smarter than those in an another; scientific intuition, deep-seated interest, many years of study and research are common to ALL scientific fields. I find that becoming a physicist vs. becoming a biologist vs. becoming a chemist etc. depends upon individual interest and nothing else. I’m majoring in biophysics, and as such take classes in many fields, but I always lean towards bio simply because I love it. A friend of mine is a pure physics major, and he is terribly smart-we have great conversations about all kinds of scientific topics. The professor in charge of the biology lab I work at is a genius with incredible scientific abilities. (He built a special microscope in house using very complex optics, and at the same time has made some very impressive discoveries in what is esentially the chemistry of biology).