Scientific Storytelling: Why It Matters How We Write the World

30:37 Then Jacob took fresh sticks of poplar and almond and plane trees, and peeled white streaks in them, exposing the white of the sticks. 38 He set the sticks that he had peeled in front of the flocks in the troughs, that is, the watering places, where the flocks came to drink. And since they bred when they came to drink, 39 the flocks bred in front of the sticks and so the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and spotted. 

Today such an explanation rightly reads as fable, although it was only last year that Alan Turing’s 50-year-old work on repeating patterns in biological systems was definitively evidenced by research into morphogen expression. Such has been the incredible shift in our collective knowledge these past two hundred years especially: We are still learning so much, but the tools now at our disposal are capable of so much more complexity than the ones our ancestors had when looking with equal curiosity upon the world.

The trouble with these tools and their findings, however, is that they do not exist in isolation; they are forever mitigated by the people wielding them. It would not even suffice to say that for every hammer there is a carpenter, because let’s face it: Most anyone can pick up a hammer, and many unskilled persons do. I, for one, am not a scientist, but as a doctoral student of English literature with a focus on the literary forms of nineteenth-century scientific non-fiction, I feel fairly well positioned to observe the importance of narrative in conveying knowledge about the world. When we are careless with our figurative language; when we are not mindful of the style in which we are writing; when we employ rhetorical strategies with no regard for how they impact our arguments, we make a pre-existing gap between various levels of scientific literacy (i.e. between one scientist and her immediate community; between one scientific community and another; between scientific communities in general and non-scientists) that much harder to bridge.

One need only look, for instance, at the “March of Progress” metaphor that still pervades our culture as a go-to representation of evolution. Granted, depicting human evolution as a single, linear progression from primordial fish to modern homo sapiens has great potential for setting up cartoon punchlines, but it has not been an accurate depiction of species evolution for quite some time.

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Amusing? Maybe. Accurate? Nope!

Nor is the branch metaphor that came to replace it entirely accurate, either; contemporary research has rather come to terms with the fact that speciation is itself a figurative construct–useful in many regards, but limiting whenever employed to suggest concrete end-points to interbreeding between early hominid species. Networks, rhizomes, webs, rivers: the contemporary biology landscape is now rife with metaphors trying to succeed the lay-person’s familiarity with the “March of Progress” image of yore… but that’s the pesky thing about figurative language: Even inaccurate representations can prevail if they resonate with other popular culture notions (in this case, the misguided notion of inevitable human progress towards a superior state of being).

Another example emerges in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which might just have been the most abused and poorly understood scientific concept of the 20th century. Heisenberg noted that, when attempting to measure paired quantities like position and momentum for a given particle, the precision of one quantity will always be diminished the more precisely one measures the other. Research since indicates that the extent to which this precision is lost is nowhere near as dire as Heisenberg originally thought, and also that there are ways in which this imprecision might be overcome, but more critically, the concept has been blurred in the general public’s minds with wave-particle duality, wherein the act of observation (through photon inputs or related particle impacts) necessarily resolves the wave into a particle; before that, uncertainty is a fundamental attribute of the quantum system.

From these two concepts have emerged quite a few wacky notions that science now “proves” the power of any human observer to impact the reality of her system on a macro level–disregarding, of course, that these scientific observations are on a quantum level, and that we’ve come a long way since the early Greeks’ Emission Theory of Light. (Or have we? A 2002 study of American university students found that a full 50% believed our eyes actually create light.) The worst of these notions are tied to nonsense about being able to transform our environments with the power of thought alone, but even for less credulous persons, that one word–”uncertainty”–often suggests a limit to knowledge that stands in direct contrast with the science itself. We know more because of our heightened understanding of the fluidity of matter-wave quantum systems, not less.

Bad scientific storytelling is pervasive, though, and it’s difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise when the internet is such a big place, and so very many people are able to participate with some measure of authority therein. The most recent issue of Aeon Magazine, for instance, has an essay that exemplifies quite a bit of misguided thinking about evolutionary intersections with morality discourse–and the poor science writing for this one begins right in the deck (subheading). Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell are the authors of “Beyond the Paleo“, which is immediately captioned: “Our morality may be a product of natural selection, but that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone.”

Where is this “but” coming from? “But” suggests that a product of natural selection would naturally be intuited as something “set in stone” if not for these authors–but that, of course, is a complete misrepresentation of natural selection, which is always acting on us through environmental pressures. If an article is going to try to negotiate evolutionary discourse on morality, it should darn well not start by conflating colloquial use of the term “evolved” (namely, stable attainment of the highest, the most superior, and the most ideal position on any given issue) with the biological processes by which adaptive advantage is ever-determined by the surrounding conditions for any given generation.

The essay itself does not fare much better; the authors begin by presenting a form of conservative thinking that relies on the notion that people have “permanent cognitive, motivational and emotional deficits” that make “significant social reform … impossible”, and then go on to suggest that “evo-conservatives” have used evolutionary theory to “[provide] a scientific foundation for the idea that human nature is fixed in this way.” From here, the authors make a quick jump to the assertion that “[m]any evolutionists believe we can explain morality by appealing to Darwinian mechanisms, in particular to natural selection”, and in so doing tacitly align people exploring evolutionary explanations of morality unto themselves with the aforementioned construct of politically conservative thought.

There are many problems with this kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. It is immediately telling, for instance, that, three paragraphs in, no singular conservative thinker has actually been identified in relation to these first claims, which seem particularly extraordinary when one reflects on the actual arguments of prominent conservatives today: arguments that forward a “by your own bootstraps” mentality of individual transformation, which (to their reckoning) the government is only hindering when it offers welfare, food stamps, and related aid programs to persons in need. There are indeed conservatives who believe an individual’s life path is severely limited by the aforementioned measures, but when this form of conservative thought is by no means the most popularly-understood–when the more familiar conservative is actually rather Lamarckian in their belief in individual transformation–then it behoves honest authors to identify by name and example the kind of conservative thought they’re leaning on to make such critical comparisons.

Another immediate red flag emerges with the terms “evolutionists”, which invokes a group of persons disingenuously placed at a remove from scientific communities, as if scientific progress at large is not reliant upon expectations drawn from evolutionary theory. The fact that this term emerges so innocuously from the straw man conservatism of previous paragraphs is further problematized by its ensuing relationship with notions of “a Darwinian perspective … [of] biological fitness”–”fitness” being a bizarre term to use if one wants to encapsulate contemporary evolutionary discourse best. Where is the language of adaptivity that better describes the status of evolutionary theory in the modern world?

Granted, that language does emerge in another guise later in the article, with the authors forwarding a few examples of evolutionary hypotheses for co-operative and altruistic human behaviours, and even writing:

“Many different evolutionary models have been put forward to account for the evolution of co-operation in humans, including theories of reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, and punishment-reinforced reciprocity. But all of them maintain that morality evolved to enhance co-operation within a group. … But once we realise that morality is, from a functional standpoint, an inherently group-based affair, we can see that it has a much darker side. … Which means that morality most likely evolved in an arena of intergroup conflict, in which violence and vigorous economic competition between groups was commonplace. This conclusion is consistent with archaeological, ethnographic and ethological data, too. As the archeologist Lawrence Keeley, the psychologist Steven Pinker, the anthropologist Chris Boehm, the primatologist Richard Wrangham and others have observed, intergroup conflict is common in extant and prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands, and is well established in chimpanzees.”

But the inclusion of actual scientists lends itself to a greater question: So where’s the argument? Well, take a look at what rounds out the section:

Extending moral consideration to outsiders — especially those who are not in a position to reciprocate or who could be exploited without fear of reprisal — is maladaptive in a moral system that arose from competition between groups. In other words, a conventional evolutionary view is that morality involved as a way of bolstering in-groups and excluding others – that we are ‘hard-wired’ for tribal loyalties and conflicts.

Wait, what? It’s a subtle move, but the authors here have actually made a huge leap: Moving from a range of scientific arguments about how certain behaviours emerged from a specific set of circumstances experienced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors… to suggesting that these behaviours are now “hard-wired”–as if evolutionary pressures can have nothing more to say about human beings today. What scientist believes this?

The next section provides an answer by evasion: Scientists don’t, but hey! Here’s a bunch of actors in the political theory realm who are potentially employing scientific discourse in a way that suggests limits to “[m]ore inclusive moralities”. I’m not even sure if the examples these authors use fit the rigid conservative mould they established at the outset; rather, the authors offer no direct quotations, preferring just to sum up a political philosopher, a jurist, two international legal theorists, and a political scientist (among others) as all arguing “that these evolved constraints on altruism undercut, or militate strongly against, the plausibility of a cosmopolitan political order.” Is that really it? If we’re just dealing with a few political theorists acknowledging the existence of one set of evolutionary pressures, then there’s nothing this essay’s authors have said that supports the existence of a claim that such evolutionary pressures can never be overcome by others. The arguments thus forwarded only suggest that getting certain people to treat people outside their own communities as beings of equal worth is by no means an easy task. (And… I’m pretty sure human history bears that one out!)

Regardless of the relevance of these political theorists’ stances, though, their inclusion marks a much more frustrating shift from talking about what evolutionary theory actually suggests, to talking about how non-scientists are treating the theory, to then blaming the theory itself for its misapplication. To this end, the authors set up an extreme extension of the political theorists’ purported views, then introduce a “large swath of contemporary morality … [that is] strikingly more inclusive than evolutionary theory would lead us to expect, suggesting that human moral nature is far more flexible than evo-conservatives have acknowledged.” When exactly did evolutionary theory “mislead” us? In the course of their argument specifically, when did evolutionary theory itself suggest rigid and inviolate trait selection?

Much of the article to follow then looks at the ways in which “cosmopolitan moral principles” have been expanding since the Enlightenment–human rights and animal rights now challenging us to give justifications for aggressive or otherwise cruel behaviour, and to otherwise work “toward increasing inclusivity”. Here the authors themselves treat evolutionary mechanisms rigidly, writing:

The same is true of inclusive moral attitudes toward human beings who are outsiders: groups that extended moral community to individuals based on their humanity alone, rather than on the basis of their group membership or strategic capacities, would have foregone the fitness benefits that often flow from more aggressive behaviours, and would have constrained the tactics adopted in military conflicts.

But since when is “fitness” (again, an archaic term for the discourse) an automatic outcome of aggression and military conflict? There is a powerfully good reason the vast majority of species have ways of warning others off well before striking: there is a cost and a risk to combat, which human beings are fortunate enough to have the means to develop alternatives to. Also, even if these alternatives only burst onto the scene in the last few hundred years (a claim I don’t agree with; there are many philosophies far older that suggest a brotherhood of all mankind, while recent history is still rife with large-scale and wasteful conflicts) this would in no way suggest a disconnect from evolutionary theory: Again, we’re not working with Darwinian evolution here; to Darwin’s notion of gradual progression has long since been added clear instances of dramatic, exceedingly short-term transformations in the face of new environmental pressures. It is truly bizarre that these authors go to such pains to dispel the possible evolutionary origins of certain political discourses, without even accurately representing the current state of evolutionary knowledge in the process.

Their final paragraph begins as follows: “Nothing we have said rules out the possibility that a more sophisticated evolutionary explanation can illuminate the recent development of inclusivist morality – indeed there are evolutionary thinkers, such as David Sloan Wilson, who argue for a progressive political philosophy of inclusion on the basis of their scientific research.” And later adds: “But even so, no conservative implications will follow.” All throughout this essay, though, these “conservative implications” have only been described as rigid–never shown as such–and yet political theorists’ purported uses of evolutionary theory have routinely been blurred with the state of evolutionary theory itself.

The reasons for such writing are clear enough: Adversarial journalism sells. Having a scapegoat to position as wrong, even if one’s straw man has no clearly-defined real-world correlate, makes for an entertaining read. And positioning evolutionary theory in terms better suited for the 1860s than the 2010s? Well, when you have a largely lay-audience for whom notions of contemporary evolutionary theory are not always well-developed, why not just play off more familiar expectations?

Why not indeed–except that weak scientific storytelling perpetuates weak scientific literacy. We still have so very much left to discover, but there is already so much about the ongoing process of discovery that deserves to be highlighted whenever we relate stories about how much we already know. To this end, essays using rhetorical sleight-of-hand, outdated scientific terminology, and antiquated scientific concepts or straw men are by no means a rarity online–but they should be. We just desperately need better scientific storytellers to get the job done.