petri dish

wondering about wonder

As a new mother, one of the things I found odd about baby books and such was an overwhelming emphasis on farm animals. Now, I’ve got nothing against farm animals, but it did strike me as interesting that our youngest humans are fed a steady diet of rural domesticated animal life as their introduction to nature.

Having grown up near the ocean, I began tracking down picture books that featured the sea, and not only was it a relief to venture beyond e-i-e-i-o with my pre-schooler but it was interesting that the ocean books themselves seemed to have a different, savvier edge to them rather than evoking the placid warm fuzziness of the pastoral nursery. For example, Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse comes with a story at odds with the relentless emphasis on mommies that you find in baby world (abetted by all those baby farm animals and stories about their mommies), featuring those species of sea creatures where it is the male who takes care of the eggs – a baroque group that ranges from Mr. Stickleback to Mr. Kurtus to Mr. Pipe to Mr. Bullhead . . . strange creatures doing the unexpected, naturally. In Stella, Star of the Sea by Marie-Louise Gay, an endlessly inventive older sister answers the million questions her little brother (reluctant to wade into the big loud ocean) puts to her, not with scientific accuracy, but certainly with exuberance, explaining how starfish are stars who fell in love with the sea, for example. And that reminded me of something else about children’s books about nature and children's interest in the why and wherefore of how the world works: for me, at least, it wasn’t the "fact" books that caught my attention, but books that captured great and intriguing questions, evoking a sense of wonder, remaining with me even today.

I’m not completely out to lunch on this – well, or at least I’m in the good company of noted physicist and author Chet Raymo, who made a similar point in his essay "Dr. Seuss and Dr. Einstein: Children’s Books and Scientific Imagination." Raymo notes that "we live in an age of information. We are inundated by it. Too much information can swamp the boat of wonder, especially for a child. Which is why it is important that information be conveyed to children in a way that enhances the wonder of the world. . . If a child is led to believe that science is a bunch of facts, then science will not inform the child’s life, nor will science enhance the child’s cultural and imaginative landscape." In my own childhood my curiosity about how the world works was powered by fantastic books like The Phantom Tollbooth (with its explanations of infinity and the daily recurrence of the dawn that I can picture even still) and the time-traveling mystery of A Wrinkle in Time and a lavishly illustrated Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies (by Jane Werner and illustrated by Garth Williams). It still has a pull for other sixties kids as well – if you can find a used copy from the 1950s/60s, it will run you upwards of $100, depending on the condition. Luckily, there are 21st century reprints!)

A children’s picture book can weave a creative pattern that pulls you into the heart of nature in ways that leave an imprint on your psyche that few classroom science books will later on. One of my secret impulses, when someone asks me for a suggestion for a biography of Charles Darwin that might be a good introductory text for them, is to suggest they try Peter Sis’ brilliant picture book, The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin, aimed at grade-schoolers. I rarely give in to the impulse, however, presuming they’ll think I’m nuts, and instead suggest one of the impressive recent biographies that properly-credentialed historians of science have recently published. But if what they are really wanting to do is to brush back the shadows of time to try and capture the tangled bank within which Darwin lived, then in my heart of hearts, I think that Sis might be the better starting point
(and bewitch them, even as he did me, despite my being a professional science historian). Sis captures so much of the fascination of Darwin’s life and times in pages that open up like intricate Chinese boxes, full of one surprise after another, with a collage of words and pictures that draw on maps, diagrams, portraits, Darwin’s writings and a myriad of other details big and small contributing to an artistic analysis of the naturalist’s intellectual and social ecology, of his private and public habitats, that is hard to forget. 

In 1956, Rachel Carson wrote an essay for Woman’s Home Companion, entitled "Help Your Child to Wonder" (an expanded version of the essay can be easily found in several adult-focused editions that were published after her death). It begins not with a pastoral scene, but of a description of two humans, one older and experienced, one still new to walking and talking, facing the ocean on a tempestuous night, where, "out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us." You don't get much farther away from e-i-e-i-o than that.

I don't think it is necessarily true that somehow children are more attuned to wonder than adults, but I suspect that wonder is a powerful emotion that only manifests itself when the person doing the thinking and feeling is immersed in a world where space and time has an ample, expansive dimension to it. If that's true, then in a world of 24/7 in which multitasking is honed to a high art and where walking by oneself without being immersed in an electronic bell jar is becoming a thing of the past, wonder doesn’t stand a chance of putting in an appearance as a daily matter . . . unless maybe, sometimes, in the pages of a children's book, in the space and time that binds together the reader and the read-to.

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For more: Madeleine L'Engle's acceptance speech, "The Expanding Universe," for the Newbery Medal awarded in 1963 for A Wrinkle in Time; Eric Carle's bulletin board idea exchange for parents and teachers using his books; Charles Dickens's mordant take on the meeting of fact-based science and children's fancifulness, in Chapter 2 of Hard Times (1854); and historian Caroline Walker Bynum's presidential address -- entitled "Wonder" -- to the American Historical Association in 1996.

Images: Cover illustration of Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse (Philomel, 2004) and Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (Delacorte Press, 1991) -- illustration by Peter Sis and a page from The Tree of Life at nyla's pinboard.

Note: Links updated on 8.19.2018 / Published on 2.6.2006

child-sized depictions of charles darwin to grow on

The overwhelming number of recently-published children's picture books about Charles Darwin -- across a diversity of publishers and authors -- choose to feature his voyage aboard the Beagle, leading to a remarkable sameness in approach, in thematic choices, and in the texts themselves (particularly as they liberally feature Darwin's own words, from his journals and his published account of the voyage), even if as a species they offer a pleasing morphology of illustrative styles. As I wrote previously, when going through the books as I was putting together "home school" lessons on evolution for my 7- going-on-8-year-old daughter, the repetitive focus on "Darwin before evolution" that occurs by devoting the bulk of each book to the voyage seemed to me to leave discussions of the hard work of arriving at explanations for the transformation of life over time as a let-down, for that history was rarely able to compete with the descriptive and visual thrills provided by sailing the globe and collecting curiosities -- which disappointed me.

In general, however, the advertising copy and reviews insisted that this approach was exactly what would engage a child in Darwin's story: an emphasis on his youth, the globe-trotting, the familiar tug of nature stories that feature animals, and the exoticism of wild nature in all its startling forms. I was reminded of the venerable heritage of this framework with this post [thanks to the tip from the all-seeing-eye of evolution-on-the-internet, Michael Barton], from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, who had as a book of the week the late-nineteenth century volume, What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the Ship 'Beagle' -- a work more than 100 years previous which also claims that doing a mash-up of Darwin's book on the Beagle voyage (with a special focus on the animal tales and pictures) lent itself to a perfect child's-eye view of Darwin. (And, perhaps not surprisingly, when I talked in 2009 with Bernie Lightman [see here for recent articles] about his work on biographical treatments of Darwin when he was on campus for our Darwin Anniversary lectures, his view of such 19th-century works of juvenile literature were that they allowed for a conservative approach, focusing as they did on the voyage and the doing of natural history, rather than evolutionary themes. That this tack persists into the 21st century is fascinating.)

But the adventuresome seafaring young Darwin didn't seem to make much of an impact with my
particular child reader at home, who, I realized one day when I saw a new computer art picture appear on the computer desktop, had come up with an illustration of Darwin on her own that seemed to owe less to the conventional voyage thematic than it did to three different, more original takes that a handful of children's authors had created. The first of these, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle, takes Darwin on the by-now-too-familiar voyage, but gives it a sharper edge by working evolutionary theory right into the narrative, through the plot device of a talkative and knowledgeable beetle who has befriended Darwin (he names her Rosie) and who serves as his coach in seeking to make sense of the extravagantly diverse natural world he is immersed in. Rosie is not only an observer of Darwin's voyage, but a participant in it, literally sprinkling his research records with "footnotes," dipping her appendages in his ink bottle at night to add in details:

that Charles, as observant as he was, might have missed. Often, I would include a little clue to the mystery of mysteries for Charles to decipher, slipping clues on little scraps of paper between the pages of the diary.

The story that follows comes from these footnotes, and from conversations that Charles and I had as he sought the answer to the mystery of mysteries. In each of the chapters that follow, I have copied my clues for you to read. I suspect that you might be able to solve the mystery even before Charles does.

Although Weaver's book is imbued with some of the same conventions as the other voyage books (Nature "speaks" evolution to Darwin, becoming increasingly revelatory as he moves further along each waystation in his scientific pilgrimage), the clues to evolutionary theory that accompany the voyage offer a refreshing change, because both the child reader and Darwin are literally placed at the same level of asking questions and not knowing what the answers are. (An echo of this partnership is seen perhaps in the title my daughter gave to her drawing: it's not "Mr. Darwin discovers," but "discover with Mr. Darwin.")

Intriguing as well is that through the character of Rosie, Weaver inserts a female voice into a tried-and-true narrative that is almost relentless in its masculine vibe as presented in the children's books, especially when the 19th-century sailing ship focus commandeers the bulk of the text. What's interesting in Weaver's Rosie is that it is a female voice that has the scientific knowledge well in hand, and is the voice of authority -- although tactfully rendered as a guide on the side, rather than a sage on the stage, for both Darwin and the book's readers. In this imaginative provision of a fictional feminine presence for Darwin's voyage, Weaver re-creates this historical moment in an alternate key, one that perhaps keeps the celebratorily masculinist emphasis of the books for youngsters at bay in a manner that also allows for a depiction of cognitive uncertainty that is more human than the other triumphalist tales. In fact, to the extent that the reader identifies with Rosie and incorporates her knowledge, on second reading the former "audience" for the book likewise takes on the vicarious role of Darwin's tutor (as perhaps both the friendly bluebird and the artist who drew her is ready to do once Mr. Darwin has introduced himself in my daughter's picture).

Given that science is so often presented to children as an opportunity to "catch up" with what adults already know, it's a rare feat that a science book for children allows them to see a "real scientist" as being similarly at sea at such length regarding explanations about nature as they themselves often are. And in fact, Weaver's narrative ends with Darwin back in England and still unsure about how to solve the evolution puzzle (although readers are not left hanging, as Weaver sets out Rosie's clues once more, and provides Darwin's solution to end the book). It's a story that gets at the idea of scientific knowledge as real work, but real work on the order of being doable given curiosity, patience, thoughtfulness, care, and insight -- the antithesis of the idea that only a remote few have what it takes to make scientific contributions (the "Einstein" syndrome).

I was most amused to find that, despite the fact that the voyage figured extravagantly both in content and in the illustrations of the pile of children's Darwin books that I had brought home to study, the picture my daughter chose to draw owed nothing to the rainforest theme which would supposedly transfix childish imaginations, but instead depicted a much more sedate locale, fitting comfortably within the domestic backyard setting of a local neighborhood in the northern hemisphere. And here the influence I think of the second unusual Darwin book, The Humblebee Hunter by Deborah Hopkinson kicks in, for in this author's story the science literally does take place at home, as Darwin's daughter Henrietta and other family members join her father to investigate how many times a bee will visit a flower in a minute.

Once again, this story has fictional elements (while Darwin investigated creatures in his home environment, and the children sometimes assisted, we have no record of the observational study Hopkinson sketches), and the fictionalization allows for a girl "naturalist" to take center stage. (This is Hopkinson's second Darwin book -- the first is a conventional biography from 2005 with the voyage at the center, Who Was Charles Darwin?) The cover of the Humblee Hunter has Etty enlarged in the foreground eye to eye with a bee -- an image that resonates with the composition of my child's drawing -- with Darwin off in the distance, a smaller background figure. Her favorite stories, Hopkinson recounts:

were about Father roaming the world to collect fossils, shells, sea creatures and plants. I imagined myself beside him, touching the back of a giant tortoise, watching iguanas dive, or laughing at a blue-footed booby dance!

Darwin was still a collector, his daughter notes, although "most of all he collected questions." The illustrations (by Jen Corace) show Etty immersed in following her bee as it voyages from flower to flower, answering a question of scientific importance for which the answer is not yet known. It seems that the generation of scientific knowledge can occur in one's own backyard, with little more than a pocket watch and sharp eyes -- even if the eyes are those of a child. 

In thinking about the ways in which my daughter's drawing seemed to be inspired by a particular set of authorial choices -- here, Weaver's and Hopkinson's -- I realized that casting an analytical eye on each story was about more than figuring out what happens to the historical Darwin or to the theory of evolution when it is scaled down for children's consumption. Especially in the ways in which fictionalized elements in these books transformed the stories so that they provided imaginative springboards for children to see themselves as participants in science for real, and not simply as "practicing" science, they were about something even more important than the scientific content itself: they were about what the scientific content represented in relation to the readers themselves. Somewhere around the ages of 7-10 American children begin to identify themselves as being "a science person" or "not a science person," when each one of them should be coming into their own through opportunities to experience themselves as competent interpreters of nature. The point of being exposed to investigating the natural world is not simply to start future scientists on their path, or to enlighten those who will not become scientists as to "what the scientific method is": it should be to nurture the multiplicity of ways in which each of us can feel at home as lifelong students of nature, most of all in "collecting questions."

Just last year, the competency of child students of nature became a news story, when a scientific paper on the "Blackawton Bees Project" was peer-reviewed and published in a major scientific journal -- the project being an experiment created by twenty-five grade-schoolers in Britain, in which they studied how spatial and color relationships influence foraging behavior in bees. The project and its publication garnered a great deal of commentary -- see, for example, the accounts by Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science and Alom Shaha in the Guardian, along with the comments for each post-- about the state of school science, the atypical advantages of having a scientist-parent of one of the students to guide the project, whether the bar was lowered for the students to publish (there were no references to other work) and more. 

Our images of both childhood and of science come heavily-freighted, and we need to understand better what happens when we bring these two culturally-laden categories into contact with each other, whether as abstract idealizations, commercial products, educational efforts, or social reflection. Historians of science typically have spent little time thinking about science and childhood, given the seemingly sensible conclusion that science is adult business, not least in its post-graduate guise in the modern era. But I can't help thinking that we may learn more than we can currently imagine about science and culture by collecting questions about the intersection of scientific dynamics and childhood realities, and how we make and remake our world through both.

a child's-eye view of charles darwin

Last year was the 150th anniversary celebration of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (and the 200th anniversary of his birth), with lots of hoopla in the form of academic conferences, museum exhibits, magazine essays, and the like. A little-noticed side phenomenon in academia was a surge in the publication of children's books on Darwin, especially picture books for kids in the 6-12 age range. As an historian of science with a special interest in science and popular culture, including children's literature (and who had recently taught a class on science and biography in which I made sure to include children's science biographies) I was curious about what I'd find by taking a look through some of these recent books, especially as "Darwin" and "controversy" is such an unyielding theme in American popular culture.

But I was interested for a more personal reason as well: in 2008 I'd begun to pull together a "home school" program on evolution for my daughter (who was seven going on eight), because she wasn't satisfied that she understood how life changed over time just by knowing that there were different kinds of pre-historic fossils and that dinosaurs had disappeared at some point -- she wanted to know more about how it  actually worked. (We spend a lot of time in our house on "how things work," mostly when we come across various contemporary artifacts that have been taken apart in order for a certain someone to get a good "grasp" of the innards. It reminds me of what a young James Clerk Maxwell was supposed to have gone around demanding of elders who trafficked in vague and unsatisfactory explanations -- "yes, but what's the particular go of it?") The adventure of putting together what she calls "mommy science" goes into a future blog post, but in this one and the next I want to take up the question of the Darwin picture books as contributions to kids' informal science education.

The most striking dimension of the books is how so many of them are focused on Darwin's voyage as the core for the text and pictures. In some ways this must have been an overdetermined choice: a worldwide voyage has built-in appeal in terms of drama and plenty of room for the "exotic" to be on display as an attention-grabber; Darwin himself left behind an account of the voyage that has been popular since the 19th century, along with notebooks that allow the children's stories therefore to have the literal voice of the scientist inscribed within them for authenticity; and Darwin's role as naturalist on the voyage allows for a presentation that draws on familiar genres such as the nature documentary, animal tales, and picturing the globe as a patchwork of ecological habitats (not to mention resonances to more commercially-oriented fare such as Pirates of the Caribbean and the Rainforest Cafe). As an entry into the marketplace, using the voyage as the focal point for books on Darwin hits the educational/entertainment marketing sweet spot.

What I most appreciated about the voyage books in general were the opportunities for beautiful, sometimes inspired illustrations  -- the merging of science and art makes for a wonderful partnership in presenting both, and allows for each to become something more complex and enticing than each alone. Because I wish there was more attention to the visual imagination in introducing children to science, this aspect of the Darwin cache was a delight. Even a book that had a more cartoon-like/graphic novel tone that didn't generally appeal to me visually still had some striking images that did, such as a vividly blue iguana dominating the title page or an almost psychedelic drawing of "The Tree of Life" in all its wildly branching forms (What Darwin Saw: The Journey that Changed the World, by Rosalyn Schanzer as author and illustrator -- the link to the book includes both images on the website, just scroll down). In general, the books' illustrations tend to the slapstick-y more often than not (with varying levels of pulling it off), but the variety of visual approaches is a treat, from the "ye old wood-engraving" style of Alice McGinty's Darwin (illustrated by Mary Azarian in jewel-like hues) to the mid-tone pastels of the impressionistic What Mr. Darwin Saw (text and pix by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom) to the mixed-media collages that pop off the page of One Beetle Too Many by Kathryn Lasky, with illustrations by Matthew Trueman. In fact, in my science and biography class, we had a lively discussion of what might happen if the visual freedoms of children's picture book biographies infiltrated the adult book market (for some sense of the possibilities, the stunning and thought-provoking examples of biographies as art in the graphic mode of  G.T Labs' "true science comics" are stand-outs, such as  Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries and the Century He Shaped, and my favorite of the bunch, Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. And, yes, I've assigned both of these at one time or another as texts in my history of science survey courses.)

But the examples mentioned above don't exhaust the number of entries in the "voyage that changed the world" category. Others were even more elaborate, kitted up as "travel albums," really going to town with the 19th-century naval adventure "life at sea" theme, such as Charles Darwin and the Beagle Adventure by 
A.J. Wood and Clint Twist (with hefty boards and little pockets and envelopes inside with pull-out memoranda, photographs, and such) and Lifelines: Charles Darwin by Alan Gibbons and illustrated by Leo Brown, which uses the conceit of a ship's cabin boy observing the scientist and diarying his observations (the cover features a brilliant blue butterfly "specimen" under a half-globe of plastic surrounded by a compass rose to inaugurate the field collecting vibe.)  And there are still others as well -- and after working my way through maybe one voyage too many, I began to have my doubts about the approach. The multi-layered cleverness of using the voyage as the focus began to seem to have another contributory current as well: with "the voyage" as the overarching frame, the potentially discomfiting aspects of the historical narrative regarding evolution are displaced by the focus on  Darwin before he was an evolutionist -- with the evolutionary "aftermath" rendered literally as a textual aftermath.

Focusing on the voyage seemed to diminish an introduction to evolution in two key ways. First off, the evolutionary ideas that result from the voyage get nowhere near the same interesting treatment in the books as does the voyage itself, being relegated to the final pages (if covered much at all), and thus one curiously gets books on this score that allow you a kind of "safe" look at Darwin, because it is the joy of collecting oddities of nature and experiencing globe-trotting adventures (silly sailor pranks crossing the equator! earthquakes! volcanoes! huge fossil deposits! gauchos on the Pampas!) that are front and center, rather than the evolutionary theories that Darwin and others will develop. And here, the emphasis on the sesquicentennial of the Origin itself encourages a truncated view, as Darwin says next to nothing about human evolution in the Origin, and it is in his later works -- which appear amidst a community of inquiry on evolution -- that you see him take on more controversial ramifications of "Darwinism" (which, of course, in and of itself, does not exhaust approaches to evolution in his own time period). The voyage theme elicits a child-safe book that enfolds evolution into a comforting Victorian patina of wonder at wild nature, with the difficult bits shoe-horned in later.

Secondly, by emphasizing the voyage as an empirical scrapbook setpieces /powerpoint slide presentation as instantiating how Darwin became the "discoverer" of evolution, a somewhat reductionist argument is embedded in the text, but especially in the pictures: that Nature displayed itself to Darwin, he saw and recorded, and evolutionary theory was revealed. (This is especially underwritten by how the visit to the Galapagos becomes the culmination of Darwin's intellectual journey, a kind of quest in which he has been tested and in the process increasingly honed his mind and body into a receptive vessel in which to receive the truth that the hand of Nature -- as we "know" with hindsight -- lays out before him on his pilgrim's progress.)  Thus, evolutionary theory was there "in Nature" all the time, simply hidden from view by the tangled vines of the south American interior, and by the blindness of the scientific community prior to Darwin's voyage, and by the obscurantist haze cast by "Christians" ( . . . and how religion and science is understood in the books tends only to exacerbate misconceptions about their relationship in this time period).

It is true that the books usually note that many years of study and hard work followed Darwin's voyage, and they may even present little capsules about some of the other scientists from the time -- although Alfred Wallace, whose own voyage of discovery as the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection could make up an interesting parallel in the books, usually only appears as a deus ex machina to get the Origin published, which is especially frustrating since "voyage" is the governing concept for the books and hence to bring in Wallace would seem to offer an intriguing point of comparison. But if you take the books on their own terms in regard to what the bulk of the pages feature and how they build to a crescendo -- and in what gets most intently presented in textual and visual form -- it is the voyage itself that matters most of all, not the later years. It is on his voyage that Darwin encountered nature's truth in its raw, self-evident essence, where the evolutionary facts are in plain view. They may need further consideration, but in the end, the scientific word is written on the rocks.

This isn't a perspective on the history of science with which I'm particularly comfortable, as it draws a veil over the hard work of how scientific knowledge emerges, is debated, and then rendered authoritative in a dynamic interplay along many dimensions. And it does, again, tend to make for a "safe" presentation of Darwin and science, rehabilitating him, perhaps, from invidious perspectives that have convinced many that the word "Darwin" is synonymous with hidden agendas that aim to hijack scientific thought for the purpose of destroying faith in God on dishonest pretenses. A depiction of a robust and engagingly curious young Charles who is almost a blank slate, aside from his fondness for beetles -- indeed, who is an orthodox believer at the start of the voyage -- as an alert conduit for Nature's empirical truth is hard to square with a vision of a sinister and conniving Darwin out to dupe the devout as the devil's chaplain. There's an undertone of scientific apotheosis that I'm not eager to pass along with lessons on evolution if that's what comes along with a child's-eye view of Charles Darwin.

My own reservations aside, I let my daughter rummage through the books and what she seemed to notice most was just the sheer bulk and repetitiveness of representations of Darwin and the voyage, Darwin being a relatively new name for her and his voyage as well: clearly here was something that mattered to adults, if it was repeated over and over for kids! One day, however, I came across an unfinished  image she created in her computer art program, titled "discover with Mr.Darwin." Interestingly, it was not the young Darwin, and it didn't come with a portrayal of ships and adventure, or the wild and exotic. Instead, a disembodied Darwin, his long white bearded face aloft in the sky just under a smiling sun (although with the beard blending into the grassy expanse below), is introducing himself by name to a rather large bluebird in a tree, eye-to-eye, in a perfectly ordinary neighborhood setting.

It seems as if it was another Darwin that she took to heart and made her own, from an alternate set of children's Darwin picture books than those above. These were books that took a different tack, one significant aspect being that they threw off the overwhelming "a boys' Darwin" tone that tended to be embedded within these voyage books, with their affection for nautical hi-jinks and male bonding and the idea of Charles as a salty adventurer. They brought, if you will, a differently gendered Darwin into view, one which was made possible by taking liberties with the historical conventions so dutifully enacted in most of the picture books. And they -- Peter Sis' The Tree of Life, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle, and Deborah Hopkinson's The Humblebee Hunter -- deserve a blog post of their own.
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For more: For a short description of an undergrad book exhibit we put together at OU in the History of Science Collections, see The Children's Darwin. For reviews and notes on children's books about Darwin (especially around the recent anniversary-related publishing surge), see: School Library Journal Reviews; Bookslut; Children's Literature; the Dispersal of Darwin blog (the link matches up with a search for "children's books" on the site, so be sure to scroll all the way down to see everything), and the pdf list compiled at Charlie's Playhouse.

student anthropologists: through the looking-glass

I always look forward to the final project papers for my Science and Popular class -- watching the students take the wheel and report on their topics always turns up different angles and additional dimensions of the class for me. The projects take in a wide swath of territory, including (as just a few examples) high-spirited analyses of mathematics in Hollywood movies (Stand and Deliver, Good Will Hunting, Mean Girls, Proof and more), to nuanced explications of science fiction stories new to me (this time, of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Newton's Sleep") and to explanations of the popular culture moebius (s)trip that is Futurama -- an animated series that depends on its audience's sophisticated grasp of pop science even as it contributes in its own ways to science and popular culture.

I found a subset of papers that were especially intriguing, though, for their format: future professional scientists (in primatology, paleontology, and neuroscience) reflecting on their observations/interactions with members of the public in settings related to their professional scientific interests (a zoo, a natural history museum, and a science center).

The future primatologist set out to observe visitors at the Oklahoma City Zoo, and found himself reflecting on the differences between his own responses to the zoo as a child and as an adult, and then noting when the responses of the visiting children and adults diverged in certain situations. Outside the snake house, one of the snake handlers brought out a boa constrictor, and within three minutes 25 kids had touched the snake, but only 5 adults. This wasn't due simply to kids being more "hands on" than their elders: when he visited the aquatics area, an equal number of adults and kids had physical contact with the seals. Later, over at the gorilla display, "the [Gorilla] babies brought up an interesting topic that caught my eye. . . the adults were more fascinated with the baby Gorillas than the children were. The reason this caught my attention was due to the fact that most of the time children are more fascinated with babies, not adults." He wasn't sure what to make of all of this, but I bet he'll think about it from time to time. I like students leaving the class with answers; I like it even better when they leave with questions (especially self-generated ones!) as well. It gives me hope that a little piece of the class will travel along with them once we've all said good-bye.

Now, his visit to the zoo's "Great EscAPE" was more than just one stop on his itinerary -- as he finally revealed at the end of the paper: "I want to tell you why the Gorilla exhibit is my favorite part of the zoo. This is the whole reason why I am attending college and studying to become a Zoologist. I want to become a Primatologist and study Gorillas." It was here that he found himself out of sympathy with the zoo's visitors, much to his surprise, for it seemed like the public had trouble knowing the proper term for the Gorillas. He decided to sit at the entrance and record what happened: "I observed twenty-five people total, and out of the twenty-five only five people (three kids and two adults) called them Gorillas," instead speaking of them as "monkeys." A small point, you might think, but he was stunned, as he reported back: "Those numbers were a shock to me." This kind of loose talk grated on his burgeoning professional sensibilities; a few years earlier and a few years closer to the public side of the public/professional divide, and he might not have been bothered by it, let alone have noticed it.

The future paleontologist set off to interview visitors to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and he had his own unsettling moment, in some of the responses to his request for them to "Describe what you think of when you hear the word paleontologist" . . .  for when "some people answer that they do not even know what a paleontologist does it is a shock to me." Taking a more activist approach than the silently observing primatologist, he reported that "You can believe that I took that opportunity to educate them on the basics of what a paleontologist does." The ones who answered "Sam Neill" or "the guy in Jurassic Park" got to slide by :-)

Some of his respondents were fanciful, as with "one kid [who] said that he saw a T. Rex eating a paleontologist because the T. Rex did not want to be found," or "the little old lady" who was visiting the museum because "her grandkids call her an old fossil so she figured she'd come in and see the family." Speaking of dinosaurs and how they viewed them when they were children, one adult woman "said that she was always fascinated by them and actually wanted to study them, but got a little boy crazy and that quickly changed. Another woman said that due to religious beliefs she was not allowed to like dinosaurs." Interesting little bits at the intersection of science and popular culture that you don't know about if you don't ask! In his discussion of his interviews, the future paleontologist frequently switched back and forth from describing his interviewees' ideas to recalling his own early encounters with paleontology (it was seeing Jurassic Park when he was 11 years old that inspired his interest in his future profession). It was interesting to see him grapple with the idea of whether he could still be both a member of the public and a non-member of the public at the same time.

The future neuroscientist was staffing an exhibition table at the Oklahoma City Omniplex Science Museum as part of "Brain Awareness Week" (organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and locally coordinated by the Oklahoma Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience, "to advance public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research"). His table featured the "human brain station," which presented:

three human brains that have been donated for scientific use: a whole human brain complete with the outer meninges, a brain with a cutaway exposing internal anatomy, and finally a brain from which the brainstem and cerebellum have been removed from the cortex. . . [I discovered that] the brain as an icon for science elicits a wide range of responses. My favorite of all of these, however, happened when two couples approached the table. As the women recoiled, the men went through the 'who is more macho' routine, looking and sounding just like the younger boys who try to persuade their buddies with 'double-dog dares'.

He noted that this was a repeated theme:

when asked 'Do you want to touch a real human brain!?' . . . Most children respond[ed] with a resounding 'Wow!' or 'Cool!' and fight over the box of gloves in an attempt to get the first finger on the wrinkly pink mass. Other children simply disappear behind their parents' legs, silently answering me in the negative. More often than not, these children are girls.

Our exhibits are gender neutral; we don't tie pink bows around some brains or strategically place male or female volunteers. Our explanations do not vary from child to child. However, it seems that the idea of science being a male pursuit still seems to influence scientific interest. Sometimes, the parents seem to foster these values. 'You don't want to touch a yucky brain do you?' says one mother to her daughter. Conversely, boys who are afraid to touch the brain may be admonished by their fathers,'What's a matter? Don't be a sissy. Go touch the brain.' And this is where boys and girls begin to learn about how they should -- or should not -- interact with science.

In a fascinating turn of events, even as he was an observer of how attitudes were being formed about what is and is not appropriate in approaching science, he found himself in the uncomfortable position (uncomfortable because of his heightened awareness of himself as both an observer and as a participant) of administering lessons as an expert on the proper relationships between scientists and the lay public. Two incidents in particular caught him off guard:

After they began to touch the brain, one of the men asked me a question. I had practiced my demonstration several times, and as a future neuroscientist, I felt confident that I could field any question the 'uninformed' public could throw at me. This man, though, threw me a curve ball. 'So, uh, d'you believe in that whole evolution thing?' the man asked. I froze. Of all the questions I had been asked about where the brain came from or which part of the brain controlled what, I was completely taken aback by the seeming randomness of the question. I knew how I answered could have an effect on how these people perceived science. What's more, I felt torn between the desire to defend biology's most powerful theory and sidestepping the social landmine that this man had planted. His question and my reaction are indicative of the larger cultural battle between evolutionary theory and recent fundamentalist Creationism alternatives. That the image of the brain can serve as the catalyst for the dialogue, however, still continues to amaze me.

The second incident related to his observation that personal values often surface when "parents may redirect any of my mini-lectures over an exhibit." Who knew it would happen at the pig-eye dissection table? There:

an older man interrupted my explanation of the inner anatomy of the eye to offer, 'You know, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul.' I again got a little defensive, hoping that I could somehow steer the conversation back into the realm of the scientific, replying 'Well, uh, yes. If you look here at the back of the eye, you'll notice the optic nerve, which transmits all the information from your eyes and sends it to the brain to be sorted out.'

"Granted," our brain expert remarked, his response "was not as poetic as the old man's account, but I felt like the romantic aphorism needed to get" -- in his memorable phrase -- "a swat of science." In the end, he suggested, "the man and I played the roles of dry empiricist and artistic poet battling it out for the right to explain nature."

I'm always quite grateful that the students are willing to take a leap of faith with me that studying this science and popular culture thing will prove to be worth their time and effort, given that we're exploring an area that still exists off the map in any kind of meaningful way for most historians of science. To see students willing to begin reflecting on their own scientific images and go through the looking-glass -- well, it was a real privilege to share some of their glimpses. And who knows where next semester's students will go? I can't wait to find out.

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Image: A John Tenniel illustration from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

erector sets, anyone?

Last week’s issue of Newsweek featured one of those curious meldings of social commentary/biological determinism that are a staple of popular discussion on gender issues: "The Trouble with Boys." If last year brought us the great women and math debate (thanks to Harvard University President Lawrence Summers’ maladroit comments) this year it is how schools treat boys as "defective girls" – apparently the source of such woes as the fact that "boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests" and that "the number of boys who said they didn’t like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001" and that "thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they’re a minority of 44 percent." School is seen as a too-feminine environment, and is thus a source of torment for boys.

I always tell myself to ignore these cover stories because they are always so badly edited and sourced but like a motorist driving by a highway wreck I never seem to be able to pull my eyes away from the scene of the disaster. (In addition to factoids it would be great to have more information: What about tests other than writing? Did the numbers of girls who didn’t like school rise also, or did it stay the same or lessen? Has the age of marriage risen, leading more girls to go to college than in the past? What’s the economy been like over the past thirty years, and has that had an effect on boys’ decisions on college? I’m not saying that these are the only relevant questions or that they somehow negate the upfront claims – but would it kill the authors to provide fuller information, at least in the online version? It’s hard to make sense of the arguments otherwise).

I’m sure that this topic will resonate with lots of parents of boys who have frustrating experiences with their local schools, and I have no doubt that there are lots of valid issues in regard to why boys’ performance levels seem to be dropping. It’s just that there is so much "missing" information in between the confident assertions and the illustrative anecdotes that it is hard to get a firm grasp on what the relevant arguments are other than the claim that something is amiss and gender [and in this case, gender backed up by feminist social engineering gone horribly wrong, it seems] is to blame for it.

These gender wars stories always bring the authoritative voice of science into the mix in ways that I find passing strange. In this one boys are described as being somewhat like home science experiments -- being the physical conduits of an impressively powerful "male brain chemistry" -- which they acquired in a kind of "brain in a vat" science fiction image-y way when, beginning in the first trimesters of their lives as boy fetuses their brains were "bathe[d] in testosterone" . . . these chemical fermentations in the end result in a "hard-wired" boy brain, giving the science experiment a 21^st century computer cast to it. (In addition to the chemistry and computer references, there are the obligatory evolutionary biology ones as well, looking back to our primitive beginnings that exert their relentless hold still today: "juvenile chimps" battle for "their place in the hierarchy of the tribe," facing off "against each other rather than appear weak . . . [and] like the juvenile primates they are middle-school boys" do likewise.)

The science gets handed out briskly with a definitive presentation, although towards the end of the article it was a pleasure to see our old friend, the obligatory disclaimer, put in an appearance: "scientists caution that brain research doesn’t tell the whole story: temperament, family background and environment play big roles, too." Sure they do. That’s why the second sentence after this one begins: "But . . ." (It is true that there is a sidebar with "scholar" Carol Gilligan -- identified in the caption to her picture as "an expert on girls" – offering a feminist take on the issue. She’s the one photographed in her kitchen, backed up against the counter. An interesting pictorial choice. Presumably she generates her knowledge about girls while making tea, rather than working in a laboratory or similarly serious place like those folks who are quoted in the article with scientific titles.)

And then after all the science talk that is woven through the piece, the article winds up for its big finishing pitch: "one of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school rests on a single question." What do you think that question is? Does it have to do with brain chemistry, or testosterone bathing, or battling to maintain your place in the hierarchy of juvenile chimpdom? That would be a no. The crucial question is: "Does [a boy] have a man in his life to look up to?" Maybe that argument should have led the article? (Or maybe some of the other issues noted in passing – the hegemony of standardized testing driving the curriculum in the last decade; the elimination or drastic reduction in recess; the increasingly media-saturated environment that exists for boys that wasn’t even on the horizon in 1980 – might have yielded more insight as well if they’d been followed up on.)

But then there is the historical amnesia that drives me nuts. One reason the Newsweek piece caught my eye is that I’m getting ready to do a unit on "childhood and science" with the students in the science and popular culture class, where one of the topics we’ll take up are science toys for kids and their historical significance. Taking a look back in time, we’ll be reading Bruce Watson’s book about A.C. Gilbert, the inventor of the erector set – and in sketching out the context for Gilbert’s engineering toys, Chapter 2 of Watson’s book describes "The Boy Problem" as seen by early 20^th century Americans (the phrase comes from a popular 1901 book). The Boy Problem encompassed such difficulties as gangs, and "boys who drifted from school because the teacher was ‘down on them’. . . boys whose mothers asked them, ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ but who couldn’t because they were boys" (p. 25). In fact, as Watson points out, Gilbert sold his erector sets directly to worried moms in advertisements in the pages of Good Housekeeping where he firmly proclaims that purchasing his toys "solves the boy problem."

Erector sets anyone?

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For more on the Summers' controversy, see the excellent compilation of sources by the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/news/Summers.htm#May16. For online information on A.C. Gilbert, see this excerpt of an article from Smithsonian: http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues99/may99/erector.html.

Images: The cover to Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace, 1951-1952 (Fantagraphics Books, 2005) and to Bruce Watson, The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made (Penguin, 2003).