petri dish

a big hello to this year's scipop students!

welcome to the spring 2009 edition of hsci 1133, "science and popular culture"! I'm glad you're enrolled, excited about getting started, and looking forward to exploring aspects of the class further here on the blog as we move along through the semester. Although the things I write about on the blog aren't confined to our class alone, the class is the heartbeat behind its existence, and during spring semester a great deal of what appears here will relate to course content.

Sometimes I'll post about a topic or issue that will be coming up soon on the schedule, and providing a sneak preview -- as you'll see below about dinosaurs as scientific icons. Other times I'll supplement our course materials by seeing what I can turn up on the web, just meandering down different avenues that allow you to do some extra exploration if you'd like -- as when we were looking at the history of conceptualizing the moon two years ago. Other times I may reflect on questions you all have raised in class or in your assignments -- this space gives me a place to work on my thinking about these questions at greater length outside of class (see, professors assign themselves homework, too!) Here's an example from a previous year, when we watched a 1950s television program that addressed evolution and religion. And there will be entries related to topics where there is so much interesting extra information to be found online, that I'll use this as a place to bring some of that together as a point of departure for those who might find particular areas interesting beyond what we've had time for in class or in the reading (for example, anyone up for pondering the relationship of medieval bestiaries and phenomena such as the Loch Ness Monster in the present day? Then you're in luck!). Or sometimes, stuff that is just fun (like history of science and Halloween.)

This week coming up we'll begin discussing the kinds of symbolic images that appear within popular culture relating to science -- as a kind of quick example, I passed out brochures last class that advertised the "Walking with Dinosaurs" extravaganza that rolled into OKC this weekend at the Ford Center downtown (here's a newspaper review and here's the official site where you can get a sense of the show and here's a review by a scientist, Brian Switek, at his blog Laelaps). Dinosaurs certainly loom large as scientific icons in the public sphere, and the idea of thousands of people gathering together in a darkened sports arena to watch million dollar mechanical/puppet/thingamajigs conjure dinosaurs back to the living world is certainly an interesting example of the intersection of science/education/entertainment/spectacle/commerce.

Trying to understand the ecology of dinosaur images as a social phenomenon even as it is a scientific one is part of our task in analyzing popular culture. For example, if the popular success of paleontology as seen by the arena rock status of "Walking with Dinosaurs" -- or the auction of the T. rex skeleton, Sue, in 1997 for 8.36 million dollars, and the busy schedule the copies of her bones have had in traveling around the US and the world -- are indicative of something powerfully significant, it would follow logically that paleontology would be a richly-endowed area of scientific research, with untold numbers of paleontologists-to-be clamoring to take part, right, with huge paleontological institutes part of the university landscape? Ummmm, not exactly. Discuss.

We'll also work on analyzing images themselves, and trying to discern the patterns of meaning that connect dinosaurian imagery -- as one example -- with other aspects of what's going on in particular cultures at particular historical times and comparing them with the present. We'll look at how it was that a prehistoric creature that seems relatively banal to us today -- the mastodon (how many kids run screaming through natural history museums demanding to see the mastodon fossils?) -- was the first fossil exemplar of the idea of extinction, and on whom we projected our images of a vicious, dangerous past. The newly-founded United States was especially pleased to claim this ferocious carnivore (!) as our own mascot: "huge as the frowning precipice, cruel as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, and terrible as the Angel of Night." Such attention to big, cruel, meat-eating tyrants is still common two hundred years later. Exhibit one: Oklahoma's own state fossil, the Saurophaganax maximus [note the maximus!], ushered into state law with the following words:

"Because of the extraordinarily rich paleontological heritage of the State of Oklahoma, the Legislature hereby declares Saurophaganax Maximus to be the State Fossil of Oklahoma. This spectacular dinosaur, the 'greatest king of reptile eaters', once roamed this great land. It is only known from Oklahoma and has surpassed the Tyrannosaurus rex, the 'king of the dinosaurs', as the greatest predator of earth’s history."

We don't want no puny critter representing us, ha! Surpassing T. rex! And if you want to check it out, look no further than the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where on the south campus you can see:

"The centerpiece exhibit in the Hall of Ancient Life, the Jones Family 'Clash of the Titans,' [which] shows an encounter between Oklahoma's largest Jurassic animals - the plant-eating sauropod Apatosaurus, which, at more than 93 feet long, is the largest of its kind in the world, and the carnivorous theropod Saurophaganax maximus, the largest of the Jurassic predators."

There's also a mammoth or two, and we'll take a look at how they're presented as well. Feel free to take a field trip of your own and get an early feel for what you think about all this!

If you'd like to explore dinosaurs as modern totems in greater detail, there's no better guide than W.J.T. Mitchell in The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. Here's an interview with him about the book that will give you a sense of what kinds of questions scholars ask about popular phenomena like these and how they go about theorizing the answers. And there's a chapter excerpt as well: the counter-intuitive, "Why Children Hate Dinosaurs." Were you a dinosaur fan, foe, or indifferent to all the hoopla? Still feel the same today as an adult? Stay tuned, and we'll find out more from each of you.
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For more: How do you think the general public view science/paleontology in your country? At paleontologist David Hone's public forum website at DinoBase, he asked the question and you can read the answers given by various scientists. For a quick piece on Oklahoma's dinosaurs, here's a report from News9 by Christian Price, "Oklahoma's First Residents" -- and note that down on the right side of the page in the green sidebar there are some nice video links. And will the whole king of beasts tag become extinct?: see the BBC's report, "T. rex: Warrior or Wimp?" 

Image: Advertising from the producers, at http://www.zrock.com/zforum/about1044.html

of crocodelephants and category confusions

So how can you make something that is as wide as a (modest) household lot and as high as 100 feet and has the heft of hundreds (thousands?) of cubic yards of steel and cement invisible? As I wrote last time, in what it seems now was the first installment of lessons for science and popular culture from art, it's a very simple sleight of hand: leave it unclassified. As Calvin Trillin remarked in the New Yorker in 1965 about what came to be known as Sam Rodia's Watts Towers in south-central Los Angeles, "If a man who has not labelled himself an artist happens to produce a work of art, he is likely to cause a lot of confusion and inconvenience." The problem in classification had been created through the decades-long labor of an Italian immigrant who, the correspondent from NYC explained, "constructed  a dream-like complex of openwork towers . . . and encrusted them with a sparkling mosaic, composed mainly of what had once been refuse." A book without a Library of Congress call number can't be shelved, and may as well not exist -- you won't find it in the art section. Of course, even if forced by circumstances to classify something that is confusing and inconvenient and made out of refuse, we can assign it to a category that still renders it hard to see: say, label it as popular culture, not Art. In the part of the scholarly map where I work, the stuff that relates to science but that isn't produced by a scientist also creates category problems: if it's stuck in the ephemeral -- the category of "popular culture" -- it is hard for professional historians of science to see it (or to take it seriously). If it's not scientist-produced and approved -- and therefore solid and visible -- then why would a historian of science study it? Another category problem.

About a decade after I'd seen the Watts Towers, I received another lesson in art, from another Los Angeles artist who makes particular use of the discarded junk of modern society in creating his sculptures and installations, Michael C. McMillen (that's one of his pieces at the top -- "The Box of All Knowledge," from 1997 -- which, by the way, can't be opened. So what is in it???) To the left is one of his recycled pieces on the cover of "Folksongs for a Nuclear Village," a Shadowfax album -- the piece's title translates as "In the Middle of Our Life's Journey," a line taken from the opening of The Divine Comedy. As a post-Sputnik youngster McMillen was very involved with tinkering and with science -- reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, working in a homemade chemistry lab behind his grandfather's workshop -- and he majored in science in college before switching to art his sophomore year (for this and more, see an interview from 2002 titled "The Alchemy of Things"). His artworks often reference technology and science and history. In capturing the nature of his work from this time period Elenore Welles suggested that:

Fifteen years' experience building models for Hollywood movies [such as Blade Runner] and an abiding love of craftsmanship is visible in the amount of technical finesse applied to these intricate constructions. McMillen's passion for junk is evidenced in the huge stockpile in his backyard. Items such as plumbing valves, door hinges or typewriter keys provide impetus for his conceptual fecundity. He likes his process to be ongoing and interactive. In fact, works often appear to be in an evolving state. The viewer is brought into the process of invention and discovery.

McMillen juxtaposes objects to evoke associations and to investigate the fine line between illusion and fiction. The transmutation of matter, how it disintegrates and is reborn, inspires his art. Scientific logic and the nature of matter are terrains that often remain obscure. But he attempts to demythologize them. In the process of building his imagery he plays with the psychology of perception and the ideas those images might convey.

As someone who was set to return to graduate school (not to study cognitive psychology, like before, but history of science instead) I loved visiting his installations and gallery shows, which through the richness of the juxtapositions and layerings and their surprises and resonances raised all kinds of interesting questions about the meaning of science and technology as past and present for me. The artworks were always the effort of one mind seeking to convey ideas and emotions to other minds, but without dictating results, leaving room for viewers to discover and interpret and reimagine. McMillen's installations were partnerships with his visitors, sometimes literally, as when their actions became part of the exhibit themselves. He once remarked that he "wants viewers to interpret his art according to their own experiences. . . 'I suggest, rather than shout.'" (from Patricia Hamilton, Michael C. McMillen: Hermetic Landscapes, 1988).

Suggesting, rather than shouting. . . this was part of what I loved about these carefully constructed worlds of McMillen's and why they seemed so engaging to me. And here's this second lesson I learned, although it has caused me no end of uneasiness in becoming an academic historian of science. Our disciplinary rhetoric, our blunt-edged forms of persuasion such as the scholarly monograph and the professional article, are built on an argumentative platform that seeks to marshal evidence and drive home a thesis, in order to engage almost in a battle with the minds of readers to convince them that they must understand what we are writing about in just this one way. Especially within the history of science, which frequently seeks to emulate the sciences themselves, our histories often proceed as if they were clever, neatly contained scientific experiments, in which we deploy independent variables to find out if our hypothesis is judged to prevail or not. This professional mode was coming up against a set of changing dynamics, however -- something that cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed in 1983: that a "blurring of genres" was occurring within intellectual life, with "many social scientists hav[ing] turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords." He characterized this shift as a contemporary "refiguration of social thought," summing it up in this way: "something is happening to the way we think about the way we think." I could see this shift all around me, as with McMillen's installations. But Geertz's shift didn't seem all that real when dealing with the print culture of academia in which I was being trained for.

So, what I wondered from what artists such as McMillen had taught me is this: what does the rhetoric look like for less martial, less adversarial histories of science? Why not histories of science that instead view the reader as a partner in meaning-making, that strive to evoke, and broaden, and recalibrate, and suggest, and raise possibilities rather than seek to have the last word (reject the null hypothesis)? What category would this kind of history of science fall into, this kind of art-inflected narrative, one based on picking up the flotsam and jetsam discarded by the mainstream, reworking it, reconsidering it, recategorizing it, blurring genres?

I left California in 1994 for Oklahoma, and haven't been able to follow McMillen's work in person, although the web makes possible a bit of visiting at several removes. And it's a delight to see that among the numerous and fascinating turnings he's taken that he's found unusual ways to bring his reflections on humans and history and science and technology to new and different locations: whether just this last year at the San Jose Museum of Art, for their group exhibition on "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon". . . or CalTech, with "Dr. Crump's Inductive Geo-Imaging Mobile Laboratory (Field Unit 1)", where visitors would see an "ever-evolving archive of artifacts" from the research being conducted of, he revealed, a series of buried chambers from an underground abandoned laboratory, sealed off over seventy years before. . .or Geologica 42, at the LA Metro Fillmore station . . . or the joint experiment by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Naturalis (the Netherlands' national Natural History Museum in Leiden) that he and a handful of other artists participated in, "Conversations: Nature and the City," featuring his Crocodelephant Incognitus Giganticus and the "The Flying Dutchman" (the porpoise skeletons with schooner sails above to the right). When the exhibit set up in Leiden a real scientist came by to look over the artists' pieces and deliver a prouncement: Philip Campbell, an astrophysicist and editor-in-chief of Nature (his review, "Conceits and Provocations: Artists Reveal a Variety of Responses to the Contents of a Natural-History Museum," appeared in the 16 November 2006 issue, p. 274). His final conclusion about artists in a museum context is that: "Cumbersome attempts by artists to pose philosophical questions in a visual form tend to smack of conceit, rather than stimulate," although he allows that the closer that the artists get to "artfulness" -- which he defines as "sheer visual creativity" -- the better they do. I wish an historian of science had also reviewed the exhibition, to see what further conversations might have resulted!

Campbell finds McMillen coming off somewhat better in his mind than did some of the others, giving him an evaluation of being "conceptually more substantive" and displaying a "sense of visual play that adds to the cultural value of the specimens." He also seems to endorse the statement in the organizers' supplementary material that "McMillen's creativity is closer to the way our brains work than we might want to admit." McMillen himself speaks of his Naturalis creations, which play off of nature's creations, as "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious." Perhaps this is what leads "print" historians like me (who spend too much time haunting artists' venues?) to venture out into the digital world -- searching for a contemporary space that allows room to mount a carnival for the curious with open-ended narratives allowed, even necessary. Ephemeral? It depends on what categories we navigate by . . .

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For more: McMillen's most well-known Los Angeles installation is the fascinating "Central Meridian" (and here) which is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If you're ever visiting LA don't miss it (or the Watts Towers)! You can also see a quick YouTube hit of a recent installation at Cincinnati's UnMuseum, Speed's Place. For more background on the artist, see this oral history interview that the Smithsonian Institution conducted with McMillen in 1997. Clifford Geertz's essay, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought" is from his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology; the essay was first published in 1980 in American Scholar.

Images: The Box of All Knowledge (photo by Brian Forrest) accompanies an essay on McMillen at http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1997/Articles0697/MMcMillen.html; the album cover is at wikipedia; the porpoises image is from the Natural History Museum of LA County website for the exhibit, at http://www.nhm.org/Conversations_LA_Leiden/?artist=mcmillen; and the CalTech lab accompanies an article by Michael Rogers, "When Art and Science Collude," at http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/caltechnews/articles/v38/collude.html.

 

go fish

Having finished watching the dolphins pirouette and sweep around their tank from the underwater viewing windows at the Vancouver Aquarium, our group began traveling up the ramp back to the main floor. As we did, everyone walked by a nondescript case off to the back containing an odd-looking rhinoceros-type fish, without anyone taking notice of it at all . . . well, that is, everyone but me. I noticed it because even though I only caught it out of the corner of my eye, my heart did a little jump, just like it does when you unexpectedly see someone you love. And this was one of my first loves: a coelacanth.

( Not sure what to do with the Latin? It sounds like this: see-la-kanth :-) 

In the late 1960s, there were only a handful of places in the United States that someone who was nine or ten years old could have seen a coelacanth, but I happened to live in the harbor town of San Pedro, not terribly far from the Natural History Museum at Exposition Park in downtown Los Angeles -- that's where I came across my first coelacanth in person. Sure, the dinosaur exhibits were memorable as well, but not anywhere near as captivating as the coelacanth, with its lavishly fringed tail fin, its primitive looking eyes and teeth, its armor-like scaliness, and the fleshy lobe fins that seemed for all the world like they could be dwarf legs. As Samantha Weinberg remarks in A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth:

"In appearance, at least, the coelacanth is less a fish than a bizarre confection of mismatched parts -- modern, ancient, and unique. As one of the deckhands . . . said after hauling it up off the southern African coast in 1938, 'It looks like a giant sea lizard'" (p.196).

Coelies aren't cute and cuddly like waddling penguins or grinning dolphins or furry baby seals; it certainly wasn't looks that led to them becoming pop culture icons in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the fact that, in 1938, a creature that scientists assumed had died out 65 million years ago in the great Cretaceous extinction, like the dinosaurs -- known only through its fossilized remains, dating back 400 million years -- had suddenly emerged from the ancient sea and onto the front pages of 20th century newspapers. It would not be until 1952 that a second coelacanth was captured and preserved in a way that it could be properly studied, adding to the anticipation that the first arrival had caused. (No one has been able to keep a coelacanth alive outside of the ocean to study it; a few films of live coelacanths in the water have been made. Over the years, about 200 coelacanths have been caught and studied. A new initiative in South Africa has created a major program of coelacanth research, which may result in much more information about the life cycle of coelacanths.)

Dubbed "old four-legs" in the popular press, it was more than the fact that the coelacanth was a "living fossil" that caused such a stir. The possibility that coelacanths might well be the "missing" evolutionary link between the first sea creatures and the first tetrapods that had crawled out of the ocean and on to land, giving rise eventually to human beings, made them the source of widespread fascination. And perhaps the coelacanth's renown was given an extra boost in that the Leakeys were unearthing "early man" in Africa, and the idea of being able to at last fill in significant gaps in the great evolutionary story of life (the ones relating to us :-) seemed to be at hand.

When I became a scholar and began thinking about the nature of science in popular culture, my enduring interest in coelacanths has never been far from my mind. For one thing, the existence of coelacanths represents one of the scientific experiences that spurred my interest in studying nature -- and most of these experiences had nothing to do with the science I learned in the classroom up through high school, via textbooks or laboratory demonstrations. The science I most loved rarely showed up in class; the science I was exposed to in class rarely enthused me (don't ever get me started on the tedium of rolling steel balls down inclined planes or of titrations of potassium permanganate).

It was as if my ideas about nature existed on two tracks that rarely crossed: scavenged from museum visits and National Geographic's School Bulletin (and later the grown-up magazine itself) and television specials and visits to the ocean and books from the library and camping trips in the Mojave desert with the Girl Scouts or hiking the high Sierras with the YMCA . . . or instead properly trained into me (more or less) through bench-pressing facts from big fat textbooks and successfully executing one multiple choice test after another.

So what happens when the two paths rarely cross -- or two species of thought fail to cross-fertilize? Welcome to my world! I'm still working on it. In many respects, that early love of coelacanths put me on the path to wanting to understand science in the vernacular.

I think that one important idea that the coelacanth conveyed to me, in the midst of the self-congratulatory high that the space race brought to the US in the 1960s, was of how little we knew about our own planet, particularly the three-fourths of the globe covered by oceans and seas. My own sense of nature was overwhelmingly shaped by my proximity to the ocean as a growing organism, and I was beginning to suspect that a vernacular-derived metaphysics and epistemology that was aqueous-based differs from those that are terra-formed or aether-filled. This has got me thinking, so look for a blog entry sometime this spring on "Thinking Like an Ocean," which will be part of the analysis for the next book I'm writing.

Interestingly, South Africa's Minister of Science and Technology, Mosibudi Mangena, sees study of the coelacanth as a way to promote science in society (I was just born too early, and near the wrong ocean):

The South African Minister however deplored the low standards of science in his country and Africa at large, given the lack of resources. "Public scientific output remains low, and in critical areas, such as securing patents, and new fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, there is a limited institutional capacity to respond adequately," he complained.

The African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme however stood out as an important and well-functioning "high-profile flagship programme" for science in South Africa and the region, Mr Mangena pointed out. Through ACEP, science authorities had caused popular excitement by "ships, sea exploration, sophisticated instrumentation, and new discoveries that extend the frontiers of science to capture the imagination of the youth, and inspire them to take an interest in science."

Coelacanths continue to surprise us, popping up in 1997 10,000 kilometres away from the African coast in Indonesia, where UC Berkeley researcher Mark Erdmann spotted a coelacanth carcass being hauled off to market. The existence of the Indonesian coelacanths surprised the scientific world, although it turns out that Sulawesian fishermen were quite familiar with the fish they called raja laut, or "king of the sea" -- the Comoran fishermen also had a name for the oily, inedible fish they sometimes accidently caught: gombessa.  Makes you think about what it means when we say that a species has been "unknown" -- unknown, that is, until it is discovered by outsiders.

An aside: "My" childhood coelie appears to have been the result of a UCLA researcher in 1964 initiating the first major international expedition to the Comoros Islands off of Madagascar, the coelacanth habitat that had been previously open only to French scientists (see Malcolm S. Gordon, "The international program of research on Latimeria in the 1960s," Environmental Biology of Fishes, 1993, 36:407-14). After their analysis was complete, their coelacanth was sent to LA County's Natural History Museum, and no doubt would have been something of a local celebrity when I visited it.

Ten years later, as a UCLA student, I walked through the doors of the campus Life Sciences building, and came face-to-face with another coelacanth, much to my surprise (it was probably a cast taken of that first one). It still had the power to give me a small electrifying jolt, unlike the dozens of other students who passed it by without a second look. Every now and then, I'd visit it, just to take a small step back in time amidst the stress of the present; it always pleased me to see it there. I wonder if it's still on display?

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Further info: NOVA produced an episode on coelacanths, "Ancient Creature of the Deep," and there is a companion website. Want to make your own paper coelacanth? Courtesy of the Yamaha Motor Company, you can -- see the example to the right. I know what I'm going to be working on over Christmas vacation :-)  Other odd moments in coelie pop culture include the Pokemon Relicanth and a slew of musical tracks which feature coelacanths!

Images: The top left image is from the front page of dinofish.com, a great place to start in your exploration of all coelacanthish news. The second one is from the wikipedia site on coelacanths, and is a coelie that is on display at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. The paper coelie can be found at the papercraft "rare animals of the world" Fun From Yamaha site at http://www.yamaha-motor.co.jp/global/entertainment/papercraft/animal-global/index.html.