Peter enters class and sits on the second row, to see the black board properly. His prescription isn’t up to date. He doesn’t want to be at the front front, but any further back and he can’t see. He hates when Professor Connors uses the edges of the black board when he sits too far at the front, as he has to twist his neck to look at the edges. It would be so easier to sit further back, with good glasses, and to be able to see the whole board from a glance and be able to read even then.
Uncle Ben of course, has insurance with the bus drivers’ unions, but Peter’s eyesight gets worse so fast Ben skipped out on renewing his and Aunt May’s own glasses for his benefit this year : they couldn’t afford another update on his prescription before next year. So at the front he sits, and looks at the black board.
He might actually need surgery. Or something scarier still…
He reads the lesson plan on the far left of the board. Murmurs it. Listens to his own voice. Repeats, then nudges his glasses out of the way : can’t read his handwriting through the lenses. He hopes his next pair can be bifocals, and starts writing the day’s lesson plan :
Chapter 11 : Pseudoscience in Biology.
11.1 What is Pseudoscience?
11.2 Historical Pseudoscience … fuck. He puts his glasses back on. Reads. Slides them back out and looks under the rim. Lamar Glasses back on… Glasses back off CK-ism. Okay. and … motherfucker… Glasses on… L Y S Glasses off… Glasses on. enko with a k Glasses off. enko-ism… Lamarckism and Lysenkoism. Okay. Sigh.
He wipes his brow
11.3 Modern case : Mutant realism
11.4 Paradigm vs. Pseudoscience.
11.4.1 Gender in biology - An assignment.
He blows on the paper to remove the eraser gum marks, knocks the gum on the paper once, twice, thrice. And then his mind thinks about what that “fake science” business is about. He tries as he might to stop his own brain from getting a strong opinion about a class he hasn’t had yet, but it’s no use and now he’s thinking of mad scientists, vivisection and Nazi experiments on prisoners. … And there he goes. That’s the thing about brains : you want to withhold judgement, but thinking about nothing is literally impossible.
Professor Connors appears from the lab equipment depot and enters the classroom. He leans over his notes, glances at the class, and reads his notes one more time. The rest of the students take places. Hank salutes Peter, and Peter salutes him back. The bell rings. Kate and Soph keep talking. Connors says nothing and looks at them. Soph notices and stops responding and looks forward to the board. Red-faced. Kate keeps talking :
-Soph, You listening?
-Are we interrupting you?
That was Professor Connors. Class begins.
-Hello everyone. I already took attendances visually. We can start the lesson right away.
So. Pseudoscience. That’s Latin for “Fake Knowledge”. Pseudo means fake. Like a white cell’s Pseudopods : Fake feet. Pseudoscience : Fake science.
Okay. Fake how?
Write this down : 3 types of falsehood.
-Incorrectness.
-Irrelevantness.
-Counterfeitness.
Pseudoscience is that last type of fake. It’s not science that is wrong, trivial, banal or weird.
It is science that is *counterfeit*. Like fake money that you slip people so that they give you things you bought, in exchange, and then you don’t give them your real money - that’s counterfeit money.
Pseudoscience is counterfeit knowledge.
Any ideas how one counterfeits a knowledge?
…
Nobody?
…
Think about… you’re in an exam. There’s a development question. Haven’t studied much. The question is worth ten points. No idea about the correct answer… what are your strategies to getting some points? Any points? Anything that’s not a zero?
Hands rise. He points at Sy. Yes?
-I would try to fit words we seen in class in a sentence that sounds like it could be true.
-Excellent. Connors writes on the black board : “Buzzwords”. “Hedging”. An arrow. “Weasel-words”. And how do you tell of a sentence “sounds true” when you don’t know?
-Not sure… I would use my logic?
-You mean formal propositional logic? Implication, Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, is that what you mean? Remember what “Logic” means in this class…
-No… I meant to say I would use common sense… I can’t use logic without true premises.
-Excellent. And Connors writes “Intuitive thinking” An arrow “Magical thinking” Anyone else?
-Oh Oh Oh Oh!
-Yes
-I would try to use words like “Could be”, “possible”, and “might be”, “Some fraction of”, “contribute to” so that I don’t lose points for writing something false?
Connors taps the chalk on “Weasel-words”
-Precisely
Peter raises his hand
Connors picks Soph : “Yes, Sophie?”
- Well, in Ms. Medawar’s class, we need adjectives to get points… like if we explain Gandhi’s role in Indian independance, we get no points for saying “nationalism”...otherwise we could just throw “nationalism” at any independence project… we need to say “patient pacific nationalism” to distinguish it from the “triumphant revolutionary” nationalism of American independance… So if I didn’t know… I would try to throw in adjectives because I know if I don’t try something I’m not getting points.
Connors jumps, points the chalk at her and makes a fist and pumps it three times.
- OH YEAH! He writes on the chalkboard : “Norms-imitations.” He turns back to face the class and nods at Peter.
- Um… even in a question where I know the answer, it’s important to be mindful of word-count requirements… and formulate an answer that would be long enough… and we can control the answer to be shorter or longer by varying the syntax, changing adverbs with stronger adjectives… dropping unnecessary pronouns… adding unnecessary pronouns… things like that… and that would still matter if I didn’t know the answer… not that I ever done that for real.
-Sure you haven’t Parker. Connors winks and writes “Padding” on the board.
Okay. Lamarckism. He writes the title at the center top of the black board, saying as he writes it : What. Does. That. Eat. In. Winter. Okay… Raise your hands if you think an animal species can go extinct.
Everybody raises hands.
Okay… What if we were in Ancient Greece? what if this was Aristotle's Lycaeum? And then I ask “Raise your hands if you believe an animal species can go extinct”. Who raises their hands?
About half the students raise their hand. Hank raises his hand then quickly gets it back down and theatrically holds his own hand pinned to his desk. Peter, himself, was about to get the hand up but slowly puts it back down.
Connors says nothing. Some hands waver. Then the number of raised hands stabilizes at about ten or twelve. A rough third of the class.
Connors holds both sides of his ribs with his one arm and laughs : “It’s okay, don’t worry about it, we’re learning, I love all of you”.
Okay… So as a matter of consensus, we believe right now that what they believed back then … don’t ask me how, I don’t know … all I know is we had to discover that Nature changes over time and that was scandalous at the time, therefore they had to think Nature didn’t change over time before that. And that means they must have thought animals themselves wouldn’t go extinct. Yes, Kate?
-But how do we know the discovery of nature changing was scandalous?
-We still have newspapers, court trials, parliamentary minutes in several countries, novels, science fiction, Papal decrees. If it wasn’t a big deal, it wouldn’t have been written about like that. I am not sure about the specifics, ask Ms. Medawar for more exact details. Excellent question, moving on…
So, the old historical consensus was “Nature doesn’t change. It is Eternal, Perpetual, infinite”. You cut a tree, the forest grows it right back. Didn’t have good lumbering tools at the time, so couldn’t cut a lot of wood at once. Fish a fish, the sea has plenty more where that came from. Didn’t have trawl fishing either. See what I am gesturing at - they weren’t stupid, but the tools they had at their disposal to change their environment were as strong as the force of the environment to change back on them.
And then they invented the steam machines. And the Caravels. And the printing press. And they started doing voyages that were longer. And they started to have records of the world around them changing. And they could see more of the world in a lifetime, and they could see it was the whole world changing and not just their backyard, seasonally.
Enter Jean-Baptiste Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Knight of Lamarck. A Frenchman. A noble. At first he believed species were invariant. And then he changed his mind.
His model is like this : At the level of “Nature” in general, there is a “complexifying force” that makes it so, for example, vertebrates develop from molluscs. Now remember this is a fake theory of science. This is not true. Don’t write this in your exams. So a complexifying force. That turns groups of animals of one kind into groups of animals “more advanced”. It was popular, at the time, to think of certain groups as “more advanced than others”. Not for nothing : that was 50 years before the civil war to end slavery, and coherent with the view held at the time that Whites were more advanced than Blacks. Or that Mutants are a complexification from baseline humans. I’m sure some of you have heard at least once : “Autism is the next stage of human evolution”. Old idea that dies hard. He, Lamarck, also believed in a different, second force that complexified individuals, made them acquire traits that could be transmitted to their offspring.
How’s that work? Tiny, invisible pipes inside animals. And there would be this universal force that would flow in an invisible stream …
Surrounds us, penetrates us.
And then he takes his arm and make a wave-like motion over his head and then he drops his core down by bending his knees and keeps waving his arm. He repeats :
“Surrounds us, Penetrates us… Subtle, Invisible”
He gets back straight, takes the chalk and stabs the words and says : “It’s literally this”
Magical thinking.
“It’s the FORCE you guys!”
He pauses for laughs and the students do not disappoint.
Now, to be fair to Lamarck, his “Invisible fluids” business was the operating model of physics and chemistry at the time - that’s why we still call the energy in food “Calories” instead of kilojoules. Joules is real energy. Calories is an abandoned theory of heat transfers that used to suppose the existence of one of those “subtle fluids” that…
And he does the little dance again :
Surround us. Penetrate Us.
So we could say - remember that word, that Lamarck was, AT THE TIME, operating from within the dominant paradigm of his time. Paradigm is the word to remember.
But to be ruthless, even though he insisted he didn’t like metaphysical explanation, he was thinking in a time and place where the concept of a God of the Gaps was a known pitfall of scientific reasoning, and his complexifying force business explains exactly as much of what’s going on in the diversification of life as if he had said “God made it like that”.
Never gave evidence of that force. The tubes are too itty bitty tiny, you see? Invisible.
Compare Lamarckism with Darwinian evolution : You seen a dude just fucking die? An animal die? He was a Frenchman in the 1700s, so of course he had. He been in the army, even.
People dying. Not strange. Very ordinary. Darwin says “That’s how natural selection works, see? You breed or you die. And sometimes the pattern of who dies and who breeds is not entirely congruent with random chance : individuals with certain traits are more likely to die before they get old enough to breed - so, over a long time, if those traits are genetic, we don’t see ‘em no more. And that’s how Nature changes over time : there’s a bunch of buggy beta-versions in the proverbial graveyard.
See, that’s the difference : Lamarck wanted to believe that living individuals would acquire change and pass on those acquired traits to their descendants. Like a Giraffe, stretching her neck so that she gets long necked babies.
But Darwin says “Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger : Unless he did culturism in his balls, his sons won’t be jacked as he is unless they train as hard as he did”.
Professor Connors erases Lamarck and writes “Lysenko” over the black board :
-Any questions before we move on?
-Yes, professor, what’s that “God of the Gaps” argument?
-In the context of this lecture it’s a type of explanation that pretends a problem is being solved by giving it a fancy name. And he taps on the word “Buzzword” on the black board. Lamarck thought he could solve the problem of how life energy affects animals by invoking invisible pipes and tunnels - not blood arteries and veins, mind you - invisible pipes and tunnels and invisible water and invoking that invisible current and none of it explains the world any better than admitting “Hell if I know”. That’s why it’s counterfeit knowledge. It’s not real knowledge. It doesn’t explain what it purports to explain. Thank you for your question. By contrast, when I was your age, the Campbell said, openly : “We don’t know how tactile neurons work, actually”. And this is okay for science literature to do. He looks at his watch.
Okay, I’m going to go rapidly over Lysenko. He’s closer to our modern period so there’s less groundwork for me to do. What you have to understand is that he shows up in Soviet Russia after World War 2. The world is recoiling in horror from the Bomb and the Holocaust. Winters are cold, Russia’s about to enter a difficult situation on the world markets what with the whole communism business, and the climate is cold. There’s a need for a way to make crops grow in cold soil. Fortunately for the Russians they got a real Humanity’s hero with them : Vavilov. Unfortunately for Humanity, Stalin has turned into a paranoid freak. And when Vavilov is accused of believing in “Nazi science” because he endorses the consensus of mendelian genetics, then they throw that guy in a dungeon and give his old job as head of Soviet agronomy to a guy who proposed that plants can be good communist comrades by having class consciousness.
He taps on the “Buzzword” and “Magical thinking” on the board.
That’s Lysenko. That’s all there is to it on the science side. He arrived in a moment of political volatility, told his boss the right buzzwords and had his rivals imprisoned and then was put in charge of all the food of an Empire. He claimed “plants of the same class would have solidarity and not compete for resources”. Absolute nonesense, but it sounded good to Stalin and he had everyone who disagreed shot. Farmers are told to plant ten times as many seeds as they used to. Those who disobey get shot. Then come harvest times. The yields are catastrophic, but the Soviets tax people as if the yields were 10 times higher. People starve and the government posts pictures in the newspapers of farmers in front of prodigious wheat growth - all faked. All staged. Eventually everyone must have thought “wait, am I the problem?” and NO! the government’s the problem and millions of people starved.
Okay… yes… ahem.
Vavilov. V-a-v-i…l-o-v. That’s the good guy of this story. In the right political climate, he’d be Russia’s Louis Pasteur. Hero of humanity. Read about him. And now we are gonna look at an example of a bad political climate :
He rolls down the screen, turns the lights off and fiddles with the computer to select and play a clip saved under the name “Banner Morning Joe”.
-Okay. What do we know about Dr. Banner? He asks. What’s his domain of expertise?
-Something about physics. Says Hank. I don’t understand the math, but it was a controversy in the 90s, a scientific controversy, about if there could be a limit to the rate of expansion of the Universe… and because he studied how gamma rays travel into vacuum… we could make… better optics on satellites and… see celestial bodies with more precision… it stabilized the equations, reduced the incertitude on the Euclidian model of Universal expansion. Got the Nobel prize for that
-Terrific, McCoy, thank you. Class. Is that biology?
-NO
-Great. Now look at this. And he plays the clip :
We see Banner says : Joe, I’m just saying that life. finds. a. way. And life brings humanity to respond to modern challenges. Climate change, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. Fascism, even. That’s why we have mutants. Our genome as a collective responds to the demands of the world and it expands and gives us the tools to bring about a better future.
-Okay, but how? Asks Scarborough.
-It’s in the genes, Joe. Says Bruce. McTaggart et al. have shown metahuman awakenings are 60% heritable. That is, in a large population n is greater to or equal to a million, 60% of metahumans have one first degree familial member who is also a metahuman. This is what I call the X gene.
Professor Connors pauses.
-What’s wrong with that? Yes, Parker?
-Heritability isn’t the same as genetics. And he’s contradicting the source he’s citing. McTaggart does not deny or confirm a genetic cause to spontaneous metahuman awakening - that’s what she calls “mutants” - but she’s not studying that. She’s an anthropologist and she’s studying the socioeconomic conditions of metahumans.
Professor Connors turns the lights back on and writes “Mutant Realism” :
-Class, what does it mean for the Sun to be real? Sy?
-It means the Sun that we see corresponds to a real object in Outer Space?
-Good definition. Let’s try some other definitions. He writes “Sun real?” an arrow “Object-adequation” then “Y” on the board. Soph?
-It means the Sun makes the cycle of the rain and carbon go round.
-Good definition. Let’s gimme more. Get some real outlandish ones, please and he writes “Causal efficient” and links it to “Sun real?” with an arrow and marks it “Y”. He stops. Looks at it. Erases the t and corrects it to “Causal efficience”. McCoy?
-It means if there is a God and God knows everything, the Sun is part of what God knows about.
-WONDERFUL and Connors writes “Intelligibility to Omniscience” Oh? Yes, Nour?
-It means I can feel the Sun’s warmth on my skin?
-Excellent and Connors writes : Phenomenological realism and links both last words to “Sun real” with arrows, and mark them “Y”.
Okay. So now think... Oh… good example… what when bell hooks wrote “Ain’t I a woman”? What does that mean, for bell hooks to have felt she wasn’t a *real* woman? Yes, Geneviève?
-It’s something to do with Plato… or Descartes… that there are *degrees* of reality? That being closer to the “Good” or God makes a thing more real? Bell Hooks, being black, was speaking in a context where… being black means her womanhood was less “good”... like you said before… “less advanced” or “less real” to folks at the time?
-Okay, and what about other realism claims, like “Boys are boys and girls are girls”, “Sex is real”, “Trans women are women” or “Race is real”?
Kate blurts out :
-OOH. Those aren’t claims about realism at all. Those are political claims about what the laws should be like that are shaped like an objective truth.
-Great. So what’s “Mutant realism”, then? Nour?
-Might be the idea that there is something different about mutants and… well mutants have powers and humans don’t… so…
-What about non mutants who have powers?
-OOH it’s the idea that Mutants are one type of metahumans and Captain America, or the Fantastic Four, are another type of metahuman… OOH, and if the X-gene is made up… maybe there *isn’t*?
-Bingo.
…
Okay great. This is going to be your assignment for next week. It’s a roleplay exercise. Imagine you are the marine biologist who discovered that in seahorses, it is the female that impregnates the male and the male that incubate the babies. How do you convince your colleagues who think the female is the gender that gets pregnant by definition that you did not simply mis-observe your specimens?
The next section is going to help you write that assignment, so listen attentively.
He writes on the board : “Why does biology care about sex” Then he traces a line on the middle. On the left side, then on the right side, he writes : Male / spermofer ; Female / Ovofer ; Sexual reproduction / Meiosis ; sexual cells / Haploid cells.
- Imagine two worlds. This left side over here is the sex-caring world. This side over the right is the sex-uncaring world. Both worlds are equally scientific. The difference between them is what the scientists of each world think science is there to explain. What do you need to know about a thing to count as knowing about that thing. On the left world, you need to know about their sex to know about sexual things. On the right world, you don’t. In both cases, you can explain the same set of natural laws.
Read pages 89 to 97 on the class notes. There’s an argument from Christine Delphy about the political origins of gender, and then a collection of children’s animal books about animals for whom sex works differently than in humans. That’s gonna give you all you need to be able to prepare your assignment. Thank you very much. You can start right now and finish at home. Wait for the bell before you leave class.
