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Subtitled: Theory and Method in American Earth Sciences
I have had this in paperback (still a hefty tome) on the shelf on the third floor for 15 years (technically, NOT on the 3rd floor for 15 -- only 10, before that somewhere in Mayberry and probably even in Seattle). Unread. I got a wild hair and decided to read it, partly because I kept thinking about Henry Fountain's _The Great Quake_.
Well, that is interesting, because Plafker, the two academic camps in US geology mentioned in that book, the Stabilists and the Mobilists -- none of those are mentioned. None. Nowhere. In fact, at the end of the book, the data collected by Plafker in Alaska and then Chile to show a kind of faulting incompatible with stabilism but fully explained by mobilism and absolutely consonant with continental drift / plate tectonics, is not even on the list of data that led to the final switch to a consensus on drift / plate tectonics. Which is sort of weird, because Plafker was a non-theory driven geologist who figured out a great way to quantify something that was completely on the drift side. You would think this would be relevant. Fountain portrays it as crucial to the switch. But nowhere to be seen in Oreskes.
I do not know quite what to think.
Oreskes' book is awesome. She creates compelling character sketches of the major participants in the development of Earth Sciences and the debate over drift start to end. She carefully depicts what each participant contributed, and how they thought about the problem, and about geology in general. She depicts the fundamental conflict that went on for decades (longer, if you include other debates predating drift) between geologists and geophysicists (worth noting here, altho Oreskes rarely gets into it: the physicists are always always always wrong. When a geologist says, hey, there is this thing, it looks like maybe this happened, and when a physicist then says, that is impossible, never, ever, ever believe the physicist. This may be a more widely generalizable truth.).
She does a fantastic job of depicting what the job and career of being a geologist was like. That really brings it home, right there: interesting stuff starts in the field. You go out, thinking you are going to walk around in miserable, periodically terrifying conditions and look for rock sticking up out of the brush or trees or whatever, and then put it on a map and eventually go home and create a really big map that depicts all the many rocks that poked up and what they look like. What actually happens is you do all that, and while you are doing it, you go, well THAT is not supposed to happen. And you go home, and you document it, and someone tells you, THAT cannot be right. So then you go back out there, and do it again, nope, still the same, so then you go -- if your patience and the money has not run out -- you do it again in a similar type place until the mass of data of THAT is happening even tho it is not supposed to happen becomes something that requires an explanation.
The outside world changes: early geologists had computers. They were women. They did your math for you. (It is always women doing the math for men, and men pretending that the women do not exist, and telling girls that girls are worse at math than boys, so that it will be cheaper to hire the women who are good at math when the time comes. It is a fucking scam, and a crime and we really should talk about it a lot more than we do.) Later, the computers were machines, which were expensive, but not as expensive. So you could do more complicated math, which is part of what enabled a lot of progress to happen.
Other changes: people develop new and tricky ways to measure things, like something to measure gravity while on a boat (very tricky!), and better boats so that you can go more places in the ocean and measure the gravity and notice that it changes in ways that your theory did not account for. Ways to measure magnetism, so you can document magnetic banding. Etc.
The tail end of the book is Oreskes trying to figure out what kind of moral to draw from the fact that every other place in the world (Europe, South Africa, etc.), geologists accepted drift much, much sooner than in North America, and they kept trying to explain to US geologists and the US geologists were fucking abusive in return. Not her word. But they totally were. She talks about utility, and false theories making correct predictions and a bunch of other hoorah. Nowhere does she get into the status ladder of the scientists, in which physics is the top, chemistry is next down, and everyone else is scrabbling for attention and money and respect. That ladder _predated_ any of physics successes, FWIW (a little addendum to the never trust a physicist arguing with a geologist rule: Lord Kelvin got maybe one thing right, ever), and had a lot more to do with who could afford to become a physicist than anything else. If only scions of the well-to-do can enter a field, then that field will enjoy a halo entirely undeserved by the people producing things in that field. This is not a new concept. I do not know why we do not apply it to physicists, but I have a few theories, most of which reduce to: physicists are stubborn, loud, aggressive and relatively unwilling to listen to counterarguments. They do not concede even when everyone else can tell they are absolutely wrong. And then they invoke Galileo or Einstein or whatever, hey, he was right and everyone else disagreed so I must be right too. Yeah. In your dreams. Einstein was dead wrong on quantum mechanics, too.
If you read this review, and you sense bias, you are correct! I am biased! I have dear, dear friends who are physicists. I see their flaws, and avoid discussing areas of disagreement with them, which is largely the strategy adopted by the geologists. Invoking the human characteristics of the human participants would have helped the argument of this book.
In the meantime, everything about this book other than the concluding few dozen pages, and some quibbles with the adequacy of the explanation for why drift ultimately won -- everything is awesome. It is a super amazing and wonderful depiction of how something adopted out of expediency that turned out to be super useful reifies into dogma, and can be very, very, very difficult to dislodge. I was inspired -- 2/3rds of the way through the book -- to go have another look at migration to the Americas theories. One of the things I was thinking about when I made this leap was that land-bridges -- isthmia which come and go to explain things, in the absence of actual evidence that there was an isthmus there and now there is not -- land bridges are always bull shit. And I knew that Beringia was a land bridge, so I was like, I bet I can spot all these deny deny deny things going on in paleo-archaeological theories of who originally peopled the Americas. Yup. There it is. Cherry picking for DNA testing to be heavily weighted to North Americans. Nit picking every last aspect of sites with solid work and solid dates pre-Clovis to somehow suggest that, you know, those tools fell off the cliff that way, and the charcoal in the hearth in the rock shelter blew in from outdoors. And maybe monkeys made those tools. Seriously. Monkeys. Because the VERY IDEA that migration occurred to the Americas somewhere south before they went north is ANATHEMA.
OK. So, we definitely do have pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas. Most of the sites are pretty far south or actually in South America. We have not made it all the way to the proposition that, you know, BOATS, possibly from some other southern location, but we are sneaking up on it.
Bias is real. I have it. You have it. I know my biases. I know that there are no facts; there are observations which are interpreted. I think it is delightful when people try to be painstakingly objective, or at least entertain multiple interpretations for their observations. The earth scientists in Oreskes book are really delightful, even when they are wrong. The author is not particularly present in this book, but the glimpses or impressions this reader gathered were incredibly favorable: a careful person with integrity and good character.
I still do not much care for the geophysicists, tho.
I have had this in paperback (still a hefty tome) on the shelf on the third floor for 15 years (technically, NOT on the 3rd floor for 15 -- only 10, before that somewhere in Mayberry and probably even in Seattle). Unread. I got a wild hair and decided to read it, partly because I kept thinking about Henry Fountain's _The Great Quake_.
Well, that is interesting, because Plafker, the two academic camps in US geology mentioned in that book, the Stabilists and the Mobilists -- none of those are mentioned. None. Nowhere. In fact, at the end of the book, the data collected by Plafker in Alaska and then Chile to show a kind of faulting incompatible with stabilism but fully explained by mobilism and absolutely consonant with continental drift / plate tectonics, is not even on the list of data that led to the final switch to a consensus on drift / plate tectonics. Which is sort of weird, because Plafker was a non-theory driven geologist who figured out a great way to quantify something that was completely on the drift side. You would think this would be relevant. Fountain portrays it as crucial to the switch. But nowhere to be seen in Oreskes.
I do not know quite what to think.
Oreskes' book is awesome. She creates compelling character sketches of the major participants in the development of Earth Sciences and the debate over drift start to end. She carefully depicts what each participant contributed, and how they thought about the problem, and about geology in general. She depicts the fundamental conflict that went on for decades (longer, if you include other debates predating drift) between geologists and geophysicists (worth noting here, altho Oreskes rarely gets into it: the physicists are always always always wrong. When a geologist says, hey, there is this thing, it looks like maybe this happened, and when a physicist then says, that is impossible, never, ever, ever believe the physicist. This may be a more widely generalizable truth.).
She does a fantastic job of depicting what the job and career of being a geologist was like. That really brings it home, right there: interesting stuff starts in the field. You go out, thinking you are going to walk around in miserable, periodically terrifying conditions and look for rock sticking up out of the brush or trees or whatever, and then put it on a map and eventually go home and create a really big map that depicts all the many rocks that poked up and what they look like. What actually happens is you do all that, and while you are doing it, you go, well THAT is not supposed to happen. And you go home, and you document it, and someone tells you, THAT cannot be right. So then you go back out there, and do it again, nope, still the same, so then you go -- if your patience and the money has not run out -- you do it again in a similar type place until the mass of data of THAT is happening even tho it is not supposed to happen becomes something that requires an explanation.
The outside world changes: early geologists had computers. They were women. They did your math for you. (It is always women doing the math for men, and men pretending that the women do not exist, and telling girls that girls are worse at math than boys, so that it will be cheaper to hire the women who are good at math when the time comes. It is a fucking scam, and a crime and we really should talk about it a lot more than we do.) Later, the computers were machines, which were expensive, but not as expensive. So you could do more complicated math, which is part of what enabled a lot of progress to happen.
Other changes: people develop new and tricky ways to measure things, like something to measure gravity while on a boat (very tricky!), and better boats so that you can go more places in the ocean and measure the gravity and notice that it changes in ways that your theory did not account for. Ways to measure magnetism, so you can document magnetic banding. Etc.
The tail end of the book is Oreskes trying to figure out what kind of moral to draw from the fact that every other place in the world (Europe, South Africa, etc.), geologists accepted drift much, much sooner than in North America, and they kept trying to explain to US geologists and the US geologists were fucking abusive in return. Not her word. But they totally were. She talks about utility, and false theories making correct predictions and a bunch of other hoorah. Nowhere does she get into the status ladder of the scientists, in which physics is the top, chemistry is next down, and everyone else is scrabbling for attention and money and respect. That ladder _predated_ any of physics successes, FWIW (a little addendum to the never trust a physicist arguing with a geologist rule: Lord Kelvin got maybe one thing right, ever), and had a lot more to do with who could afford to become a physicist than anything else. If only scions of the well-to-do can enter a field, then that field will enjoy a halo entirely undeserved by the people producing things in that field. This is not a new concept. I do not know why we do not apply it to physicists, but I have a few theories, most of which reduce to: physicists are stubborn, loud, aggressive and relatively unwilling to listen to counterarguments. They do not concede even when everyone else can tell they are absolutely wrong. And then they invoke Galileo or Einstein or whatever, hey, he was right and everyone else disagreed so I must be right too. Yeah. In your dreams. Einstein was dead wrong on quantum mechanics, too.
If you read this review, and you sense bias, you are correct! I am biased! I have dear, dear friends who are physicists. I see their flaws, and avoid discussing areas of disagreement with them, which is largely the strategy adopted by the geologists. Invoking the human characteristics of the human participants would have helped the argument of this book.
In the meantime, everything about this book other than the concluding few dozen pages, and some quibbles with the adequacy of the explanation for why drift ultimately won -- everything is awesome. It is a super amazing and wonderful depiction of how something adopted out of expediency that turned out to be super useful reifies into dogma, and can be very, very, very difficult to dislodge. I was inspired -- 2/3rds of the way through the book -- to go have another look at migration to the Americas theories. One of the things I was thinking about when I made this leap was that land-bridges -- isthmia which come and go to explain things, in the absence of actual evidence that there was an isthmus there and now there is not -- land bridges are always bull shit. And I knew that Beringia was a land bridge, so I was like, I bet I can spot all these deny deny deny things going on in paleo-archaeological theories of who originally peopled the Americas. Yup. There it is. Cherry picking for DNA testing to be heavily weighted to North Americans. Nit picking every last aspect of sites with solid work and solid dates pre-Clovis to somehow suggest that, you know, those tools fell off the cliff that way, and the charcoal in the hearth in the rock shelter blew in from outdoors. And maybe monkeys made those tools. Seriously. Monkeys. Because the VERY IDEA that migration occurred to the Americas somewhere south before they went north is ANATHEMA.
OK. So, we definitely do have pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas. Most of the sites are pretty far south or actually in South America. We have not made it all the way to the proposition that, you know, BOATS, possibly from some other southern location, but we are sneaking up on it.
Bias is real. I have it. You have it. I know my biases. I know that there are no facts; there are observations which are interpreted. I think it is delightful when people try to be painstakingly objective, or at least entertain multiple interpretations for their observations. The earth scientists in Oreskes book are really delightful, even when they are wrong. The author is not particularly present in this book, but the glimpses or impressions this reader gathered were incredibly favorable: a careful person with integrity and good character.
I still do not much care for the geophysicists, tho.