Sciencespeak

Originally published 9 November 1987

The British physi­cist and philoso­pher of sci­ence John Ziman recent­ly pub­lished a book called Know­ing Every­thing About Noth­ing: Spe­cial­iza­tion and Change in Sci­en­tif­ic Careers. This col­umn is not about the book. It is about the title of the book.

Ziman takes his title from the old joke about the dif­fer­ence between philoso­phers and sci­en­tists: Philoso­phers learn less and less about more and more until they know noth­ing about every­thing. Sci­en­tists learn more and more about less and less until they know every­thing about nothing.

Spe­cial­iza­tion is endem­ic in sci­ence. More and more peo­ple are spend­ing more and more time learn­ing more and more about ever small­er details of the world. Research in sci­ence expands like the root sys­tem of a tree, divid­ing itself again and again, prob­ing with ever fin­er rootlets and ten­drils into the remotest cor­ners of nature.

Take a glance at the titles of typ­i­cal reports in any issue of Sci­ence, the week­ly jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence. Here are a few from [the 16 Octo­ber 1987] issue: “Down­reg­u­la­tion of L3T4+ Cyto­tox­ic T Lym­pho­cytes by Interleukin‑2″; “Her­i­tabil­i­ty at the Species lev­el: Analy­sis of Geo­graph­ic Ranges of Cre­ta­ceous Mol­lusks”; “Phy­lo­ge­net­ic Rela­tions of Humans and African Apes from DNA Sequences in the psi eta-Glo­bin Region.”

This is not a jour­nal for spe­cial­ists. The edi­tors of Sci­ence go out of their way to give an account in under­stand­able Eng­lish of what they judge to be the most sig­nif­i­cant reports in each issue, and they do a good job of it. Still, one can­not help but feel that sci­ence speaks more lan­guages than there are ordi­nary human tongues, and that a sci­en­tist in one dis­ci­pline is cut off by the curse of Babel from what goes on in dis­ci­plines oth­er than his own.

Some good things are happening

And there are good things going on, right across the board, from the immu­nol­o­gists who study lym­pho­cytes to the pale­o­bi­ol­o­gists who exca­vate Cre­ta­ceous mol­lusks. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the last of the three arti­cles list­ed above. The title is a jaw-break­er. Even the abstract of the arti­cle seems to have been writ­ten in a for­eign lan­guage. But what the arti­cle describes is of gen­er­al inter­est: A com­par­i­son of cer­tain seg­ments of the genet­ic code of chim­panzees, goril­las, orang­utans, and humans sug­gests that humans and chim­panzees are more close­ly relat­ed than either is to the goril­la. Chimps and humans may be clos­est cousins.

If non-spe­cial­ist jour­nals, such as Sci­ence, are so dense with spe­cial lin­gos, then what can be said of the huge num­ber of jour­nals devot­ed to par­tic­u­lar dis­ci­plines — or to sub­sets of sub­sets of par­tic­u­lar disciplines?

Ulrich’s Inter­na­tion­al Peri­od­i­cals Direc­to­ry lists more than 1500 peri­od­i­cals under the head­ing of biol­o­gy alone. Each year the British jour­nal Nature reviews new sci­ence peri­od­i­cals. This year’s crop includ­ed the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Phys­i­o­log­ic Imag­ing, Jour­nal of Enzyme Inhi­bi­tion, Jour­nal of the North Amer­i­can Ben­tho­log­i­cal Soci­ety, Micro­bial Patho­gen­e­sis, Trans­port in Porous Media, and Yeast. Among jour­nals sub­mit­ted to Nature but not reviewed were Applied Clay Sci­ence, and Dys­pha­gia: An Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal Devot­ed to Swal­low­ing and Its Disorders.

Appar­ent­ly sci­en­tists will pay through the nose for the priv­i­lege of know­ing more and more about less and less. A sub­scrip­tion to eight issues of Bone and Min­er­al costs $306. A year of Liq­uid Crys­tals (a month­ly) costs $490. What is the min­i­mum read­er­ship nec­es­sary to make a new jour­nal a com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful propo­si­tion? Pre­sum­ably, if all of the authors who pub­lish in the jour­nal also sub­scribe to it, regard­less of its price, the jour­nal is deemed a success.

The question is what to do

It is easy to decry the ten­den­cy toward spe­cial­iza­tion in sci­ence, but hard to know what should be done about it. Spe­cial­iza­tion has proved to be an effec­tive way to gain knowl­edge. Sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge grows faster than our abil­i­ty to assim­i­late much of what is learned. It is dif­fi­cult for an indi­vid­ual to be mas­ter of more than one lit­tle ten­dril of the huge root sys­tem of science.

Edu­ca­tors should be care­ful that young sci­en­tists not begin to spe­cial­ize too ear­ly, at least not until they have learned to appre­ci­ate the majes­tic com­mon themes that run through­out all of sci­ence. And we should val­ue peo­ple like Stephen Jay Gould and Philip Mor­ri­son, those rare sci­en­tists who are mas­ters of a par­tic­u­lar dis­ci­pline and also per­sua­sive gen­er­al­ists who help us rec­og­nize the com­mon themes.

But alas, for the most part, we find our­selves on the horns of a dilem­ma, philoso­phers on one horn, sci­en­tists on the oth­er. Here’s an arti­cle from the cur­rent issue of Review of Meta­physics: “Is Each Thing the Same as Its Essence?” That’s called know­ing noth­ing about everything.

And here’s an arti­cle from the cur­rent Chem­i­cal Reviews: “Acetyl­cholinesterase: Enzyme Struc­ture, Reac­tion Dynam­ics, and Vir­tu­al Tran­si­tion States.” That’s called know­ing every­thing about nothing.

Both approach­es leave some­thing to be desired. It is in the gap between the horns that we live our lives.