My big take-away from cellular biology is that we are all meat bags, and, furthermore, we are all meat bags of bias. Rowan says this is incorrect, we are more like water balloons. Point taken, we are made up mostly of water, but I say that since the dry weight of cells is made up mostly of proteins, I’ll stick with meat bags. Ro tells me I’m not alone in this idea – he tells me to check out The Oatmeal:
Does it help you cope with the fact that you are a bag of meat sitting on a rock in outer space and that someday you will DIE and you are completely powerless, helpless, and insignificant in the wake of this beautiful cosmic shitstorm we call existence?
As meat bags, we mostly want to do two things: engage in cellular respiration (a complex chemical reaction that sounds like cells breathing, but is more like cells eating to provide energy for all the stuff our bodies do) and mating (to pass on our genes to be reproductively successful, as in “survival of the fittest” successful). I like that you don’t have to actually be physically fit to win the survival of the fittest award. In fact, you can sit on the couch with a heating pad, like a blob. All you need to accomplish is to reproduce.
In the real world, finding a mate with whom to reproduce requires a lot of emotional, and possibly financial, resources. We don’t have to think about the cellular respiration part but the mating part takes up so much time and energy that maybe we would be better off to be like Mr. Spock and have a mating season as portrayed in the Star Trek episode Amok Time, but without the part about fighting to the death. It would be more efficient, but probably less fun.
The Oatmeal comic is asking the question, “Does religion helps you endure existential angst of meat baggery? If so, carry on.” For me, the scientific process helps mitigate that angst. Careful, incremental work over time can have an incredibly powerful impact—think about the study of cancer, or viral infections, or data analytics. Our individual lives are brief, but contributing to a greater good provides some solace for the short duration that we get to be here.
I like the idea of society functioning as a meritocracy, where the best ideas win out. But the fly in the ointment is that we exist in the context of social, political, and economic environments, and that’s where things get messy.
It’s also where the bias part comes in. As meat bags of bias, we make all kinds of snap decisions, based on anecdotal data, that we are sure are true. In Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he writes about how we are riddled with cognitive biases, are poor at doing cost/benefit analysis, and are overconfident about our ability to understand the world. I couldn’t get through the whole book, but here is an overview of the logical fallacies Kahneman describes.
Even scientists, who are trained to recognize and avoid biased thinking, fail all the time. One science blogger noted that when double-blind review processes are used in scientific journals, more papers written by women get published then in single-blind processes (that when reviewers know who writes a paper, but the author doesn’t know who’s doing the reviewing).
The social environment also imposes obstacles to those who don’t look like scientists are “supposed” to. Maria Geoppert-Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for physics for her discoveries about nuclear shell structure. She was born in Germany in 1906, where she was refused entry into Ph.D. programs because she was a woman. She attended lectures anyway, and was eventually granted her doctorate in theoretical physics. After moving to the U.S., she worked at Columbia University, but for no salary, because, you guessed it, she was a woman. When she won the Nobel Prize, a San Diego newspaper headline said “S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize.” Can you image one that says something like “Father of Twins Wins Nobel Prize”?
A couple of months ago I saw the movie Hidden Figures, which chronicles the real-life story of three African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1960s. Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan were all kick-ass mathematicians who faced the double-whammy of racism and sexism. It was depressing to watch the casually-dispensed humiliations the women endured.
But I like to think that what keeps people going when they face persistent and pervasive bias in scientific fields is their love of the work. That seems to have been true of Geoppert-Mayers, who said, “Winning the prize wasn’t half as exciting as doing the work itself.” That’s what I am looking for – work that is satisfying and worthwhile. We’ll always be meat bags of bias, but we can come to deep insights by just powering through and staying true to what we discover.
Successive Approximation 