Findings

by CKR

For some time now, Harper’s Magazine has devoted its last page to “Findings,” a sort of summary of what the magazine deems to have happened in the world of science during the issue’s month.

Although the print version does not give the collator/author of the section,* the web spills the beans. Roger D. Hodge is listed there. According to his bio, he has edited “the acclaimed Readings section” and oversaw redesigns of the web site and the print version of the magazine. “Findings” is described as sardonic.

When the section first appeared, I thought I should be pleased: a literary-political magazine takes note of science. For a while, maybe a year or two, I made a point of reading it all the way through. No big deal, only a page, not even all text, artwork across the top.

But with time, I have come to read it less and less. I suppose the juxtaposition of various scientific findings is supposed to highlight their political significance or to make us think differently about ourselves and the world, or perhaps to encourage us to admire the depth and breadth of Hodge’s mind. (Why sardonic?)

I became tired of the mini-riddles encased in the semicolonized sentences and the implications that went further than the science warranted. Too many of the juxtapositions seemed to me to be nonsequiturs, which, I realize, may indicate my own inability to attain Hodge’s heights of wit and brilliance.

I’ve been thinking about why “Findings” appeals to me less and less. I think there is something fundamentally wrong in a column that presents scientific findings in as little as a clause or phrase, and I find the sardonicism tiring.

The latter may be my own limitation. To me, science is more positive than not; the things that can be considered frightening tell me that we need to work on ourselves, our society, and how we use that knowledge.

More important, scientific findings are usually qualified: for this limited experimental sample, at some times and places. Presenting them as sentences or less than sentences wipes away the qualifications and gives them a shiny veneer of unqualified truth. It’s easier to be sardonic about such shiny truths, but fundamentally inaccurate in presenting the science.

So let’s (another scientific thing; I can’t help it) look at the evidence.

A 2,300-year-old solar observatory was uncovered in Peru, and NASA was considering the use of lint rollers to protect astronauts from dangerous lunar dust.

Speculators were enjoying a brisk market in pandemic flu futures, and childhood obesity was linked to early-onset puberty among girls. [line break: ear-ly. Note to Harper’s copy editor: ugh.]

German researchers warned that warmer ocean temperatures could make the earth spin faster, and new data showed that Mars is also getting hotter.

Scientists found that smokers take more sick days than normal people, though new evidence also emerged that people who drink coffee and smoke cigarettes are far less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease.

Canadian surgeons encountered a man with green blood, and scientists discovered that people enjoy paying taxes.

Scientists found that robins living in noisy cities prefer to sing at night, and that shifting one’s eyes back and forth horizontally can enhance memory.

Those are some of the nonsequiturs in recent months. The grammatical purpose of a compound sentence is to connect clauses that are logically connected. As I was reading the last several columns, it appeared to me that the paragraphing to some extent collected similar ideas, where it had been pretty much arbitrary back when I was reading “Findings” regularly. So perhaps Mr. Hodge is moving toward a more scientific view of the world, or perhaps I am just recalling incorrectly.

Sex is always a hot topic. In the July issue, it enjoys an entire paragraph, scattered sentences in the May, June and August issues. Social science findings are juxtaposed with hard science like physics, observations of natural phenomena and things that are not science at all, like the pandemic flu futures. Much of observational science has been the collecting of isolated facts; until the understanding of DNA, biology was like that.

I love collecting rocks; round ones, red ones, spotted ones, crystal ones. That is what “Findings” does with science-related news. It picks up a round one here, a red one there, and puts them next to each other. The rocks themselves have much more that shows up under those circumstances: differences in grain size, texture, shine. You can learn from those differences. I don’t know what it is that we learn from juxtaposing findings that may or may not qualify as fact, especially when they have been polished down to a uniform clause size.

We don’t get the depth of the actual findings, and we don’t have a context in which to make the comparisons implied by their juxtaposition. I keep wondering what Mr. Hodge is thinking, but that is much less interesting than the findings themselves would be.

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* The author’s name may be buried in the small print of one of those legally-required expositions of the magazine’s hierarchy. I didn’t bother to try to dig it out.