biodiversity

The readings for tomorrow, "biodiversity and the human prospect" and "interpreting biodiversity" made me think a lot about earth's natural desire to recycle and what it means to conserve. I found it interesting that this planet has undergone previous extinctions and has rebounded significantly and even more prosperously after. It causes one to wonder if the efforts to conserve will be fruitless because of the natural cycle of how things should be. This doesn't mean that no efforts should be put forth. I think conservation is very beneficial. I like the idea of environmental interpretive centers and think that they provide a positive experience for people who seek them out. I know that when I go hiking or visit a national park I like to read about the environment I'm in and it's nice to know that it's protected and cared for. I think spreading awareness of the looming ecological problem is a good step in prevention and the museums are a great place to educate people. It will be difficult to educate and spark activism throughout the entire human population however. There's just so many...so many houses, buildings, so much trash. So many questions about where to go from here? How do we stop it all? One wonders if maybe the earth should be recycled, if maybe there's nothing we can do to stop it. Human selfishness is undeniable. For instance in the first reading, "Biodiversity also contributes to our emotional and psychological well-being" and "Biological diversity enriches the quality of our lives". It makes one wonder what is the real reason scientists and activists want to conserve the biodiversity of our planet. Is it for the benefit of the planet, nature and all life forms, or for the benefit of the human race?





biodiversity and the human prospect
interpreting biodiversity
science at the museum
education at the musem

Response 04/06

Bruno Latour spends a great deal of time in the article A Textbook Case Revisited – Knowledge as a Mode of Existence by Bruno Latour, in Sciences Po Paris, a chapter for the STS Handbook focusing on the disparity between the approaches of Ludwig Fleck and William James toward understating the basis of relativism of knowledge. Latour provides a great deal of insight into each gentleman’s relative approach. Fleck believes that truth was an unreachable ideal in scientific research because discovery was both a multi directional and an iterative process, where new information must be acquired and analyzed, which can result in old information being replaced. James on the other hand felt that discerning the truth about any idea or thing relies not only on an analysis, but also on observation. Whatever the differences in philosophy, something that Latour writes about in a rather tedious fashion in this article, he doesn’t answer what I thought was the most interesting question he posed: ‘Why do we find troubling, superfluous, irrelevant, the displaying of the successive versions of the science of evolution?’

Looking at current societal trends to answer this question, it seems to me that we, as a people, find history interesting, but the ability to focus on each successive iteration of evolution for the general population is both boring and tedious. As a society, we have evolved to a pursuit of the bottom line, ‘just the facts’, the ‘need to know’. Focusing on the path that got us there is appropriate when needed, but it is typically viewed as someone else’s problem. The boss, the scientist, the person who cares, is the one who should be involved in the details. We just want the outcome. Looking at how the horse got to be the modern horse is interesting, but the American attention span is not capable of viewing 200 iterations of the horse, and noting the subtle differences in evolution.

The history of science, while nice to think about, is not really our focus. Society as a whole is concerned with the here and now, and unable, as James noted, to ascertain that there is a ‘continuous scheme’ to things. As a society we are so self centered, we find it difficult to contemplate our role in interactions with all other living things – why would we contemplate that there were 200 or 2000 evolutions of the modern horse?

The fact that “we see only what we know beforehand or that we ‘filter’ perceptions through the ‘biases’ of our ‘presupposition’” has not changed. Fleck’s belief lead for the first time, to integration of the social, collective, practical elements that contribute substantively to categories and accept the facts as they are has slowly become recognized as the preferred method. Understanding the relationship that defines the integration of scientific concepts within society is one key to answering the question that Latour poses. The newly developed discipline of STS (Science and Technology Studies) will lead the way into resolving this debate and hopefully provide new approaches to answer Latour’s question.

Posting 4/6

I found the Latour reading to be really interesting especially in conjunction with a class I took last semester on the social construction of knowledge. I found that there were often arguments about meaning and knowledge, similar to Latour's ideas and criticisms. I'm still not 100% sure what my feelings are on whether something has meaning before its defined. Latour infers that relativism in science is obsolete because science is predicated on objectivity, and yet relativism tells us there's no such thing as objectivity. Latour then argues that knowledge must have objective principals because we have to be basing our subjectivity on something. He also seems quite set on combating skepticism of science, and rather looking at it as an ongoing map of theories through time.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what to make of all this. I innately think in terms of relativism, and I find Latour to be non-linear and confusing and so I don't know if I agree or disagree with him. I think claiming that science has no need for epistemological theory is kind of strange. Although I'm not even sure he was claiming that. What I do understand and agree with is the idea of science as a network, that builds,change, and rectifies itself through time. That's why I think the exhibits at the museum that comment on the history of the object as well as the science tend to be more comforting. All in all I agree with Kevin that Latour is making a seemingly over complex argument for I guess the separation of skepticism and scientific discovery.

Response to Latour

I enjoyed Latour’s initial premise for the article, questioning the different timelines of the progression of science. It is important to view scientific progression, particularly in evolution, as two timelines: one that a shows how certain aspects of nature have changed over time, and the other that demonstrates in which order we gained the knowledge that allowed us to alter our perception of that change. The first is the closest to an objective view of the world as can be, but in its inseparability from the second, it can never be thought of as actually objective. Instead of thinking as our understanding of nature’s progression as an absolute truth, it is instead a progression of theories that continually are able to describe as much of nature as well as possible. However, Latour raises the issue of whether microbes existed before their discovery, and if so, how. This immediately seems to be a ridiculous question given the knowledge that we have now. How he treats the question is absurd, as he gives to two options as “They were sitting there, waiting to be known,” and “They date from the moment when philosophers or the scientists designate them.” These answers are directed at two different questions, as they pertain to the separate timelines of knowledge shown previously. The first relates to how nature existed in its own progression. The second is falsely conflating our knowledge of them with their very existence. These two ideas run parallel, as our awareness of the microbes is only that which allows further study said microbes, therefore allowing us to better understand their existence previous to our discovery of them. However, as knowledge is never absolute, and objective understanding is really just the progression or more and more effective theories, scientific progression has to be viewed as the both of these answers together. Latour, to me, seems to overcomplicate this idea, but to delve into that would take entirely too much time for this post.

4.5.10

I was very fascinated by Latour's idea of knowledge as a vector, stressing that fact retroactively validates itself, where time is of the essence. In regards to the relationship of time to knowledge, he writes that "we don't know yet, but we will know, or rather, we will know whether we had known earlier or not." The attached quote above summarizes another important aspect of knowledge, in which it is in many ways circumstantial and specifically subscribed to context. This emphasizes the margin for error in organizing artifacts and information in the museum environment. In the scenario of the horse exhibit, the two parallel lineages of horses demonstrated that scientists overlooked the anomalies in their theory of evolution to make a cleaner, more stylized presentation. However, the revisited lineage seems to have sparked some interesting controversy. It seems funny to me that, as humans, we can embrace the evolution of a species, but not always the evolution of knowledge.