My cousin Shoma was obsessed with Antoine Lavoisier. She had a bunch of books about him as a teen. I know this because I visited Bangladesh at 12 and there were all these Lavoisier books strewn across her bedroom. In 2004, I went back to visit my cousin in Dhaka, and by then she was working as a computer engineer. That was her undergraduate degree. But she had a master’s in physics, and her concentration was in cosmology (that is, she wrote her thesis on that topic).
I asked her about it, and she said it was Lavoisier in the back of her head. He was such a great scientist whose life was cut short by the Revolution, and one of her main inspirations in science as a young person. She knew ultimately she’d go the practical route and work with computers (she now has a high-level job at a Malaysian company and commutes back to Bangladesh), but she did the master’s degree because of her early passion for basic science drawn from this long-dead Frenchman. She had to honor it before life’s responsibilities made it impossible.
I bring up this anecdote because it’s pretty understandable for me. I too admired the dead white men of science. I didn’t care they were dead or white or men. I cared about their science. This is perhaps an old-fashioned view, but many of us still hold it. Today many people talk about things like “representation” and seeing people who “look like them” in positions of science and power. I understand, it’s very human.
But there is a world out there. That world doesn’t care about human skin color, ancestry, social status, religion, or sex. The world is what it is. That’s what scientists traditionally focused on, even though scientists were of this world, this social world, and so they sometimes missed the mark. But over the last few years, I feel many younger scientists now believe that it wasn’t missing the mark, that science’s social aspect must be embraced as a good, not as an accident that has to do with our frail humanity rather than the great science we aspire to.
But here we are. Dissenters. I am one of those, and I doubt I’ll ever change my mind. I also doubt my cousin, a hijab-wearing Asian Muslim woman, would disagree with me. Whatever ideological differences we may have, we agree about what science should be.
O/T and completely procedural:
Your recent Brown Pundits podcast on Indian History and DNA did not appear in your superfeed. It picked up a couple of recent posts on BP, but not the podcast.
Also, I an not getting notices of your Clubhouse rooms. I missed the one on Genetics of Obesity, a topic which I greatly resemble.
Razib,
(Sorry for an off-topic question)
You mentioned in the latest BP podcast that we can estimate steppe-IVC-AASI fractions in the genomes of people from the Indian subcontinent. How do I do that, and using what data? I have a 23-and-me account.
Mr. Khan, that is your “white-adjacent-ness”* talking. Confess and repent!
*In your case, literally. 😉
Here is a question for you, if you will indulge me: with which historical character do you identify the most?
@Numinous
Request raw sequence. Upload to GED match. Find which groups you cluster best with on Harrapa. Look at the table in Narsimha et al, as to the break down of those groups you cluster closest to. That will give you a rough idea.
“Trust the Science!
Which Science?
The Science that supports your side, of course!”
Compliments on the Arnade podcast.
There is a surfeit of information and observation on “the divide”.
Very little in the way of what to do about it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/endangered-wolf-spent-days-searching-mate-border-wall-blocked-rcna10769
Science or politics?
@thewarlock:
Thanks, I’ll try that.
There was a time when I might have quibbled about this post. Not anymore. Experiences have convinced me you were right all along.
I recently went to a local museum in which I saw the medicine chest of a local southern physician, that had served in the rebel army and then come back to an uneventful life after the American Civil War. Despite us living in the same town, there are no doubt differences between us. He probably owned slaves, I…do not (yet). He was white and I am brown. I did not recognize all his agents, and conversely he would probably assume Tofacitinib referred to an Aztec deity. But when I saw his materials, I knew in my heart that we were part of the same fraternity across time and place.
Not convinced? I recently saw a post on Reddit where my fellow American physicians were collegially commiserating with one of their opposite numbers from Russia. Perhaps unremarkable, until you realize that we are on the verge of a great power war between our countries, and science has been the last area of cooperation to fade away between our two sides.
To be a man of science is to connect to something larger than yourself, to recognize new predecessors and descendants, to create avenues of peace and comity with people who would have been your enemies. To a great degree, the cause of science is, or at least was, the cause of humankind.