The Three-Legged Woman and Other Excursions in Teaching

The Skeptic

129 hopes, in my office. My reluctance to cooperate frustrated them. But when they left they magnanimously handed the intelligent design text back to me as a gift, “in the faith,” as one put it, “that it will eventually open your eyes.” To this day, it has still not had the desired effect. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p theskeptic When I was an undergraduate student in marine biology, doing a semester of coursework in the Virgin Islands (how one martyrs oneself for science), everyone in my class, as a sort of capstone project, had to plan, carry out, write up, and publicly present an original experiment—in the space of four weeks. We were a talented and enthusiastic lot of early twenty-somethings, so we went about the work with élan. My partner and I, for example, examined the symbiotic relationship between a small, defenseless, and probably blind crab and a large sea urchin, Meoma ventricosa. Another team examined the nocturnal migratory behavior of barracuda; while another concocted a set-up to raise seaweeds in processed sewage water. But the experiment that caught my eye was one that was constructed by a couple of fun-loving women in the class. In between marathon games of poolside bridge, they occasionally arose—as languidly as mist on a lake—to examine their project. This consisted of a large, wooden, Y-shaped trough of seawater (a so-called “Y-maze”). Their subject was a solitary sea urchin (Diadema antillarum) with exceptionally long, barbed spines. (Upon our arrival in St. Croix, the professors had cautioned us 130 p f o r b i d d e n f r u i t s against so much as touching this urchin, for the brittle, barbed spines embedded themselves deeply and painfully. Shortly after this cautionary lecture, I slipped in the water and sat on one.) In each of the arms of the “Y” the women placed a different species of alga. Then they placed the unwitting urchin at the far end of the stem of the Y. Over the course of hours, and if it were so inclined, the urchin made its way, laboriously, up the Y, to the fork, where it would—one hoped—choose one alga over the other to graze upon. It was the perfect endeavor for budding scientists-cum-bridge-players, for it required only that one look at the experiment every few hours, then check off the appropriate alga as selected by the urchin. The thing was, every so often the urchin got to the fork in the Y and halted. At this point a crowd of students would gather, in sympathetic psychic vibration with the two women, willing the urchin to make a move one way or the other. (On one occasion one of the students, unable to bear up under the frustration of the invertebrate’s indecisiveness, shouted, “Choose!” He startled everyone but the urchin.) But there was another way. If the urchin kept the women away from their bridge game for too long, one of them would gently rock the trough of seawater. More often than not, this would be enough to stir the urchin from its lethargy, making it list toward a particular alga (usually the one toward which the rocking of the trough had nudged it). Then they would note the result, resettle the urchin at the far end of the trough (but gently!) and return to their card table (avec piña coladas). There is a moral here, and it is this: in science there are terrible pressures to produce results. These pressures, for the most part, are known as tenure, grant money, publication, and competition with colleagues. What this means is that, in the course of an experiment, a researcher, sensing that he or she “knows” what the outcome will be, occasionally hurries things along by “jostling the urchin.” The Skeptic p 131 (There are stellar historical examples of this. Gregor Mendel, the monk who discovered how sex worked, is thought to have been somewhat “loose” at times in the interpretation of his observations in order to make his numbers jibe. Pasteur and Newton have also been targets of similar allegations.) I’m not talking about outright fraud here, but rather something far more visceral and human; that is, seduction: yielding to the siren call of success, which...