The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 Page 2

  DAMON YOUNG is a philosopher and writer. Damon is the author of Philosophy in the Garden and Distraction, both published locally and abroad. He has written for The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, the ABC and the BBC, and is a regular radio guest. Damon has also published poetry and short fiction. He is an honorary fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

  EMMA YOUNG is an award-winning health and science journalist. She is a contributing editor at COSMOS magazine, and a regular contributor to New Scientist, and the author of the STORM series of science-based children’s action/adventure novels.

  Foreword:

  Not a Nobel laureate

  Tim Minchin

  The previous two collections in this excellent series have contained forewords written by Nobel laureates, so in pursuit of balance – I assume – this year’s foreword is being written by someone who is quite spectacularly not one. Therefore, rather than say something knowledgeable or insightful, I’ll begin with the dental health of the people of Oregon, USA.

  I’ve only been to Portland once, but geez it’s a great city – its population a paragon of liberalism and artiness, sporting more tattoos than you could point a regretful laser at, and boasting perhaps a higher collective dye-to-hair ratio than anywhere on earth. Great music, great art, wonderful coffee … It’s my kind of town. Except, the residents recently voted – for the fourth time since the 1950s – against adding fluoride to the water supply. It’s as if a mermaid on one’s lower back is an impediment to sensible interpretation of data, or perhaps unkempt pink hair acts as a sort of dream-catcher for conspiracy theories.

  This apparent inverse correlation between artistic interest and scientific literacy seems to play out all over the world. Go to Byron Bay in New South Wales, and you’ll find more painters and musos per capita than anywhere in the country, and – inevitably – a parallel glut of aura-readers, homeopaths and anti-vaccination campaigners. There’s clearly no such thing as a free lunch: you wanna listen to good blues, you have to have your palm read (and maybe get measles in the process).

  As an artist who gets aroused by statistics (among other things), I find this deeply troubling. But I reckon (and yes, I only reckon: one of many advantages of being a not-Nobel-laureate is that I may hypothesise with relative impunity) that the apparent relationship between artiness and anti-science is a result of people acting out cultural expectations and subscribing to popular myths, rather than a genuine division of personality type or intellect. I wonder if artists identify themselves as spiritual (whatever that means) and reject materialism for the same reason that they might wear a beret or take up smoking: it’s just adherence to a perceived stereotype, rather than some fundamental feature of the creative brain.

  Science is a masculine trait and art a feminine trait; people are either ‘right-brained’ or ‘left-brained’ thinkers; a materialist worldview is an impediment to the imagination; you need to believe in magic to write magically – all these tropes are familiar to us, and all of them myths. Or if they’re not entirely myths, they are nevertheless dull and unproductive categorisations.

  At the heart of some artists’ anti-scientific worldview is the suspicion that science is unromantic. The beauty of the human form is best revealed with charcoal, not with a scalpel. Love should be expressed in a sonnet, not measured with an fMRI. A sunset may be photographed or painted or reflected in song, but getting excited by its rate of fusion or the fact that it represents pretty much all the mass in the solar system is seen as somehow … unpoetic.

  And further into it: the fruit of the tree of knowledge will rob you of paradise. Facts are the opposite of inspiration. Scientists are cold, boring, and amoral. If you reject the spiritual you will never access the sublime.

  Of course, I’m building a straw-man only to burn the bastard.

  Science is not a bunch of facts. Scientists are not people who are trying to be prescriptive or authoritative. Science is simply the word we use to describe a method of organising our insatiable curiosity. It’s just easier, at a dinner party, to say ‘science’ than to say ‘the incremental acquisition of understanding through observation, humbled by an acute awareness of our tendency toward bias’.

  Douglas Adams said, ‘I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.’

  Science is not the opposite of art (nor the opposite of spirituality – whatever that is), and you don’t have to deny scientific knowledge in order to make beautiful things. On the contrary.

  Great science writing is the art of communicating that ‘awe of understanding’, so that we readers can revel in the beauty of a deeper knowledge of our world.

  This volume is a small, exciting, and illuminating reminder that art and science feed off each other, need each other, are each other. There is no conflict between art and science: there is only the wide-eyed pursuit of cool ideas.

  Introduction:

  An intimate dissection

  Natasha Mitchell and Jane McCredie

  ‘How about chooks, ciggies, then farts?’

  ‘Yes, that works!’

  If you’d been a fly* on the wall during the many sessions we spent compiling this anthology, you might have mistaken it for a comedy script in the making. Happily, there was plenty of hilarity alongside all the hard head work.

  The curious thing about choosing the best science writing is that the process itself is fairly unscientific. There are no formulas you can apply, no clearly defined exclusion criteria, no p values or confidence intervals.

  In the end it comes down to gut feeling (though, as one of the pieces in this book explains, it seems we have a second brain in our gut, so maybe that’s not as random as it sounds).

  We suspected early on that we could, if we weren’t careful, end up with a collection that read like a vaudevillian freak show. A cast of oddball animals, kooky sex (often involving oddball animals), and gee-whiz stories about scientific pursuit and discovery.

  The rich ecology of science writing contains all that fun stuff, but much more besides. In the spirit of open enquiry – a hallmark of science itself – we were keen to cast a wider net. Much wider.

  We wanted to look beyond the places and stories most readily associated with science to connect with the role it plays in the minutiae of our lives, our most intimate selves.

  We stumbled on it at the heart of a mother’s poignant account of her autistic son’s obsession with numbers, and her questions about how we define ‘normal’; in a poet’s lyrical exploration of cadaver donation, drawn from his own experiences as a professor of neuroscience and anatomy; and in a novelist’s moving tribute to her father, who paradoxically combined his career as a physician with a staunch belief in creationism.

  Science isn’t just done with the contents of a test tube or down the barrel of a microscope, and it doesn’t just belong to scientists. It belongs to any of us who have ever wondered about the origins of the universe or the blood pumping through our veins. Or, in the case of science journalist and blogger Becky Crew, about the way the male blue sea anglerfish transforms itself into gonads.

  This anthology celebrates enquirers of every variety – scientists who write, and writers who ‘do’ science. And it celebrates the art of language, of prose and poetry. Reading beautiful writing is one of the greatest gifts our fat set of frontal lobes has to offer us. Science writing also serves to open our eyes to the wider world – it can temper our own narcissistic tendencies by reminding us that we’re not the only weird, wonderful creatures eking out an existence in the cosmos.

  A recurring theme in this book is the passion and painstaking effort that underpins scientific work. You’ll find it in Jo Chandler’s riveting mystery story of medicine and cannibalism in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and in astronomer Fred Watson’s rollicking insider-account of Pluto’s demotion as a planet.

  It’s there too in philosopher Damon Young’s piece about Charles Darwin’s shy, almost reluctant, investigation of the way life on
this planet evolved. It could be argued that this is the scientific process at its best: a humble search for understanding and, importantly, a willingness to be proved wrong.

  Actually, Darwin and his theories pop up a few times in this collection: you’ll read how he played a role in naughty-Catholicschoolgirl-turned-art-historian Janine Burke being expelled, and Nicholas Haslam’s account of the scientist’s 25-year struggle with debilitating intestinal turmoil. Yes, no stone has been left unturned.

  Speaking of matters intestinal … never fear … farts … and, yes, ciggies and chooks all made it in here too.

  The two of us come to this collaboration with many years of writing or broadcasting about science under our belts. We are fairly convinced we have the best gig going. Scientific research is as satisfying as it is challenging to report on. There’s great pleasure to be had in turning the abstract and impenetrable into the tangible, in making meaning out of jargon. As British science writer Ed Yong describes it, we get to cover the ‘wow beat’.

  But here’s a big all-guns-blazing caveat to that.

  As science journalists, we don’t see ourselves as cheerleaders for science. Nor are we here to solely serve as translators for the scientific establishment. Science is about robust and rigorous enquiry, and so is the best science writing.

  We live in an era where the battlelines have been drawn. Scientific controversies now explode into the public arena with the intensity of an incendiary device, and scientists and some science writers can feel the need to take sides and defend their turf. One person’s scepticism has become another person’s denial, and it can be hard to have a nuanced public discussion about scientific findings, and their inevitable uncertainties, without brickbats and polemics being hurled across the trenches.

  Science needs its critical, dispassionate observers as well as its defenders. There’s much to defend – strong data produced by well-designed, reproducible experiments offers us an explana-tory power like little else. It’s allowed us to make medicines, chart galaxies and banish smallpox. Without it, we risk falling prey to our own superstitions and untested anxieties.

  Yet, like all human endeavours, scientific research can be flawed, subject to grandiosity, to unquestioned assumptions, to commercial pressures, or to the temptation to tweak results to achieve a desired outcome.

  In this collection, Clive Hamilton investigates some of the wilder geoengineering schemes being canvassed as fixes for global warming. In the absence of international agreement over carbon emissions, why not use the mother of all nuclear explosions to shift Earth’s orbit a little further from the Sun? That should cool things down a bit.

  At a less cosmic level, Gina Perry’s piece on Stanley Milgram’s notorious obedience experiments exposes the way he cut ethical corners and manipulated the outcomes of his research. Decades on, a painful legacy remains in the lives of the human subjects he and others recruited.

  Nicky Phillips reports on another group of scientists who are convinced they can bring the dodo back from extinction. Why not at least try?

  We need skilled writers to connect us with these developments and debates more than ever. Yet, globally, science writing is at a critical turning point, some would say a crisis point. In Australia, two major newspapers have recently laid off their most experienced science and health journalists. Broadcast science journalism isn’t a growth area either, despite a strong tradition in this country. Specialist and investigative journalism are on the wane worldwide, as the old business model for newspapers undergoes radical reinvention. The story is much the same for book publishing.

  All is not lost. With change comes opportunity. That’s cultural evolution at work. Rising from the ashes will be new forms – resilient, mutant forms – that will find a home on new platforms. Already podcasts, e-readers and social media are connecting readers and audiences with new ways to share words and ideas.

  Ours is a scientific age like no other. The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 is, we hope, a reminder of why readers are drawn to science stories, and why we need writers who are adept at telling them.

  We hope you enjoy this collection as much as we’ve loved mucking with the genre to make it for you. Of course, most of the hard work was done by the writers themselves. Some we’ve mentioned here, but we are indebted to all twenty-nine of this year’s talented contributors for their smart, poetic words.

  * Almost certainly drosophila!

  The weather of who we are

  Mark Tredinnick

  Talking about the weather

  Don’t start with the weather: Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing. Which I’m breaking here, start to finish.

  Everything starts with the weather, so why wouldn’t a writer? Why wouldn’t we all? And often we do: How’s the weather over there? Hot enough for you? Have you ever seen so much rain? Though these days most of us spend most of our lives inside (93 per cent, to be precise), still we live inside the weather. There’s no escaping it: it’s how the world speaks to us; it tempers and colours all our days and nights. It clothes us; it decorates and articulates the places where we live.

  Start thinking about the weather and you soon find yourself in outer space: the sun’s radiation, the orbit of the earth around our star, the sun; the daily rotation of the planet; the tilt of this orb in its daily spinning; the location of our planet just near enough to, and yet far enough from, the sun to kickstart life and keep it going, to let the whole miraculous system work and keep on working within the insulation of the atmosphere.

  For weather is how our planet behaves in space, and how the atmosphere curdles and gyres and rotates around it; weather is intergalactic and it is global. But think about the weather another way and you are right here, and what the weather means is how things look and feel outside your window. For weather is also local; it’s how the sky behaves when it turns up at your place: the distinctiveness of the light at dawn, the way the wind picks up from the west in the afternoons, the species and colour of clouds that inhabit this valley with you, the heaviness of the rain that falls out of winter storm fronts or dumps from January southerlies, or the way rain rarely falls this side of the mountain, the size of the hail in April downpours, the particular shade of green the sky turns above the bay ahead of a tropical storm in late November, the speed with which the ground fog comes up the paddocks from the flood plain some nights in early winter, the blueness of the light in June over the harbour, the characteristic heaviness of the frost in the east-facing lawns in July, the weight of the pre-Christmas winds.

  There is always weather to report, and there will be weather long after there are any of us around to report it. Weather is the oldest story in the world – one we want to keep on telling each other when we meet, as though it were part of who we are, a story that wants to keep on telling itself, and affecting us, whether we like it or not. Clouds – those thought bubbles of the atmosphere, those oracular utterances of the sky, those prophesies, those poems – may have taught us to think, especially higher thoughts, to speak our mind and to change it.

  And still we’re at it, this most ancient discourse, for the weather never lets up, and it continues to affect the way we experience life, and our lives, on earth.

  These days, weather talk is bigger and more abstract, for although we are, most of us, removed from it, living most of our lives under cover, we can read the weather of the entire planet on our laptops and television screens. Now more than ever, everyone else’s weather is our own. Weather talk isn’t small talk any-more; now it is most of the news. Weather talk is politics now. It is econometric discourse, because the weather is changing around us, and changing faster, perhaps, than it’s ever changed before – though it’s hard to tell with weather: its patterns are long and our memories are short, our data inexact and shallow. It looks like long-established weather norms are changing, and not in our favour, and it looks, so the climate change hypothesis goes, as if we may have caused it, changing the chemistry and behaviour of the atmosphere
we conduct our lives inside, by burning too much fuel, in part, to defy and transcend the weather – to stay too warm, to keep too cool, to prosper everywhere, all the time, regardless of the weather.

  Weather is the stage on which we enact the drama of our lives. We breathe it in; we see embodied in it our fears and desires; it falls on our head. And we’d better take care of it: our lives are in its hands. Its drama has become our own. A morality play in real time. The days of our very own lives.

  The weather of who I am

  I go the way the weather goes, though not always in sync. Eddies of energy rise and fall in me, travel me in a ceaseless, undulant, sometimes turbid, and recursive circuit. The world that is my body is travelled by weather. We are creatures made largely, like the planet, of water; we are physical beings under the sun, moving in space, small wildernesses of microbes and energies, and all the rest of it; we are made of the same atoms the world, the whole universe, is made of; we are creatures adapted profoundly to the earth in its manifestations. So it should not surprise us that we have weather, too, and are, even in these air-conditioned days, affected by changes of mood of the weather of the larger world – of air pressure and light, or wind and rain and cloud.

  Sometimes the weather going on inside your self is the same weather going on inside your habitat; sometimes your weather rises out of memory or desire or fear. Each of us is a small world trafficked by weather, emotional and intellectual and physical. And perhaps how we feel is just how who we are responds to the whirlpools of energy, internal and external, that course us – the highs and lows. Certainly this is how my life goes. I harbour weather; I am made of it. And this helps me understand the world, and all the weather it suffers, how the world and all of us within it are weathered, without end.