Roots, Branches, STEMS, and Leaves

Astral Facts, Mid-Summer 2014

Roots, Branches, STEMs, and Leaves

Astral: (Theosophy) Consisting of, belonging to, or designating, a kind of supersensible substance alleged to be next above the tangible world in refinement; as, astral spirits; astral bodies of persons; astral current.

Roots, Branches, STEMs, and Leaves.

A few years ago Eats, Shoots & Leaves was a best-selling book on grammar and usage.   The title comes from the author, Lynne Truss, reading a description of the panda bear which had a misplaced comma after “eats.”  Of course, the original meaning (without the comma) was to identify two things the panda eats (A panda eats shoots and a panda eats leaves.)  However, the insertion of the comma puts the three words into a series that follows a pattern.  Since “eats” is a verb, so then must the other two be verbs:  A panda eats, it shoots, and it leaves!  Thus, restaurants began putting up signs declaring the right to refuse service at their own discretion.  Apparently the restaurants were worried about replacing the food servers if pandas ate at their establishments!

Hopefully, other people who also read the original source were able to read beyond the grammar anomalies to grasp the gist of the content.  Realistically, probably the majority of the readers didn’t even notice the discrepancy in a sort of “ignorance is bliss” state of being.   Frankly, those “humanities science” details, like artwork on the refrigerator in many family kitchens, don’t really seem to impact life with much significance.  After all, if we read the “serious” news, we know that our culture is declining due to deficiencies of education in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), which is where educators are under pressure to patch the leaks and raise the bars.

Yet, on my campus, the faculty in many of the STEM disciplines are acting to “stiffen” the course prerequisites, making the skills in areas such as English 101 required prior to enrollment in their basic entry level content courses.  When students lack the basic elements of language comprehension in reading, writing, and speaking and other forms of critical thinking, the complexities of the STEM content get muddled in manipulation.

Just as life in a colorless cubicle, without even basic art on the refrigerator door, seems spiritually bleak, STEM content in isolation can lead to lifeless suppression of creative thought and inspiration.  The successful ingest the refrigerator art and much more.

For example, last spring I had the apparent misfortune of one of my back molars going rogue on me, and I ended up patiently being a patient in my dentist’s waiting room, knowing a root canal was looming up in my near future.  I say “misfortune,” but Garrison Keillor has noted, “Bad experiences never happen to writers; it’s all material,” which might be the case, for a fairly current issue of Scientific American (April  2014, V. 310, N. 4) was nestled in among the magazines devoted to people and fashion.  Deciding to choose the “read less traveled,” I thumbed through the pages to try and take my mind off the pain in my jaw.  As I did so, I was surprised to find the contents included many “interdisciplinary” humanities science references appreciably much advanced beyond the basic refrigerator artwork.

For example, near the back (I tend to thumb through magazines from the back as a technique I learned as a young boy looking through Readers Digest for the little quips at the end of the stories) I discovered Steven Mirsky’s article “The Numbers Game” about baseball, which begins with “The lush green of the outfield.  The pop of horsehide ball hitting cowhide mitt….” (88) – much more poetic than scientific!  Immediately, he references the “holy trinity” referring to the statistics of three kinds of athletic performance.  Without a familiarity with the "trinity" concept that originated in the fields of the humanities sciences, readers would find the reference is obtuse.  In the right hand column of the article, the reference to annus miribilus is not some exotic bacterial strain a proctologist would study, as many historians and other humanities scientists would recognize. Hopefully, the proctologists would look into it!

  

On the other side of this page, Michael Shermer begins the article “The Science of Lying” by recounting the GEICO commercial of Abraham Lincoln being asked by his wife, “Does this dress make my backside look big?” and “Honest Abe” must struggle with the ethics of the honesty of his answer. Noting how the humor of the situation appeals to the readers, Shermer comments on the test of love and loyalty at the root of this appeal.  This sounds more like humanities science content than STEMwork! 

Shermer goes on to reference the book Lying (2013) by neuroscientist Sam Harris, quoting Harris’ comments on the ethics of telling the truth, for “by lying, we deny our friends access to reality-…” with Harris' conclusion to “tell the truth with tact.”  Harris notes that even white lies end up “associated with poorer-quality relationships” (87).  It certainly seems that a lot of “humanities science” has been stirred in with the STEM content here!

Paging further back toward the front, I found another article on RNA research; the authors (Christine Gorman and Dina Fine Maron) begin with the statement, “Starting with the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953, the story of molecular biology has featured more characters than a Russian novel” (54).  Not only are the writers familiar with the modus operandus of classic Russian authors, they expect familiarity of the reference to be enlightening (and somewhat amusing) to the particular readership of such a publication.  Obviously, it takes more than basic STEM education to make the connection.

In between is a much longer in-depth article on “The Secret Spiritual History of Calculus,” by UCLA mathematics historian Amir Alexander, which explores the original debate between two 17^th Century Scholars, Italian Bonaventura Cavalieri and Swiss Paul Guldin.  As the editors note in prefacing the article, “In this adaptation of a chapter from [Alexander’s] upcoming book, he explains that Guldin and Cavalieri belonged to different Catholic orders and, consequently, disagreed about how to use mathematics to understand the nature of reality” ( 82).  Again, the mixture of STEM and humanities science is obvious.

The publication has much more, such as the article by Nola Rogers on spider courtship entitled “Love Him or Eat Him?” that suggests the choice seems to hinge on “feminine whims” rather than “scientific” principles.  Rogers ends with a quote from the researchers, “Our results provide evidence that different female personalities can lead to different outcomes in the interactions between males and females in a sexual cannibal” (24). 

Whoa!  This sounds like something from a Gothic novel or the premise for the next cable TV miniseries!  Can you envision it: a string of crime scenes after someone eats, shoots, and leaves and these events criss-cross a series of sex crimes involving mutilated male corpses!  Let your imagination run with it!

 Certainly all these articles were written by natural scientists with obvious training in good writing; thus perhaps they are not representing the scope of expertise of the STEM community as a whole.  Nonetheless, the references were expected to be understood by the target audience (primarily the STEM community). Just as it is good for us humanities scientists to be familiar with the STEM world, so do the humanities science disciplines aid in connecting to physical reality.  

Thus, it seems that for truly quality education, educators should help students put emphasis on the fields of the humanities sciences so they can root, branch, and STEM before they leave!

  

Walter Lowe

Astral Facts is a somewhat regular presentation of Humanities Science, produced in the bowels of the Humanities Science offices during the academic year.