Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host massive mobile YouTube. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what's our topic today?

Well, Masimo, last month the American Anthropological Association revised their official mission statement, and in the process, they decided to get rid of any mention of the word science. So the old wording began, quote, The purposes of the association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects. And now the new wording begins. The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. So this decision has raised eyebrows as well as hackles among many anthropologists and plenty of non anthropologists as well.

So today on rationally speaking, we are going to discuss the implications of the decision, whether anthropology should count as a science and why it matters. So maybe we should start by putting this decision in the context of the history of the field of anthropology.

There's been, as I have read, a kind of a pendulum swinging trajectory of the field in terms of where it locates itself in the sciences or the humanities or the social sciences. So back in the 1950s, there was the development of some new technologies like radiocarbon dating that allowed for more rigorous quantitative scientific approaches to studying human history. And then in the 60s and 70s, anthropologists started to feel that the field was becoming dominated by cultural anthropology, which tends to use some of the less scientific methods and I think also were the most influenced by this kind of relativism about truth that originally stemmed from postmodernism.

So it's been interesting to see how that background has played into people's interpretations of the decision. I read a quote from Peter Peregrine, who's the president of the Society for Anthropological Sciences. So you can probably guess where he stands on the issue from his organization name.

And he said that this move, quote, just blows the top off of the tensions between these two factions in anthropology. And he he saw it as an attack on on science, essentially, and attributed it to, first, the influence of critical anthropologists who see anthropology as kind of an arm of colonialism and imposing Western attitudes and mores on other cultures. And second, as stemming from a postmodernist critique of science's claim on truth.

So let's go back for a second to to a major division these days in within anthropologists, between cultural anthropologists and physical anthropologists. And sometimes it's actually a physical division, meaning that there are actually two departments of anthropology and some campuses and they're housed in different parts of a campus, which right there tells you that there is a tension between the two, even though they both use the word anthropology, in some cases, they actually are in the same place, on the other hand.

And and it's in some sense, this is not typical just of anthropology mean there are other disciplines that have internal tensions of a different matter. For instance, the one and I'm become more familiar with recently is that the tension between Analytica and Continental philosophy, even though they both invoke the word philosophy, arguably they do things in a substantially different way and they often don't get along very well, even though one even even when their faculty are housed in the same department, in the same in the same place, in a lot of departments that actually specialize and they become the one or the other, but not a combination of the two.

So whenever there is that kind of tension, there clearly is a difference there in the as you pointed out, in the approach to things and the assumptions that go into doing the work. But it seems to me that it's hard it's hard to argue that physical anthropology is not a science. It's it clearly uses the methodologies of science. Perhaps there are no overarching theories of, you know, of the physical and cultural evolution of humans. That may be true, but that's that hasn't stopped other sciences from claiming to be a science.

Psychologists think that they're doing science. And I think they're doing a pretty good reason to think that they are, even though they're notoriously lack and overarching theory of psychological behavior or human behavior. Right.

I mean, I think anthropology is an especially loaded field because there's been this tension in the field over what do we mean by truth. So there was one blogger I was reading who was responding to the decision, and she, in fact, was applauding the decision. But let me read you her reason for applauding the decision. She says Indigenous knowledge is only recently being understood and accepted by those in the West and in anthropology as the equally complex and equally valid indigenous counterpart to Western science.

For the AAA, maintaining the use of the term science and their mission statement served to maintain the colonizing, privileging superior position naledi of anthropology that continues to plague the discipline. So I think that's why this move was so politically loaded. It wasn't just about classifying what is it that anthropology is trying to do? What kinds of questions is it trying to answer? It was a statement about should we have an absolutist or relativistic approach to what is true? Right.

And at least in some people's estimation, this is not the only way to interpret the Ayres decision right now.

Correct. In fact, we're going to be talking about in a minute, but a different way of interpreting this. But the decision. But let's go to this, which I think it's a false dichotomy to some extent. I think you're right that certainly part of the tension there is coming from the postmodernist critique within anthropology and also essentially from the idea that some members of practitioners of the discipline do see they're they're keenly aware of a lot of sort of the the colonialist implications of doing anthropology by going to study as from a Western society perspective, we're going to study a different culture and applying for all effective purposes the frame of reference of Western cultures to to to other cultures.

So let's go back to this idea that there is a sharp dichotomy, both within anthropology, pertinent to this particular discussion. And I think actually more generally, whenever this kind of discussion comes up and the economy is supposed to be well, on the one hand, we have science that tries to do things objectively, at least as an ideal. And on the other hand, we have sort of a post-modernist or cultural relativistic critique that says, well, that's simply not possible.

And it is a form of implicit colonialism, essentially cultural colonialism to assume even that that you can't study in another society, another culture in the sort of an abstract and objective way, as opposed to, on the other hand, be bound by your own cultural constraints. I think that that is that kind of way of framing. The problem is in general frames that every discussion between postmodernists and non postmodernists and I think is not particularly useful because in fact, the truth arguably lies somewhere in the middle.

Some philosophers of science called the middle perspective the middle position, perspective, wisdom and a perspective. Its position is the idea that, no, you cannot probably achieve anything like universal truth that is independent of a point of view. But that doesn't mean the point of views are completely arbitrary. The analogy there often is about how we perceive color, hence the term perspective. Right? So the idea is that you can perceive colors in a different way from what I perceive colors, particularly, for instance, because I'm partially colorblind.

So certainly I perceive differently from the way you do. Right. And so every human being perceived is going to listen to a slightly different way, sometimes surprisingly in a significantly different way. But that doesn't mean that there aren't objective things of the matter about the wavelengths of light, about the way light reflects on certain surfaces and the way in which the human brain works in order to analyze and interpret that kind of information. So it's a mix between the two.

In one sense, there is something objective about it that is independent of the first person experience. On the other hand, the first person experience cannot be avoided or completely eliminated. And I'm wondering if that kind of approach wouldn't make for something a little more useful in the in the context of this discussion.

Right. So, I mean, I agree with you that it's a false dichotomy between completely objective knowledge and and completely subjective. I mean, one of the I think useful influences that postmodernism has had has been to remind scientists and social scientists that there is an influence of their own cultural background on how they interpret things and what things they want to study.

So so in that sense, you're right, it's not completely objective. I just think that I was giving that a sort of like a background to frame this decision against, because that's how a lot of people are interpreting it.

But I think that you could probably interpret the decision a lot more charitably to the AAA and say that really it was more of an inclusive change.

So the goal was to include forms of anthropology that aren't scientific rather than excluding those that are, which is probably closer to their real intention, just based on the statements that I've that I've read from them, even though the decision did have the effect of making a lot of anthropologists, especially the more archaeological or physical anthropologists, feel alienated, actually, maybe we should break down the different kinds of anthropology, because I've been referring to different kinds and I haven't actually laid it out.

So as I understand it, there are four main sub. Fields of anthropology there. I mean, overall, the field is just about studying humans over time, human behavior and society and culture over time. But so the first field is biological or physical anthropology. So they study the history of human evolution and that also includes primatology. So that's I mean, an important component of understanding how we came to be biologically, physically the way we are now, cultural anthropology, studies, culture, usually by observing and comparing cultures.

So they're looking at social organization, technology, different approaches to conflict resolution, religion, everything, really.

And then there's archaeology.

So they're studying human material culture that could include anything from arts and crafts to the garbage produced by society.

And how that was all used by archaeologists of the future will have a lot of work on the 21st century. Indeed.

And then finally, there's linguistic anthropology, studying the variations in language over time and between different cultures and the social uses of language.

So I think we're probably going to have to distinguish between the different kinds of anthropology when we're talking about its status as a science, because these fields are I mean, they're all studying humans generally, but they're doing very different things.

Well, clearly, physical biological anthropology is closer to to an obvious, obviously, scientific discipline. You know, it uses the same approaches as palaeontology or comparative anatomy and things like that. So so it's clearly that is on the on the science end of the spectrum. Now, the cultural anthropology is probably the one that is closer to the humanistic side of the spectrum with the linguistics and the archaeology somewhere in the middle, probably a linguistic closer to the if we really have to put him in the line that the archaeology closer to the or not.

Well, actually, that's interesting you say that because I didn't mean that as a ranking.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

I'm sure that right there certainly as a as a as a progression along some kind of axis that goes from science to human to human. It is then I can see linguistic linguistic anthropology closer to the humanistic side, although I'm sure that they you know, a lot of linguistics actually done this these days with, you know, heavy statistical analysis and comparative methods that are borrowed from the from the hard the scientists sciences. I wanted to bring in the discussion also something that was written in The New York Times as a response is a commentary to the original article by Tom Belder staff, who is the editor in chief of The American Anthropologist, which is in fact the Journal of the American Anthropology Association.

And he said yes to trying to strike an intermediate chord, that it's kind of closer to the one that I was talking about earlier about above perspective is that although he didn't use that that way of putting it. Here's a quote directly from his letter to The New York Times. He says, Calibrating a telescope is crucial to valid knowledge. Equally crucial is the conceptual calibration offered by understanding the impact of colonialism in science, not just in anthropology and how claims to authority shape knowledge.

This conceptual calibration makes science more scientific. So is analogy here is that, look, the postmodernist critique is not entirely out of whack. They do have a point that you need to take into account the fact that you're looking at different culture that might work inherently in a different way from the way in which you're used. And you may also have to take into account that your work is not necessarily better in any absolute way, is just a way of doing things, which means that if you want to really understand from an objective perspective as possible the other culture, you have to calibrate for your own.

You have to filter out to some extent your own biases, your own framework that that is hard to avoid if you're not conscious of it. So the idea is that the postmodern critique simply makes you aware or makes you more conscious of the feeling that you're not a objective observer out there and living in limbo. You're actually a member of a culture of your own that comes with certain stereotypes and comes to certain ways of thinking and that you're in there and you're going to project on anything else that you study.

And I think that that's that's a good observation. I mean, that goes actually for any for the entire postmodernist critique. I mean, as you know, I tend to be pretty critical of postmodernism when it's pushed to the extreme. But I do think that the fundamental message is, in fact, on target. There is when when feminist epistemology, for instance, which which we're talking in the past in fairly harsh tones. But when they do have a point, because if it's not pushed too much, because the point is, well, look, you might be thinking that you're doing a study, for instance, of gender differences in an objective way.

But if those studies are carried out mostly by white men who thinks in a certain. I think in a certain way about gender differences, it's inevitable that those whatever biases those people have are going to come into their research and it's a good sort of vaccine against that bias if you are consciously aware of it. You know, we talked about in the past all sorts of of, you know, cognitive biases that everyone has. And most of us are not aware of it.

When we discuss with terrorists that her book mistakes were made by not by me. That was the whole point of the discussion that we all have those biases and it helps being aware of what those biases are and how they work, because that way you can filter filtered them to some extent. You're never going to achieve complete objectivity, but you're certainly going to be able to do a better job than if you were not aware of it or if you were convinced that you are, in fact, a completely objective observer of whatever it is that you're studying.

Yeah, so I think that there are two main contrasts going on here that have been getting conflated when people are talking about the anthropology as a science are not science debate.

So there's there's the question of science versus other fields like history or or sociology in which both of the fields are trying to get an objective knowledge about the world. But it's a different kind of knowledge or a different kind of goal. And then there's the question of how reliable or or subjective are the conclusions of the field. So a lot of what we've been talking about so far has been about like is anthropology producing objective truth or or is it subjective and relativistic?

And I think you're right. There's no there shouldn't be an absolute dichotomy there. But but I think what's equally important is the former contrast between not is anthropology objective, but what kinds of questions is the field really trying to address? Because that has a lot to do with whether people want to think of it as a science.

So, you know, the knowledge that a field produces can still be perfectly reliable and objective, even if it isn't, quote unquote, scientific, in the same way that the knowledge history produces can still be reliable, even if it's not scientific. So, for example, a question like did did the Battle of Hastings occur in October or November of ten, sixty six? That's that's not really a scientific question, but it is a question that you can answer with a pretty high degree of accuracy.

If you collect enough evidence or a question like what languages is this particular language related to?

Or was was the moral philosophy of Hume an influence on the signers of the Declaration of Independence? I mean, these are two examples of questions that are not really scientific questions, but they can still be answered with like a high degree of objectivity as opposed to, say, interpreting a poem right now.

That's correct. I mean, you know, you don't have to convince me that there are other kinds of knowledge that are not scientific, but they're still objective, or at least they refer to questions that can be settled, as a matter of fact, in the examples that you actually brought up.

So maybe I think instead of the question of science are not science, the better question would be to classify fields based on objective versus subjective and specific versus general. That's sort of how I think about fields when I'm sort of mentally classifying them.

So an example of a specific question would be like, when did this particular society develop language? And then an example of a general question would be why did some societies develop or why did some tribes develop language sooner than others? So you're trying to in the latter case, you're trying to get at a general phenomenon, a general like cause and effect principle. And that, I think, is where things start to look more like science.

Yeah, I think I think that's a good point. But there's yet another perspective that I think, again, emerges from the discussion in the New York Times article, which may be more difficult to settle. And I wonder what you think about this. And that is according to New York Times, the problem was in part raised by members of the profession of the anthropological profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

And the idea there is that there is an inherent conflict between trying to do science and trying to do advocacy. Now I can see a similar situation in the fields and I can see where the conflict is, although again, I'm not convinced that the conflict is irreconcilable. So, for instance, if you are if you study the environment, you are an ecologist. But if you are advocating on behalf of particular types of defense of the environment or or or.

On the environment than you are an environmentalist or you are, you know, interesting in policy and things like that, so you're not doing science anymore. Of course, your advocacy presumably would have to be informed by the science. I mean, if you're an environmentalist and your advocate is not informed by the science, you're a bad environmentalist. I mean, your your heart might be in the right place, but you don't know what you're talking about. But I can see the difference, the distinction there.

That is if they publish an article as an ecologist, I am expected not to do advocacy. In fact, the article very likely would be rejected if I started doing advocacy in a scientific journal, because the editor would correctly point out that what the science of ecology is about is to find out how things are not to make value judgments or suggestions about value judgments. Now, of course, again, value judgments ought to be, it seems to me, informed by the science, but it cannot be determined by it.

So so there are two different kinds of things. Now, that doesn't mean that the same person can only involve himself or herself in both activities, but it does mean that the two activities are, it seems, distinct. And so if in fact, what is happening with the American anthropological decision is reflecting in part at the least this kind of problem, I can see why there is a problem. If there is a group of people that are within the association and more involved, more interested in advocacy, they may see a sort of self limitation to science as problematic and by the same token, only seen in reverse.

The more science oriented anthropologists may say, well, advocacy is not really what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be studying things. You know, again, using the idea of objectivity, not not to do advocate advocacy is not it's got nothing to do with objective, objectively assessing things. It's got to do with you already took a position of about values.

They just seem like separate questions to me, though. Right. And the question of whether you do advocacy is a separate question of what field you're in, whether your field is science or not.

That seems like I mean, I don't understand why that should be something that the FAA would change their wording to reflect.

Well, I think that's a matter of the culture internal to the FAA. So, for instance, in let's take another example again, which I'm more familiar, which is evolutionary biology. On the one hand, as in the study of evolution and advocacy or teaching of evolution in public schools right now, a number of scientists, including myself, do advocacy in that respect for the teaching evolution and to stop the teaching of creationism. But that has pretty much nothing to do with what we do as scientists in the course of studying evolution as a as a phenomena.

Again, that one is informed by the other, but they're very different activities. The reason there's no conflict, however, there is because it's not that we have in that field two groups of people, one of whom devotes most of his time of its time to the study of evolution. And the other one devotes most of its time to the advocacy on behalf of the teaching of evolution.

It's just that a very small subset of the field does both. And then the majority of people just do the science. It seems it sounds to me like an anthropologist that is not the case. That is that there is a large section of anthropologists, a large number of anthropologists who see advocacy as their main goal. That's simply not those interested in pursuing the science as much as in using the science as a matter, as an instrument for policy and for advocacy.

What are they advocating specifically? Well, I'm not so sure.

I mean, the article, as I said, refers to the rephrasing of the of the of the long range plan says the purpose of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. And the article implies, again, that this is a response to due to pressure from within from people, they see themselves as advocates for native people or human rights. So as in protection of local populations and just the way in which say again, an ecologist would advocate for protecting a particular species of birds or mammals or whatever it is, but advocating for protection of a particular species is not the same as studying that species.

In fact, they're quite different sort of activities. Again, one is a political one. The other one is is a scientific one.

But actually the work of anthropologists and say university departments is still going to be research, not advocacy. Right. I mean, you don't have a department in university devoted to advocacy. Not necessarily. I mean. Yeah, that's right. If you're looking at, for instance, a lot of departments of cultural studies, they're mostly about advocacy. They really are. Yes. They wouldn't do. They publish papers and journals. The papers must be about new theories or new knowledge or they're not scientific journals.

Right. So there are a lot of these journals are, in fact, a humanistic journals where we're position papers are perfectly acceptable, where a critique of a particular way of looking at things from a cultural perspective is perfectly acceptable as a type of publication. So that's right. I mean, you. The kind of future that that people think the AAA is positioning anthropology for some people, I suppose. Right. And so in that sense, I can see the split.

I can see the reason for the split. Right. If you if you want to do advocacy at that level. In other words, if you want to if you want to make your department or your association or, you know, mostly about advocacy, then you really ought to be, in fact, decoupled from the science branch. Now, that doesn't mean to me necessarily, of course, that the air should split into two different organizations. One could have two major branches.

And as long as you make clear to members that this branch does this and this branch does these, other than it shouldn't be any problem as long as people are clear. I think that in some respects, although the intentions of the new wording sound actually positive, it may complicate things because by making things, making the decision more inclusive may be a dangerous thing if it is perceived as a threat by the science oriented anthropologists. Right. If if this is perceived as it sounds like as a victory for postmodernism or a victory for advocacy at the detriment of science, I really don't think that the two are necessary.

It is not a zero game. I don't think. But if you see it as a zero sum game, if you see it as well, the more emphasis we put on advocacy, the less it means that we do science. Then I can see why there is a problem.

Hmm. I think we like to talk a little bit more about the the question of whether the knowledge in anthropology is generalizable or not. This is a question that came up in the comment thread on the blog. There's a graduate student in anthropology who commented and he says that these questions really do perplexed me. What is the purpose of anthropology, if not to produce generalizable knowledge of what empirical use is anthropology to anyone, if it doesn't produce this kind of knowledge?

So this, I think, is really the question that a lot of people think is the most important one. When deciding whether to classify anthropology as a science or not are the questions that it asks specific questions like describing this particular society or this particular culture, or are they are we trying to get at general principles of why things happen the way they do?

But again, I think that, first of all, you actually answered that question with your own examples a few minutes ago, right, when you were saying, well, the question of generalizable knowledge. So when you were bringing up examples of historical events or the influence of a writer over a particular period, those are really not generalizable. The answers to those questions are not really generalized.

Right? Right, exactly. I was trying to lay out the different kinds of questions. But what he's asking is, what is the use?

I mean, should anthropology be asking these very specific questions or should anthropology be trying to answer general questions about?

Not that the thing that I don't understand is why is it that it's that certain people apparently, like our reader, see only generalizable knowledge as worthy of science? I don't think that's the case. There is a lot of knowledge in science that is not actually generalizable.

What would be an example of non generalizable knowledge in science?

Almost everything you get out of studies of evolutionary biology, the reason being that biological systems are highly historical. So if I study, if I spend a lot of time studying the ecology of, say, a particular weed, which I did for a number of years when I was a biologist, I can hope perhaps to to generalize to some extent to which class of plants have fallen into a similar sort of general category, but certainly not beyond that. I mean, I cannot generalize to all plants.

I cannot generalize to all living beings, number one. But in fact, even within that particular restricted group of of species of biological entities, my results may not be generalizable that much. In fact, one of the problems with the study of invasive species is precisely that. It seems to be very hard to find any generalizable conclusion. It seems to be the fact that invasive species tend to behave in a fairly aristocratic way. The number of general ideas that you can get out of those studies are not that that it's not that high.

But that doesn't mean that that research is useless, because, for instance, if it comes to managing a particular species that is invasive in a particular in a particular area like kudzu in the south, for instance, well, then you want to know a lot of specific knowledge about the particular system. And it doesn't really matter whether that knowledge is generalizable or not. You have a problem to solve and you're solving it on scientific grounds. You're not solving in a non-scientific manner.

So I don't I'm not sure that the generalizability I think we inherited this idea of a generalisable science from fundamental physics, from the idea of a theory of everything, but in fact, the science that all other sciences have to have an insecurity complex about.

Exactly. There is a physics envy just like these opinions. And they apparently and and I think that's that's really increasingly silly because it's pretty clear that the science is. A true genius kind of enterprise that addresses a variety of questions at a variety of levels, and these questions may have different degrees of generalizability and some of the specific questions may be actually more useful, frankly, than general general questions. I mean, if we may come up with some general platitudes about, for instance, again, the behavior of invasive species, but if they're not particularly useful in terms of managing those species in the field, then it seems to me that we haven't gained that much.

Well, that's what I was actually expecting to hear from you was more of a critique of anthropologists attempts to produce generalizable knowledge just based on the critiques that I've heard from you in the past of things like evolutionary psychology. Given that we can't really do experiments in anthropology and given that our data is limited and it's hard to replicate our results, you know, if you if you dig something up, you can't you know, other scientists can't replicate that dig in another place.

It's very location specific. I appreciate your attempt to read my mind. But as it turns out, actually, I mean, just explain to me why this is different.

Like, why you why you would credit anthropology more than, say, evolutionary psychology?

Oh, I'm not sure that I would go down that road. The I was going to answer that. Your question or your point was different. And let's say let's talk about psychology, for instance, which is a closely allied discipline and which does suffer from this idea that, well, there is no general theory of human behavior unless, of course, you consider evolutionary psychology a theory of human agility or human behavior. I don't. So so psychology seems to suffer the same same problem.

And yet a lot of the results in psychology are, in fact, highly generalizable. I mean, paper after paper show that experiments in psychology are highly repeatable across a very, very number of circumstances. So when psychologists that find out something about human behavior, that thing seems to actually hold across a fairly large class of subjects and conditions. That being the case, then it seems like psychology does come up with generalizable conclusions about human behavior. We just don't have a theory that explains those generalizable conclusions.

We don't know why certain things are generally general about human behavior and certain things are not. But in psychology, you're doing experiments. You can't do experiments and anthropology. And also in anthropology, you're looking at the level of society. So you have far fewer data points than you do.

That's certainly the case. But, you know, you can't do experiments in astronomy and that doesn't stop anybody from thinking of astronomy as as a perfectly valid science. You know, it's not that you can manipulate planets and stars, if you will. It's entirely observational, statistically based. So the fact that one cannot do experiment or palaeontology, you can't do experiments in paleontology either. And yet we found all sorts of interesting things about Scientology. Most of it, of course, tends to be local, not knowledge.

But there is some degree of generalized knowledge. For instance, there are statistical studies about the frequency of extinctions of of certain groups. And it sounded like there's this famous famous paper that came out in nineteen seventy three by Levi Vallen that shows that essentially the probability of extinction of a species in any particular moment in time is exactly the same. There is. There is. It's in some variant and local conditions. It seems like species have a certain life cycle and after a while they just go extinct.

That's a pretty generalizable result that has held up for a long time. But of course, most of palaeontology is about specific results, but specifically about what happened to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And that's a very specific question, that whoever does have huge implications for the entire history of life, because, of course, if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out 65 million years ago by a complete stochastic event, that we probably wouldn't be here as mammals talking about and doing a podcast, there'll be a couple of reptile or reptilian equivalents of us perhaps doing the podcast.

So so I don't think that there is any particular relationship between being a science, especially a good science, and either being able to generalise or being able to do experiments with things. So anthropology can be a perfectly good science within a certain limits that are that are posed by the kinds of questions and the kinds of materials that anthropologists have to deal with.

Well, but astronomy is much more precise, right? You don't have I mean, with with human societies, there might actually be a real reason why some societies develop technology faster than others, for example. But because you have so many variables at work and so much noise, so much natural variation, you'd need a really large dataset to start to be able to pick out that real underlying cause and effect relationship with any confidence.

So I agree. So I agree. I pointed out to me, doesn't have that problem correct. The point is not only that, but astronomy arguably deals with things that are much less unpredictable than human behavior.

And that's sort of what I meant by precise. Yeah.

So, no, I agree. I my point about Einstein was simply that there are entire scientific disciplines such as astronomy and. Pathology that nobody I think will argue are not scientific, and yet they didn't do experiments at all. So the inability of doing experiments, which is a point that you brought up earlier about anthropology, doesn't necessarily deny you create a problem for anthropology being a science. You're right. It is a science that deals with complex, complex issues that are difficult to manipulate.

The data are difficult to come by. And so arguably we would expect less progress and less generalities from something like anthropology. But even psychology is not that far because, yes, you're right, psychologists can do experiments, but often those experiments are under incredibly artificial conditions. It's hard to do a field experiment in psychology and it can be done, but it's much more complicated. And so even some of the results of psychological experiments may be reliable, reliable and repeatable and yet have fairly limited applicability because the conditions had to be so strictly controlled that that you can hardly generalize to sort of real life situations.

Psychologists in that sense suffered the same kind of criticism, for instance, that ecologists had to face. You know, ecologists have arguably an easier time, should have an easier time than psychologists, for one thing, because most of their subjects don't actually think independently, at least not that we know of. Right. And and and besides, there is a much larger number of species to study in, much larger numbers of subjects that you can study. And yet ecology suffers from the same problem, that as soon as you start controlling the situations, as soon as you start doing experiments under control conditions immediately, there is a group of ecologists says yes, but those results are not reliable because they're not field worthy.

They don't tell you much about what's happening in the field. Of course, the response on the other side is yes, but if you spend all your time in the field, only study things in the field, you can manipulate a lot of the relevant variables and therefore you're not going to learn as much as you're doing in the lab. And that kind of trade off between, you know, simplifying lab experiments and more realistic field observations is typical of a lot of sciences.

In fact, I would argue even even physics, I mean, it's one thing to do equilibrium, thermodynamics in very, very simple systems, in a completely different thing to do, non equilibrium thermodynamics and things like hurricanes and weather patterns and things like that. Physicists can tell you much less about weather patterns and they can tell you about control conditions, experiments.

So my point about experiments is not that they're always necessary to produce reliable knowledge about generalized principles, just that they seem it seems like they should be much more necessary when you have very noisy underlying systems that you're investigating like human societies instead of like the movement of planets.

I think in general that's true. But the problem, of course, is that what you're calling noise may actually be a lot of the relevant things that are going on. And therefore, if you eliminate the noise, you may actually be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

Right. Wow. OK, well, I'm glad I'm glad that I'm a journalist and a podcast and not an anthropologist because it sounds like they've got their work cut out for them.

They were out of time for this segment of the podcast. So let's move on to the rationally speaking PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our irrational fancy. Let's start with Julia's big things.

Masimo, my pick is an author, actually. His name is Ted Chang and he's a science fiction writer. He hasn't been very prolific. He's published only a handful of short stories and novellas, but they're really fantastic. He writes this very cerebral, very idea, dense, sophisticated, you could say, philosophical science fiction.

I've been recommending him to some of my friends and one of my friends described it as pure idea porn, which is really OK.

So I think the science fiction at its best has the ability to really explore interesting counterfactuals and and like really interesting, meaty philosophical and ethical questions. And this is really what Ted does. So he's got stories about time travel.

What would time travel be like if you couldn't change your future or your past stories about the ethical responsibilities that we would have towards sentient artificial intelligences.

But the one that I actually liked the most so far is called Stories of Your Life. And it's the title story in his recently published collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. And I think it's also one of his most unique stories. I'm going to try to describe it for you, just to give you a flavor of the kind of ideas that he plays with. It's a set in the indeterminate near future, and humanity has just come into contact with an intelligent alien species.

And so it's the story of how we're trying to learn their language so that we can communicate with them. And their their brains were so completely differently from ours. And they they evolved in such a completely different environment than we did, that their language is just unlike anything we've ever encountered before.

So it's I mean, it's an interesting sort of in a in the same way that it's interesting to hear about researchers solving a really mysterious puzzle. How how would you try to communicate with an alien species that just thought completely differently than you did? And then at the same time, physicists on Earth are trying to understand how the aliens practice science because obviously they must have very advanced science since they were able to contact us. But but because their brains work so differently than ours, they've developed a completely different, yet equally correct version of science.

So they get the same they make the same accurate predictions that our science does. But their conceptual framework is just completely, radically different. And as you learn more about the alien physics, you understand how that worldview of theirs is reflected in the structure of their language. And then interspersed with all of this is the personal life story of one of the human characters, the linguist who's been spearheading the project to communicate with the aliens. And at first, it's not clear why you're getting these vignettes into her life.

And then gradually, as you start to learn more about the world view of the aliens, you understand how that philosophical concept is reflected in the story of her life. It's a little hard to explain, but it's all just so beautifully tied together conceptually. And there's so many interesting philosophical, philosophical ideas in there. It just gave me goosebumps.

Sounds interesting. Sounds like where were these people? Did not discover the Babel Fish, which was featured in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Babel Fish is this is the fish, the fish that you put in your ears and feeds directly in your brainwaves. And it translates automatically everything that is being told to you in an alien language.

That would have been a much shorter story, that much shorter story. And of course, is Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy points out the Babel fish is clearly a proof of the existence of God because there is absolutely no way that something as useful as a piece of fish could possibly have evolved naturally.

But that will lead us in a couple of different directions. OK, Mike Peck, on the other hand, he's kind of a seasonal pick worth having these episodes do the, you know, the end of the year and the beginning of the new year. It's an article in that appeared in The New York Times on December 19, 2010 by Richard Cohen. And it's called There Goes the Sun. And it's a very nice sort of brief summary of what we know about the cultural history of Christmas solstice and related related holidays.

And the reason I find there's so little I find this fascinating. We'll be taping soon an episode about anniversaries and the more or less arbitrariness of picking a date to celebrate something. But in the skeptic and secular humanist in these communities, of course, the solstice is a big deal, as is an alternative that actually preceded Christmas and so forth. And yet I find that a lot of humans themselves are actually confused about the relationship between the solstice and Christmas.

For instance, most people know that the solstice originated from a particular Roman festival which was called Saturnalia in honor of the word of the God Saturn. But the. Is that that festival run from January 17? I'm sorry, from December 17 to December 24th? So where do we get the 25th as the birth of Jesus? It turns out there is an answer. In fact, it's got nothing to do with the Saturnalia. It's got to do with the Roman festival.

That's right. That was December 25th was the birth of the son. According to the to the Romans, the symbol of the Roman legions was the sole Invictus, the invincible son whose birthday was December 25th.

So when the Catholic Church decided in the fourth century to take over the Roman celebrations and make them Christian, that's the date that they picked obviously arbitrarily for the for the birth of Jesus.

But most people don't know that. In fact, there is essentially no relationship between December 25th and the Saturnalia.

And a lot of people sort of confuse the two.

So this article is very nice because it goes through that and also makes a lot of other interesting cultural comparisons across across the world about that sort of festivity.

And so it's the kind of thing that you want to have your facts straight when when when you want to argue about what the real reason for the season actually is so difficult to keep all of my arbitrarily scheduled holidays straight.

I know we're all out of time. So this concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderland between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benneton and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, true by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.