Not Every Scientists Wears a Lab Coat

 

Alexander Von Humboldt resting after inventing nature :-) 

On the many ways science actually gets done

You may have taken that science course and been taught science as a procedure. You ask a question, form a hypothesis, design an experiment with a control group, collect data, and draw a conclusion. It is tidy, it is logical, and it describes how science works at a specific set if steps, that are rarely actually followed in that way. And beyond even mimicking the scientific method a huge amount of science, particularly foundational science knowledge, was and is produced by people who never ran a single controlled experiment.

E.W. Gudger, a zoologist of the early twentieth century, spent decades building a careful catalog of what was actually known about whale sharks. He understood that simply establishing the facts of a creature's existence and habits was itself a major scientific contribution. He was right. And he was in good company.

Cataloging

Before you can ask why things are related, someone has to name them. That was Carl Linnaeus's massive contribution to all things biology. He spent his career classifying living things, and his system of binomial nomenclature, introduced in 1735, is still used today. He ran no experiments. His genius, and he was a genius, was architecture and order.

Aristotle did something similar more than two thousand years earlier. His Historia Animalium described the anatomy, behavior, and reproduction of hundreds of species through direct observation and dissection. He was wrong a lot, but he established the practice of looking carefully and recording honestly. The entire tradition of comparative zoology traces back to him. There was no control group. There was just relentless, organized attention.

A note on being wrong; science progresses because scientist, like Aristotle, are wrong…a lot. Science could be described as try, try again, until you’re not wrong. It is easier to find out how something does not work than how it works.

Observation is evidence

John James Audubon spent a decade producing The Birds of America, documenting 435 species through meticulous drawing and painting, along with behavioral and ecological notes from years of field work, describing loads of species. His method was essentially: Go find the birds, watch them, shoot them (yes, he killed a lot of birds, contradicting the tenants of the society that now bears his name), paint them, write everything down. No laboratory, no hypothesis, no statistical test.

Alexander von Humboldt* did something grander in scale but similar in spirit. Over five years in South America and the Caribbean, he measured altitude, temperature, magnetic variation, plant distribution, ocean currents, and the color of the sky. His multi-volume Kosmos attempted to describe the entire physical and biological world as an interconnected system. His contribution was the insight that patterns across vast scales of space and time are themselves data, and that recording those patterns rigorously is a legitimate scientific act. I should point out that he did test hypotheses in the traditional sense after noticing/observing, which ties in directly with the scientific method.

*Wulf’s book on Humboldt, listed at the end, is marvelous. 

Description as discovery

John Snow is celebrated as a founder of epidemiology, and what he actually did in 1854 was visit households, talk to survivors and bereaved families, plot cholera deaths on a map of London, and count. No experiment, no control group. He gathered information that nobody else had bothered to assemble, and the map told the story on its own. Thus, he, like Humboldt, did sections of what we call the scientific method; his observations led to a hypothesis on the source of cholera, which was borne out by further observations. It came from the water! However, he never got to the meat; cholera was caused by an intestinal bacterium, which we now call Vibrio cholerae. Germ theory was just being worked out, Pasteur was working in the same time frame, and Robert Koch's work on establishing microorganisms’ causality was not complete until 1884.

Annie Jump Cannon classified the spectra of more than 350,000 stars by hand between 1896 and her death. She developed the Harvard Classification Scheme and its OBAFGKM sequence, which is still the standard today. OBAFGKM is basically the hotness/color of stars, O is greater than 30,000K down to M, which is the coolest at less than 3,700 K. Temperature here, K,  is in degrees, Kelvin. Betelgeuse, Betelguese, Betelguese, is a cold, red star at about 3,700K, while our Sun is yellow at about 5,600K. The mnemonic to learn the order, which I never learned in Astronomy class, is Oh Be A Fine Girl/Guy, Kiss Me.

Cannon did not develop a physical theory explaining why stars fell into those categories. She looked at an enormous quantity of data with extraordinary precision and imposed order on it. The theory explaining the pattern came later. The pattern itself, which she established, was the essential contribution.

Alice Eastwood built one of the most important herbarium collections in North America over more than half a century as curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences. When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurred and fire was destroying the building, she went back in and personally rescued the most irreplaceable specimens. This heroism is worth exploring: 

She made her way to the collections through a damaged city and climbed the iron railings of a collapsed staircase to reach the upper floors. She gathered bundles of plants into her apron and used ropes to lower them over the banister to a friend waiting below. She did this not just once, but many times. She saved 1,497 type specimens, many representing species that would have been lost to science if not for her efforts. She lost her own possessions in the disaster.

She spent the following decades rebuilding the herbarium, eventually amassing a collection of more than 300,000 specimens before her retirement at the age of ninety.

Let me write that again: Three hundred thousand specimens before her retirement at 90!!!

Her science was the collection, preservation, and documentation of plant specimens; some of these physical records are of plants that no longer exist. Without her science and heroism, we would not know what California's flora looked like before large-scale habitat loss.

Darwin was mostly a cataloger

Was Darwin an experimenter? Mostly no. The theory of natural selection was built almost entirely on observation, correspondence with breeders and naturalists around the world, and prolonged reflection. On the Origin of Species… is an argument based on accumulated observations. Before publishing his big book, Darwin spent years carefully cataloging barnacle morphology and systematics: The kind of taxonomic slog that Linnaeus would have appreciated. His work is the basis of evolutionary studies, of course, but it also touches all the core fields of biology, including genetics, molecular biology, medicine, ecology, conservation biology, and I could go on. One of the people who based his work on Darwin’s work was Ernst Mayr.

Ernst Mayr conducted fieldwork collecting bird specimens in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands before becoming one of the great theoretical synthesizers of twentieth-century biology. His 1942 book Systematics and the Origin of Species, a cornerstone of the modern evolutionary synthesis, emerged not from laboratory experiments but from asking what the enormous taxonomic variation he had documented in the field actually meant. The thinking grew out of cataloging.

Case studies and clinical observation

Oliver Sacks spent his career writing clinical case studies of patients with unusual neurological conditions. His method was essentially Aristotle's: Observe, describe precisely, and trust that the description itself advances understanding. He was often criticized by colleagues who felt that case studies were too anecdotal to count as science. His counterargument, implicit throughout his work, was that conditions too rare to study experimentally will only ever be understood through exactly this kind of careful attention to individual cases. This appears to be correct, though modern methods may yield more answers.

What this means for how we think about science

Knowledge can accumulate through description as well as through manipulation. An experiment changes something and measures the result. Poof, new knowledge. A description of something that has never been described before is also new knowledge, and may be the prerequisite for the experiments that come later.

The scientific method, as typically taught, describes how science works at a particular stage of inquiry, the stage where enough is known to form a falsifiable hypothesis and design a meaningful test. Before that stage, and often running in parallel with it, the work is observational, descriptive, and comparative. Linnaeus had to name things before Darwin could ask why they were related. Gudger had to establish that the whale shark existed and filter-fed before anyone could ask how its filter evolved. Snow had to map the deaths before anyone could test the germ theory of cholera.

That foundational, descriptive work is not pre-science. It is not a lesser form of science waiting to grow up into proper experiments. It is science, doing exactly what science is supposed to do: Paying attention to the world and writing down what is actually there.

Sources and Further Readings:

Cannon AJ, & Pickering EC. 1901. The spectra of stars of Secchi's fourth type. Annals of the Harvard College Observatory, 28, 131–168.

Cannon AJ, & Pickering EC. (1918–1924). The Henry Draper catalogue. Annals of the Harvard College Observatory, 91–99.

Gudger EW. 1932. Cannibalism Among the Sharks and Rays. The Scientific Monthly 34(5): 403–419. http://www.jstor.org/stable/15135.

Koch's original in German, or seek out the story below by Walker et al.

Koch R (1884). Die Aetiologie der Tuberkulose. Mittheilungen aus dem Kaiserlichen Gesundheitsamte. Vol. 2. pp. 1–88.

Walker L, Levine H, Jucker M.2006. Koch's postulates and infectious proteins. Acta Neuropathologica. 112 (1): 1–4.

Pasteur, L.

Check out the Pasteur Institute for more on Pasteur:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteur_Institute

Snow J. 1855. On the mode of communication of cholera (2nd ed.). John Churchill.

Wulf A. 2015. The invention of nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. Knopf.

This month, I put a whole bunch of books by Oliver Sacks and Ernst Mayr among the other references. Great reading these books, I encourage you to dive in.

Ernst Mayr

• 1942. Systematics and the origin of species from the viewpoint of a zoologist. Columbia University Press.
• 1963. Animal species and evolution. Harvard University Press.
• 1982. The growth of biological thought: Diversity, evolution, and inheritance. Harvard University Press.
• 1988. Toward a new philosophy of biology: Observations of an evolutionist. Harvard University Press.
• 1991. One long argument: Charles Darwin and the genesis of modern evolutionary thought. Harvard University Press.
• 2001. What evolution is. Basic Books.
• 2004. What makes biology unique? Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline. Cambridge University Press.

Oliver Sacks

• 1973. Awakenings. Duckworth.
• 1985. The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. Summit Books.
• 1989. Seeing voices: A journey into the world of the deaf. University of California Press.
• 1995. An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales. Alfred A. Knopf.
• 2007. Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain. Alfred A. Knopf.
• 2010. The mind's eye. Alfred A. Knopf.
• 2015. On the move: A life. Alfred A. Knopf.