Inthe most recent “race” thread a discussion has ensued about whether a concept needs to have hard and fast lines in order to be valuable as a scientific concept.
While I think that the discussion is really immaterial to the thread itself (IMHO, the biggest problem with “race” as a scientific concept is that it has only the crudest of correlations with anything; it is of little predictive value, and obscures a more nuanced understanding of both population genetics and of sociology … join that thread to argue with those points), I think that this question of “hard and fast” is an important one for understanding how science works and for epistemology in general … always fun discussions on this board!
So, does a concept need to have hard and fast lines in order to be scientific? Or is scientific knowledge, like other knowledge, more fluid, fuzzy at the edges, and guided less by how sharp the edges than by how useful at making future predictions?
Well, the value of clear definitions is that we know what the heck we are talking about.
Another key function is to avoid slipping into equivocation or True Scotsman fallacies. Race is one of those concepts that is problematic not because a precise definition cannot be made, but rather that there exist so MANY definitions out there that it is very easy to mix them and their implications up.
The real recourse is to examine an issue without the special words. If you cannot make your case without using your special controversial word, then chances are your case relies upon a sloppy definition. If, instead of “race” we actally spelled out by what we meant by it in this case, we could eliminate a lot of the confusion, at the price of being ALOT more longwinded (but then, I don’t have any problem with longwindedness!)
Well, you can probably guess which way I’ll come out on the question, but what the heck, I’ll throw a few thoughts in.
First, it’s always nice to have categories that are hard and fast. To borrow a phrase from another discipline, “law students love bright-line rules.”
However, in some disciplines, it can happen that the “things” you are trying to categorize just aren’t amenable to hard and fast categories. For example, in biology, you may have group “A” of weebles living in a valley. In the next valley to the south is group “B,” which are, on average, slightly different from group “A.” And so on, until you get to group “Z,” which is very far from group A, and totally different.
Now, a biologist may wish to distinguish between the Northern Weeble and the Southern Weeble. But it would be very difficult to draw a hard and fast line between the two groups.
So you end up with a science that’s kinda fuzzy at times. IMHO it’s valuable and useful to study biology. But some of the generalizations that you end up with are a bit weak, e.g. “The Northern Weeble tends to have quality X.”
We are trying to get away from such Northern v. Southern Weeble categorizations in taxonomy. Most taxonomy nowadays comes down to very specific measurements and genetic quantitiation. We are rearranging species as it becomes apparent that things aren’t really what they look like under a microscope. Ambiguity can always be solved by phylogenetics.
I will take credit for the “hard and fast” line, FWIW. Since I am not good with the whole epistemology thing, I would like to see some real world examples in this thread. I feel that the “harder” a science is, the more precise our definitions have to be in order for them to be widely relevant. In medicine, it is often difficult to put a neat box around specific disease entities – certain symptoms may appear more than others, diseases present totally differently, and host factors confound the picture. Diagnoses are often based around loose constellations of symptoms.
But with science, we come along and we try and cut through the ambiguity. We pin down specific pathologies, whether they are congenital single/multigene diseases, infectious agents, rheumatologic disorders, or something based on specific environmental exposure. I gave the example of lupus as something that is a loose constellation of clinical findings, but now has an unambiguous pathology. The same has happened across the medical spectrum. Other disorders remain elusive: atherosclerosis and multiple sclerosis may or may not be due to an infectious agent. Pinning down a specific pathology of course helps diagnosis and treatment. We see the utility of moving from the loose clinical description to the “hard and fast” benchtop definition.
—Now, a biologist may wish to distinguish between the Northern Weeble and the Southern Weeble.—
The question is: why? Especially when we already have high specificity available, like gene studies, generalization becomes a timesaver, not a real necessity. I know it’s a dirty word, but I’m all for principled reductionism in definitions: if only because if we DO have to make generalizations, we at least know what we’re fudging out.
—So you end up with a science that’s kinda fuzzy at times.—
True, but it does seem that the point is to become more and more specific.
A huge problem with hard and fast lines, for instance, is life itself. It’s one of those things were we can say that objects far on either side of the line are definately alive or not, but we can’t find the line itself. That is, we don’t really know what is “essential” about “life.” Now, pre-Darwin, essentialists thought they had it all figrured out: but that was basically because they hadn’t encountered any hard cases. When Darwin’s thought emerged and started to change things, essentialism crumbled, but it left us with words like “life” that don’t really have operational definitions. I very much doubt that we will ever find some characteristic that is “essential” to calling something “life”: only a gradual progression of primitive to modern characteristics.
But that’s okay: that’s NOT the same thing as simply embracing an ambiguous word like “life” in science. My point is: the enterprise of science doesn’t need that word: it can simply talk about what’s there, and what it’s doing.
—I gave the example of lupus as something that is a loose constellation of clinical findings, but now has an unambiguous pathology.—
Same thing with AIDS actually. We still have strange cases of people with all the symptoms of “AIDS,” but no HIV.
So far the thread has dealt with ‘hard sciences’. I’ll add that what Apos said applies to the ‘soft sciences’ as well. With the slight difference that delimitations of the hard and fast boundaries do not have absolute values to rest on and therefore require more work to achieve consensus in the scientific community.
In a current thread about the possible value of nationalism we got badly sidetracked for a moment discussing when nationalism arose and what the underlying events where. Had we been historians all, this argument would have been immediately shortcut to the real point, since there is consensus amongst historians that the best date we have for a hard and fast moment when nationalism takes off is 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, hence the subsequent period is The Age of Nationalism. This is of course highly arbitrary, but it still retains importance in as much as that it makes discourse easier and cuts out the need to constantly define all of human history as a part of any given argument.
To take another example related to the thread that spun this one. The concept of ethnicity needs to have a hard and fast definition in social anthropology, so as to make any sense whatsoever in its highly confusing context of perceived and real social and individual identity. Ethnicity has more or less pushed the concept of race out of social anthropological discourse since race is too vague as definition across the whole context of human culture. On the other hand it remains somewhat useful in sociology since it serves as a hard and fast delimitation of certain phenomena such as racism, but even here the finer granularity of ethnicity is slowly pushing it out.
Take ‘caucasian’. Do I mean an Eastern European person, or any white skinned person, or a white skinned American, or maybe somebody from Caucasus? Globally it makes no sense whatsoever, hence as a definition it only serves the purpose to confuse and fudge concepts that are already extremely fuzzy as is. On the other hand if you aim to describe the cultural and social dynamics in mid-town Manhattan it might make sense, but then it isn’t race any more, it’s ethnicity and you can apply a hard and fast definition again.
—Had we been historians all, this argument would have been immediately shortcut to the real point, since there is consensus amongst historians that the best date we have for a hard and fast moment when nationalism takes off is 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, hence the subsequent period is The Age of Nationalism. This is of course highly arbitrary, but it still retains importance in as much as that it makes discourse easier and cuts out the need to constantly define all of human history as a part of any given argument.—
Depends on what our aim is, though. There comes a time when using a shorthand like “nationalism” becomes questionable in itself. Far too often, words like this become barriers instead of facilitators, and people in discussions start caring too much about whether this or that really is nationalism or not, when the real discussion is about establishing something else controversial. In such a situation, labeling one thing nationalism or not becomes a substitute for discussing the actual people and situations crucial to the debate.
There are other dangers too. As a intellectual history tutor, I got far too many papers from students who talked about nationalism as doing things or causing things: this or that event happened “because of nationalism.” “Nationalism caused this.” “If not for nationalism…”
But even if they could nail down what they meant by “nationalism,” this stil wouldn’t be all that helpful in telling us anything of interest about the actual specific situation. Classification is ultimately a tool for communicating ideas fast: but it is no substitute for presenting a meaningful and contentious theory of how events went down.
After having to rework so many papers with students, I started to get an ear for this sort of thing, and was surprised to start finding it even in professional papers. Even though academics have a fairly well agreed upon definition, the overuse of this definition as a substitute for a real case in many cases made for some very weak, and, let it be said, boring, arguements.
This is the danger of having too much essentialism, and I think it is actually more of a danger in the social sciences than it is in the “hard” sciences.
I agree Apos. Very well put. I think there is a limit for how much hard and fast definition we can handle in social science due to the need for consensus on each and every concept put forward. I might have argued the need for hard and fast definitions a little too far in that respect.
The case of our Age of Nationalism discussion, does however fit exactly the problem you describe. The purpose of debate was (is) to examine three postulates that I made pointing towards the inherent problems of nationalism. I provided definitions of nationalism for the purpose of the debate, but failed to provide a definition from a historical perspective, since I took for granted this wouldn’t go into the debate. In a scholarly environment I maintain that this wouldn’t have been needed either, although I would still have needed to define nationalism for the purpose of debate. In other words we were trying to examine the nature of modern nationalism and ended up talking about the historical basis of nationalism.
I guess I’ll have to revisit my stand to see if I can come up with a hard and fast point where hard and fast definitions make sense in social sciences. Until then I’ll just say that you’re right the sword doth both ways cut.
—I might have argued the need for hard and fast definitions a little too far in that respect.—
Well, it’s not that having them is: they’re great. It’s rather the thinking that definitions can make our arguements for us: that definitions are theory.
—I guess I’ll have to revisit my stand to see if I can come up with a hard and fast point where hard and fast definitions make sense in social sciences.—
No, I really DO agree that they are useful, in every definition. They are crucially important for commucating ideas in general. And having sloppy definitions is far worse than good ones.
It’s only when definitions and arguements collide that problems arise. My litmus test is if you can make the arguement without using the special terminology at all. If you can’t, then there’s most likely too much reliance on labeling to do the arguement’s work.
When is it a bird and when is it a dinosaur? Feathers? Tail structure? Front limb structure? But I know a bird when I see it. And I think that “bird” is a valid scientific concept.
Human versus proto-humanoid? Heck, define human for me. Number of chromosomes? So a kid with Downs is not human? Give me the hard and fast line.
Variation is often along a continuum. In multiple dimensions.
How about from genetics? This from the current issue of Science as a handy example. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/297/5582/752a
A different allele of MAO-I is asociated with later violent behavior. So is that allele the definition of the condition? Oh yes, only violent if they were abused as kids as well.
Multiple genes, combinations of genes, combinations of genes and environments, will result in the same phenotypic result. Is the phenotype not a valid scientific concept as a result of its multiple posssible paths to causation? (We’ve gone here before!)
Is lupus defined by the presence of anti-DS DNA? No. You can have that and not have lupus. It is still defined by a constellation of findings.
I maintain that concepts can best be thought of as spaces in our minds with often fuzzy edges. The center of the space is our prototype for that concept. How far out along each dimension from that prototype we are willing to accept, how fuzzy the edge, is determined by the utility we recieve in making a more precise vs a less precise determination. By the value of the outcome.
A hypothetical example. I ask you to tell me how many red heads you see in one day. Two weeks later I ask you to identify red heads for me because all red heads are going to catch a fatal infection unless they get vaccinated today. Now that auburn girl, which day do you think that you called her a red head? That strawberry blond boy? We define according to salience and utility, in science as much as in any other form of knowledge acquisition. We (as individuals and as a knowledge acquiring society) impose patterns upon our perceptions of the world based upon experience and modifiy the patterns as new experience dictates. The fluidity of those fuzzy edges is where progress often happens.
—And I think that “bird” is a valid scientific concept.—
Valid is one thing. Operationally useful is quite another. It’s okay to speak of bird as shorthand for things that are uncontroversially birds. But when there is controversy, as in precisely the cases you note, then the term isn’t very useful at all. As you might put it, the utility of the concept goes to nil.
That is because it is an essentialist term: a relic from when “I know it when I see it” was good enough. But it’s shorthand: sometimes we need to use the longhand, and not get caught up in whether it fits into one category or another.
If someone decides that killing birds should be illegal, in a world where some “lizards” have feathers, then simply defining a hard and fast line as to what is a bird and what isn’t really just sort of dodges the question. At this point (and I think this is a good thing) we really have to start to figure out WHY it is that we want to protect “birds,” and see what actual creatures fit those reasons.
Same thing with the redheads: what is important is not what we call a redhead or not, what defining line we make, but rather exactly who the fatal infection targets and who we need to protect. The attempt to find a perfect classification of “redheads” just gets in the way of what we are actually interested in getting done.
Since you say “trying to get away,” I gather that we’re not there yet, so in the meantime, we still have some fuzzy rules.
In any event, I suspect that “phylogenetics,” in many instances, will give you rules that are pretty arbitrary and not conceptually satisfying.
For example, you may distinguish between the Northern Weeble and the Southern Weeble by saying that the Northern Weeble has alleles #37, 41, and 55; the Southern Weeble does not. But you may very well find, pretty far north, a Weeble that has alleles #37 and 41, but not # 55. It looks like a Northern Weeble to experienced Weebelologists; it lives and breeds with the other Northern Weebles; but by your “hard and fast” rule, it isn’t a Northern Weeble.
(But I’m speculating a bit here, and I’m not a geneticist, so you should feel free to correct me!!)
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Me too, but I’m not sure that the resources are available to discuss these things in the necessary detail online. In any event, I mentioned a few creatures in the current race thread that you might take a look at.
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Agree.
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Agree. My only point is that sometimes we have to deal with fuzzy rules or nothing at all.
I didn’t think you were disagreeing with me. I just found that you put much-needed nuance into what I posted. It made me start asking myself some questions.
For instance: in the forenamed thread I was using the term ‘universalism’ quite a bit. A member that entered the debate midway was wise enough to ask for a definition. I gave it and we went on. However, when I run the debate over in my head I realize that used that term in two ways, albeit that they were related it could still be unclear. To boot I quoted papers that applied ‘universalism’ in yet two or three shades within the same context. I’m used to reading studies of the kind and sort of ‘into’ the subject matter, but for someone who isn’t this could potentially lead to total confusion, especially if you don’t read the papers and only see excerpts or quotes. Worse than confusion it could lead to application of rigidity to the very fluidity we try to maintain by having hard and fast definitions.
Somewhere it boils down to simple (Ha! Scoff!) semantics, but I think there is a point before that were we apply contextual references by concepts of common understanding specific to the field. The question is where that point should lie as to not run the danger of clouding rather than clarifying the argument.
As I said, you made me think that over and it isn’t a small issue. It immediately moves into the accessibility of science as well. Fill a text with nomenclature and your immediately narrowing the scope of accessibility, which especially in social sciences is sometimes downright counterproductive if you consider that it is desirable to be apply the findings outside the scientific community, in social, political, cultural and professional contexts.
I find it especially interesting at the moment since I am working on something that entails translating some pretty complex socio-cultural concepts into a format that is accessible to the general public and I appreciate more and more how much nomenclature isolates important findings to the scientific community. I would posit, just off my head, that this applies just as much to communication across scientific fields. Take for instance the way the ‘race debate’ is influencing genetics, medicine, sociology, political science and anthropology, and how much confusion we are seeing as a result of the varying nomenclature.
—But you may very well find, pretty far north, a Weeble that has alleles #37 and 41, but not # 55. It looks like a Northern Weeble to experienced Weebelologists; it lives and breeds with the other Northern Weebles; but by your “hard and fast” rule, it isn’t a Northern Weeble.—
This is a good example. In this case, you wouldn’t want to make any particular case turn on whether it is or isn’t a “Northern Weeble.” You have to go down a level and deal with the specific characteristics you are really concerned about.
—As I said, you made me think that over and it isn’t a small issue. It immediately moves into the accessibility of science as well. Fill a text with nomenclature and your immediately narrowing the scope of accessibility, which especially in social sciences is sometimes downright counterproductive if you consider that it is desirable to be apply the findings outside the scientific community, in social, political, cultural and professional contexts.—
I hadn’t considered that point: between technical debates and the public understanding the significance of them. It isn’t even just confusing terms I guess: but even the fact that many people who aren’t “in” a particular field don’t even have the time or will to read the long discussions that avoid confusion. It’s a real dicey tension, I guess, especially in the social sciences.
I wonder: maybe one key to the difference between “hard sciences” and the “soft sciences” is that the hard sciences more often use newer terminology, having had to create a lot of it fairly recently, especially post-Darwin and the modern critiques of essentialism.
The social scientists, however, are more often stuck using terminology that was not so carefully and specifically developed: terms that have litterlly milenia of time to accumulate all sorts of different connotations and associations. Race is certainly one of those terms. But then, the social sciences also deal with a lot more immediately politicized issues: meaning that terms get appropriated and changed by many more groups each with their own spin. The rate of mutation is way higher.
Not everything can be included at the same level of categorization. Bird is defined as the branch of animal kingdom that diverged some time around Archaeopteryx. Whether Archaeopteryx or something similar is a bird or not is basically irrelevant – it serves as the defining breakpoint for bird versus reptile. As Apos says, “bird” is defined based on what is in the world today. We can see evolution in both the morphology and the genetics. Right now, the breakdown is predominantly morphologic, but we are moving to the point where we will be able to take an unknown DNA sample and say “this is a bird.” If something comes along that is half-bird, half-lizard, we used to use morphology to say which it is closer to, and put it there. Nowadays, we look at the genetics. Each example that stretches the border defines the border better.
This has implications on microbiology right now more than big animals. Things are constantly getting shifted around. I bet if you go back and check a microbiology text, some of the things have been shifted around since you were in medical school (i.e. Pneumocystis carinii).
Easy genetically and evolutionarily. If it can reproduce with a human and produce viable, fertile offspring, it is human. This has interesting connotations for those who are genetically sterile (Robertsonian translocations and the like), and especially the rare cases of genetic sterility which someone may find a mate who complements the rearrangements, and children can be produced. (Robertsonian 21 and aneuploid 21 in the germline I suppose is an example, I don’t know how viable the offspring are due to genetic imprinting issues). One could argue, if the defect were maintained in the offspring, that this is an example of speciation.
Genetically, the disorder is defined by the mutation. This is an example of a mutation that we would say is partially penetrant. We could define the disorder (Avshalom disorder, if you will) as a propensity to violence, diagnosis based on that MAOA (MAO-Is are the drugs) mutation. The same is true of most other genetic disease. Define the disease by the mutation, put a neat box around it. It doesn’t always correlate with the clinical findings. Most have variable onset with variable severity based on a whole bunch of host factors and other factors. None, even Huntington disease, has 100% penetrance with all of the classic symptoms (although Huntington disease is 100% penetrant with choreic ataxia by the time the patient is 60). We have, however, defined something, we have discovered a primary pathology, and we can design our treatment regimen around that. There is the genetic hard-and-fast thing. When it starts to pay off clinically on a large scale, physicians will resort to it as well. Molecular diagnosis, man.
No anti-dsDNA is only 1 of 11 findings. We haven’t put a neat box around this one, but I would wager that we could define SLE as a disease resulting from any one of a few anti-nuclear antibodies, anti-dsDNA being one of them. Perhaps we will resort to saying anti-dsDNA type SLE, if the future treatment modalities become specific to treating the exact pathology caused (or causing) anti-dsDNA autoantibodies.
This is true in everything but science. While I am no philosopher, this sounds like the concept of the Platonic ideal. In science, though, we can set a definition for a class, and every member of that class meets the criteria of the definition, and every other thing not in that class does not.
I’m sure that I’m starting to sound tired, but “red heads” is not a scientific definition. Neither for that matter is “African American” or “black.” Let’s say that every red head gets a fatal infection because they carry an allele of the gene RED1, a membrane receptor. The allele they carry makes their hair red but also serves as a receptor for a new bacteria. So, I would pull over every person and test them for that allele of RED1, starting of course with the obvious red heads. PCR based, it should only take a couple of hours. Or just vaccinate everybody :). Anyway, my guess is that you would positively identify all of the red heads, but also a set of other people who carry the allele but due to host factors (i.e. their hair has gone grey or they dyed their hair brown), doesn’t appear to be a red head.
I agree that “why” is a very important question. The answer does and should inform the question of how we categorize things.
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IMHO, the problem is that we live in a dirty world where life is short and analytical resources are scarce. There just isn’t enough time or energy to analyze everything seperately. And it’s not always even possible. So we put things into rough categories and draw dirty lines.
I think it’s great that science is moving towards better and better ways of breaking things down. Someday, when I go to the doctor with a serious illness, I hope that they prescribe a treatment that is ideal for the very specific variation of whatever condition I have, as applied to my unique genetic/biological makeup.
Your prepubescent boy – no, he may one day be able to produce viable, fertile offspring.
Your post-vasectomy buddy – no, he one day was able to produce viable, fertile offspring.
Your infertile friend – ahhh here’s the rub. I am using fertility as a measure of “genomic integrity” – two people have to have grossly intact genomes in order to produce normal gametes, which fuse to form a normal zygote.
There are many reasons for infertility, but it can be caused by large scale genomic rearrangements which prevent normal zygotes from being made. If your infertile buddy has none of these large scale chromosomal rearrangements, he IMHO would be Homo sapiens sapiens. He could have a large scale rearrangement and still be phenotypically normal, though. A quick PubMed search reveals that up to 1:1000 people are born with a Robertsonian translocation of chromsomes 13 and 14 – the short ends of the chromosomes are fused together without loss of genetic material. These men cannot genetically produce normal gametes – at meiosis:
Bolded dashes represent sister chromatids. Pipes (|||) separate cells.
Normal:
13**-13 13-13 14-14 14-14
Meiosis I: 13 13 14 14 ||| 13 13 14 14
Meiosis II: 13 14 ||| 13 14 ||| 13 14 ||| 13 14
Robertsonian translocation: (1314)
13-13 1314-1314 14-**14
Meiosis I: 13 1314 14 ||| 13 1314 14
Meiosis II: 13 1314 ||| 14 ||| 13 ||| 1314 14 (two possible segregations represented)
In the Robertsonian translocation, notice where each gamete at the end of meiosis II should contain one chromosome, it contains two of 13 or 14 or none of 13 or 14. In the zygote, this causes triploid 13 or 14 or monoploid 13 or 14. The only one of these compatible with life is triploid 13, Patau Syndrome. Five cases have made it past 10 years of age with extensive medical management. Obviously not viable and fertile. In the unlikely occurance that the person meets and mates with another t(13;14), uniparental disomy leads to all types of disorders.
Smaller genomic reorganization may be compatible with fertility. For instance, pericentric inversions or transpositions may lead to genetic infertility due to horrible things happening at crossing over during meiosis I. It is possible that a person would meet and mate with someone with matched transpositions, and have viable, fertile offspring which pass those transpositions or inversions on to their offspring. Voila! Speciation!
So, no I wouldn’t consider this type of person fully human. Obviously, I would treat him as human, though. His genes say nothing as his value as a person. His reproductive drive has no influence on his worth on the planet. But that’s another debate.
Okay, time to try for a little more in depth of a response.
Apos,
I don’t think that we disagree, really. My point is merely that a concept can be valid and valuable scientifically despite the existence of situations in which it is not very useful … and exploration of those situations, of the areas in which the concept begins to show its blurry edges, help us (forces us) to better understand what we mean by that concept in the first place.
Science is not math. In math the definitions come first and from then on the term means that definition and only that. (Parallel means lines that do not intersect, not lines that maintain the same distance ,to reference another thread.) In science usage begets meaning and the nature of the beast is to attempt to bring the concept into sharper focus according to the needs of the day. Your basic point is extemely valid - use a word if it accurately provides meaning in shorthand, save your breath. But use however many words are needed to be precise when such precision is indicated. As for the concepts themselves, luc says it well, “sometimes we have to deal with fuzzy rules or nothing at all.” (My point in the race thread is not that race should be discarded as a scientific concept because it is fuzzy, but because it is needlessly fuzzy; more precise concepts are readily available, and should be used.)
sparc makes excellent points. I do not refer to that shifting of the meaning of a word within the context of one debate … bait and switch by intent or by accident. And the use of shorthand is only of value if it is undestood by those who you are trying to communicate with. Know your target audience. And I am constantly entertained by how many different groups are saying the same thing without realizing it because they are using different jargons, choosing different word.
edwino,
OY, the micro nomenclature changes! You mean there are reasons other than to drive us clinicians nuts that drive these microbes into witness protection programs? But doesn’t that illustrate the point? These classifications change fast, and they are hard to keep up with, but hard and fast? I think not.
And as for clinical syndromes … I’ll raise the same points as I’ve raised in a past discussion: we are rapidly getting past the stage of “specific pathologies” and into a more nuanced view influenced by other models of extremely complex nonlinear systems (including chaos theory). We are approaching a point where we realize that there are many paths to different realtively stable states (phenotypes) and that an understanding of the system dynamics is much more than identifying a point mutation.
My attraction to the image of “conceptual spaces” (as sort of n-dimensional clouds) is far from the Platonic ideal. And we’ll just have to disagree about science being an exception to this process. To me it is a model of it. In science we always have some cloud around our concepts because we always preserve some doubt. Science is about the process of trying to reduce the degree of uncertainty yet it always maintains some. If we were ever sure we had it right we’d cease doing science and open up a religion!