Story Spinning

Spiders. They create reactions of all sorts in people. My little brother was so afraid of spiders that he’d scope his entire room with a flashlight before going to bed; my high school math teacher gave extra credit to students who would catch live spiders and leave them as gifts on her desk. No matter where you fall along the like/dislike spectrum of spiders, you’d be hard-pressed to deny that they are fascinating creatures. Their webs are extraordinary, withstanding the impact of even hurricane-strength wind. However, researchers maintain that although incredibly durable, the silk alone cannot account for such survival of the web. In 2012 a study came out that suggested spider webs are designed with a sort of “fall back” option: specific parts of the web will collapse under the brunt of great force, and although diminished, the web will still function as effectively as ever (Science Daily).

Just as spiders are web-spinning creatures, so are people story-telling creatures (Fisher 181). Notice that several of our readings feel especially “storybook” in format. David Quammen’s “Out of the Wild” appears as though it could’ve been lifted right out of a sci-fi or adventure novel; he even utilizes anthropomorphism to villainize viruses: “They lurk; they wait. They hide from the immune system rather than trying to outrun it” (The Best American Science and Nature Writing 160). “Lurk,” “wait,” and “hide” denote human activity because they all imply some sort of motivation and consciousness. But last time I checked, viruses are not “self-aware” (Microbial Life ). So why do we assign some sort of human, narrative significance to that which is not human? Or to go for the bigger question: why do we tell stories at all?

Such a huge question demands many complex answers. However, I’ll discuss just a few. First, perhaps people tell stories because of uncertainty. We may not be able to know “facts” for certain, but we’ll use what we think we know for as long as it appears to work; if the stories we spin function well enough to “catch the fly” and get the job done, then they at least bear some of the weight of credibility. “Conclusions are based on strong evidence, without waiting for an elusive proof positive…but science can afford to move ahead because it is always an evolving story, a continuing journey that allows for mid-course corrections” (A Field Guide for Science Writers 19). In other words, the “stories” of science give coherency and structure to our otherwise chaotic and complex lives, allowing us to move freely without getting caught in a web of confusion and paralyzed by the venom of uncertainty.

Second, storytelling is rhetorical, and as such, can “assist in the presentation of new insights [and] also contributes to the generating of human knowledge” (Graves 107). I realize that Graves composed her entire paper around the controversy in the above quote, but this debate has been going on for centuries: Isocrates, an ancient Greek rhetorician, writes in his Antidosis that “with this [rhetorical] faculty we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute and seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown (The Rhetorical Tradition 75). Very well then. A discussion about the particulars of these issues lies outside the scope of this blog post; however, I would like to point out that storytelling is almost fictitious in its very nature. Paradoxically, the “fiction” helps us see more fully reality as it is. In the words of author Yann Martel, “That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?” (Life of Pi vi). For example, an artist knows that to create a “realistic” painting, one must not simply paint a tree green and an ocean blue. Rather, she must see beyond merely looking, painting blues and purples in the seemingly gray shadows dappling a wooded walkway, dazzling what appears to be a tan cliff with pinks and oranges and yellows. Her method includes something of the “fictitious,” but the end result produces something that reflects life. Therefore, I think that rhetoric in the process of investigation is indeed epistemological.

Finally, stories carry meaning, significance. We tell stories in the search of discovering purpose. It’s no coincidence that science, which describes life as we perceive it, is investigated, interpreted, and presented by rhetorical means.

Dr. Hugh Moorhead, a philosophy professor at Northeastern Illinois University, once wrote to 250 of the best-known philosophers, scientists, writers, and intellectuals in the world, asking them, “What is the meaning of life?” He then published their responses in a book. Some offered their best guesses, some admitted that they just made up a purpose for life, and others were honest enough to say they were clueless. In fact, a number of famous intellectuals asked Professor Moorhead to write back and tell them if he discovered the purpose of life! (Purpose Driven Life 23) 

Lewis Thomas states, “what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future” (The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 225). With a purpose comes a future, and thus, we have a need for story spinning. 

The Faith of Science

Walk up to any person on the street and ask him or her how science is defined, and chances are, the response you get will probably run along the lines of “discovering how the world works” or “finding out truths of nature through controlled experimentation.” Even Elise Hancock writes, “Scientific truth is a matter of evidence” (Ideas into Words 14). However, I would like to contest Hancock’s statement; she should’ve written that “faith is a matter of evidence, and science is a matter of faith.”

If “evidence is supposed to be true” (Hancock 14), then why do we have a history of false scientific theories? For example, in medieval times, people observed that maggots would spring “spontaneously” from a piece of rotting meat; through repeated observations, people began to believe the theory of spontaneous generation, which stated that living things would arise from nonliving things. However, through experiments involving control and variable groups, Louis Pasteur exposed the inaccuracy of the spontaneous generation theory. Polanyi states, “Another tenet of modern science…is its ideal of empiricism” (“Scientific Controversy” 197). Empiricism emphasizes evidence as derived through the constancy of sensory experience through experiment. However, as in the case of spontaneous generation, the evidence can be easily misconstrued—that is why actual, scientific “truth” is not a matter of evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is.

Nowadays, people understand faith as “blind,” or a “leap in the dark,” used only in religious contexts. However, Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines faith as “the assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition advanced by another; belief, or probable evidence of any kind” (emphasis added). Even biblical text asserts that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 KJV, emphasis added).One has faith in something which one has good evidence to believe. Faith is considered a “virtue” because humans are so fickle; faith leads us to continue believing something despite trivial fluctuations of opinion or indigestion or superficial opposition (of course, some people, despite all other evidence against them, still tenaciously cling in faith to something; in these cases, “faith” is just a nice cover-up for pride and stubbornness). Basically, faith is the opposite of inconstancy or mutability, which is “like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings / Give various response to each varying blast, / To whose frail frame no second motion brings / One mood or modulation like the last” (Shelley).  Such a turn of opinion (it’s too shallow to label “belief”) is caused by a lack of conviction based on evidence-following.

Intricately tied into the concept of faith is not only evidence but also passion. The heuristic passion that Polanyi mentions—the passion derived from knowledge gained through experience—motivates scientists to “enrich the world” (194). A prime example of heuristic passion in action is the kindergartner who goes home and excitedly shares with her mother all that she’s learned in school that day (“Mommy, did you know that red and blue make purple?! Could we play with food coloring too?”). That heuristic passion both inspires one toward further discovery (Polanyi 194) and manifests itself as tenderness with the subject of research; Siddhartha Mukherjee eloquently states, “When I witness science in action, I see this tenderness in abundance” (The Best American Science and Nature Writing xviii). Heuristic knowledge constitutes part of the “evidence” that make up faith, and as such, faith has a very, very personal element to it. The process by which knowledge is gained through experience plays a part in an individual’s story; as storytelling creatures, we also try to insert our characters into whatever story is being told at the time. I think this is why we encounter problems like the ones expressed in Jon Mooallem’s article, “The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name”: “For whatever reason, we’re prone to seeing animals…as reflection, models, and foils of ourselves; we’re extraordinarily, and sometimes irrationally, invested in them” (254). Anthropomorphism (this inserting ourselves into the story) even appears in a matter-of-fact excerpt from Jared Diamond’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee: “You yourself would not want to carry out a lengthy courtship and copulate under the watchful eyes of others; many animals do not want to either” (The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 111).

Based on a system of faith, “science” is not as objective as we think; remember, “the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process” (Mukherjee xviii-xix). Therefore, as science writers, we have all sorts of options when composing a paper: investigating the “line of evidence” behind a particular paradigm or taken-for-granted scientific “fact”; interviewing a scientist about his “heuristic passion” driving his research, etc. By redefining our conceptions of what constitutes science, we might also reconsider how we go about science writing.