"Look at your fish!"
That was the simple four-word command given by noted 19th century naturalist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz to his research students at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School, and it drove them crazy.
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Samuel Scudder, an entomologist who studied under him, wrote about that phrase in his 1874 essay, "In the Laboratory With Agassiz," where he recalled that after his initial meeting with the good professor, he was left alone with a single dead fish for hours on end, with no tools but his eyes, ears, and fingers.
When Agassiz would return, Scudder would tell him what he had learned about the specimen. Agassiz would nod, and demand he find more before leaving once again.
"Look at your fish!" he would exhort.
And so the dance went on for three days. Each time Scudder thought he couldn't possibly find anything new about his dead friend, he would notice something else that would send him careening off in some other direction. By the end of the drill, he had thoroughly analyzed every facet of the carcass laid out before him and said that in retrospect, it was an invaluable exercise.
"This was the best entomological lesson I ever had - a lesson, whose influence has extended to the details of every subsequent study; a legacy the professor has left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part," he wrote.
That, pure and simple, is science. But how things have changed since 1874.
Maybe it's been the super-effective misrepresentation of scientists in the media, or just that Americans, to be honest, barely have any sort of grasp on or understanding of the subject itself. But it somehow has become vogue to look upon those who spend their lives studying the world around them as crackpot alarmists who are no more than pandering mouthpieces for a certain political party.
It can be heard everywhere, from the editorial boards of conservative publications to the mumblings of drugged-up loons on AM radio, and it absolutely must stop.
Humanity, with its notoriously short memory, evidently has forgotten that everything we have, all the great pieces and processes that have elevated us to this planet's throne, we owe to science. It's always been our inventions - the obsidian arrowhead, the printing press, the radio, the combustion engine - that have separated us from the rest of the animal kingdom, and it all has come from the use of the scientific method.
We revel in the fruits of science, and rightly so. We love our tablets and wireless Internet and GPS systems, and imagining life without them is horrifying to a lot of folks.
Well, why, then, when scientists tell us that they are literally certain that our carbon emissions are warming this planet at an accelerated rate, do we, who have no background in the subject, look at them like they're the ones who don't know what they're talking about?
Why, as a recent New York Times story reported, when you can now see the "tremendous wildfires" and "gargantuan sandstorms" rage across the palette of the earth from space, and the "gunmetal exhalation of coal and fuel smoke" spread over China, do we believe that our actions don't affect the ecosystem around us?
Bill Maher once said that you can't pick the science you like, because the same process that led to the development of the iPhone is the one that's telling us that we must turn our vicious, parasitic demolition of this planet around before it's too late. And even though it all sounds like crazy talk to those who bask in ignorance, shooting messengers and hiding heads in the sand won't change that.
The scientists, after all, are just the ones looking at the fish.
We're the ones pretending it can still swim.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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