Rule 14-1B: "Science" and "Tradition" in Golf

Yesterday, the United States Golf Association (USGA) announced a rule change. Coming into effect in 2016, Rule 14-1B will prohibit the use of so-called "anchored strokes" in sanctioned play. Rather than try to describe what "anchoring" is, here's a helpful graphic provided by the USGA:

Source: http://www.usga.org/uploadedImages/USGAHome/rules/UNDERSTANDING%20ANCHORED%20STROKES.jpg

As a strategy for putting, "anchoring" has become increasingly popular—and controversial—over the last decade or so. According to ESPN, four out of the last six winners in major championships used "anchored strokes," a rate of success that has fueled speculation about what (if any) competitive advantage such a stroke might confer.

I'm not a golf fan, and I don't have an opinion one way or the other. What I'm interested in is the way this issue has been both contested within the golf community and portrayed in the media. Specifically, I was struck by how the old clash between "science" and "tradition" is playing out in some interesting ways. Here goes:

Cold War Science / Cold War Synthesis

BOOK REVIEW: Audra Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in the Cold War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Back in 2011, AmericanScience interviewed writer and editor Audra Wolfe about her work cataloging the papers of American geneticist Bentley Glass. When asked whether the Glass papers indicated that "the 'story' we have about Cold War science is wrong," Wolfe suggested that we'd have to get back to her in a year or so.

Well, it seems that we now have a chance to learn Wolfe's take on Cold War science – not from her research on Bentley Glass, which is ongoing, but from her book Competing with the Soviets, a short, textbook-style history of science and technology in the United States during the Cold War. The book examines the role that science and scientists played in maintaining state power, and how Cold War concerns shaped individuals, institutions, funding streams and research agendas.

The book hits on many of the stories that we've come to associate with Cold War science: massive technoscientific achievements like the atomic bomb and the Apollo missions; the engagement of scientists in politics (and its outcomes) as illustrated in the Oppenheimer security hearings and the Nuclear Test Ban debates; and moments of astonishing technological hubris including the atomic-earthmoving proposal Project Plowshare (with which the book opens) and Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Wolfe also dives into the history of the social sciences, considering for example the role of American economists and economic ideas in U.S. efforts to "win the hearts and minds" of those living in the developing world, and psychologists' misguided efforts to address entrenched racism at home.

Wild at Heart: Finding Evolutionary Narratives in Evangelical Christianity

We asked Myrna Perez, whose work focuses on the public role of evolutionary biology during the last quarter of the twentieth century, to reflect on that topic in a post. She's currently writing a dissertation about Stephen Jay Gould; you can find out more about her work here. 

What is so compelling about returning to our evolutionary origins? Why do we think that getting back to an earlier period in human history will make us healthier, happier and more fulfilled? In Wednesday's post, Lukas explored the appeal and historic origins of “paleo-diets” in order to make the intriguing suggestion that our attraction to these evolutionary narratives reveals a kind of ambivalent anxiety about modernity. 

When I think of these “cave-man diets” I’m struck by another aspect of this evolutionary origin story: namely, what they imply about human sex difference. The image of the cave-man offers a certain type of uncivilized, rugged masculinity – one that has been hemmed in by the advent of agriculture, domesticity and the trappings of urbanized, modern life. 

Of course, it’s not only men who follow paleo-diets. But it would be hard to deny the slant toward men for this protein-focused, weight-lifting, and wild-man-creating diet and exercise regime. In the logic of the “cave-man diet” men reach their fullest potential by shedding the cloak of civilization in order to return to a purer, more natural state of being.

Now, I’m fairly sure that there isn’t space in a blog post to get to the bottom of the relationship between evolutionary theory and modern gender dynamics. But what I would like to explore is the pervasiveness of the gender and sexuality models coming out of much of evolutionary psychology for the past several decades, by looking in one surprising place: the popular sub-culture of American evangelical Christianity.

The Curious History of the Paleo-Diet, and its Relationship to Science & Modernity

Joseph Knowles emerging from the woods in his "Wilderness Garb," Oct. 4th, 1913

Over the past few years, I've been following the career of a new fad called the "paleo-diet," which advises us to adopt the eating habits of the Pleistocene. I first became aware of it from a New York Times article featuring John Durant, a 20-something office worker turned fitness guru from Manhattan who tries to live as our ancestors did before the dawn of agriculture. On his website, Durant explains that when he started working at his first job out of college, he began to notice that he often felt tired, anxious, and stressed out. He also started to put on weight and noticed that his complexion was becoming uneven.

On the lookout for an explanation for what might be going on with his body, Durant came across the UC Irvine Economist Art de Vany, who had developed a so-called evolutionary fitness regimen. Durant decided to give it a try, and began to eat a diet that is high in fat and protein, as well as fresh fruits and vegetables, but completely avoids grains and all processed foods. Moreover, Durant began to fast for long periods in between meals to simulate the lean times that hunter gatherers often had to endure. Indeed, some advocates of the paleo-diet even go so far as to engage in strenuous exercise before breaking a fast, reasoning that early hominids had to hunt down their prey before consuming a large dose of protein.

There's been a lot of chatter about the relative merits and shortcomings of the paleo-diet recently (including an advice column at the Huffington Post and a hilarious review of Marlene Zuk's book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet and How We Live on Salon). I'm not going to evaluate any of the substantive claims made either for or against this lifestyle.  Instead, I want to give a bit of historical context for these discussions from the late 19th and early 20th century (see the image above!).

The High Quality Research Act: Searching for Ways Beyond "Politicization"

This post is a continuation of our on-going discussion here at American Science of Rep. Lamar Smith's High Quality Research Act (HQRA), which would cut the National Science Foundation's funding to certain kinds of research, especially in the social sciences.

It was only a matter of time before someone dropped the p-word, "politicization," in discussions of the HQRA. It's a word that haunts these kinds of topics. The first appearance of the word in this context that I noticed was in this post by Michael McAuliff and Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post.

I want to question and probe their discussion.

Analogizing Human Genes

We asked Andrew Hogan, a historian of science and medicine whose work focuses on the observational approaches of postwar human genetics and biomedicine, what the sort of questions he asks might reveal about contemporary science.  He sent us the following guest post; you can find out more about his work here. 

Excellent coverage of the BRCA gene patenting case by Lukas on this blog (and elsewhere) over the past few months has recently gotten me thinking about the ways that various analogies shape the arguments and decisions made by lawyers, jurists, and government officials. Comparisons to more tangible objects seem to be particularly influential in cases that consider scientific concepts and entities, like genes, which cannot be directly seen. 

After the case Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. was heard before the US Supreme Court last month, I read through the oral arguments, previous Court decisions for this case, and the 2001 US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) justification for allowing gene patents. I wanted to get a sense of what gene analogies seemed to be most influential, and how this shaped the framing of the BRCA case.

 In his recent post, Lukas did an excellent job of probing the implications of framing genes as molecules versus information. Today, I want to examine two related sets of analogies that may also shape the outcome of this case: those that equate human genes with (1) other chemicals that have been isolated and/or purified from the human body, like the hormone adrenaline, and (2) macroscopic anatomical entities, such as a kidney, liver, or tree leaf.

The High Quality Research Act: A Steaming Plate of Democracy, or Careful What You Wish For!!

I'd like to build on Hank's post from yesterday, which looked at Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Smith's potential legislation, the "High Quality Research Act" (HQRA), which would curtail research spending on certain kinds of research at the National Science Foundation. This article nicely spells out the basic contours of the story. Rep. Smith is particularly interested in cutting funding to research in the social sciences, unless it makes contributions to economic development and national security. What has mostly gone un-mentioned in recent news articles is that most of the cuts will likely effect the NSF's program in science and technology studies (STS), a field in which I and most other authors of this blog work. Hank did a nice job in his post of connecting this law to two long-standing themes in STS, namely the so-called Science Wars and peer review. I would like to take this issue in a slightly different direction by focusing on STS writing on democracy.

The High Quality Research Act and American Science

Yesterday, President Obama spoke at the National Academy of Sciences to mark its 150th anniversary. Alongside the usual issues, Obama took time to defend "the integrity of our scientific process" and "our rigorous peer review system." 

Why? Because they're under attack—from within the halls of Congress. 

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is preparing legislation that would disrupt peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF). A draft of the bill—which is called the "High Quality Research Act" (HQRA)—leaked onto the web this week. It includes a new set of criteria for NSF projects:

There are all sorts of reasons these developments should be of interest to readers of this blog—not least, the fact that the NSF funds the history of science through its Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program. Below, I'll fill out a few of the details of what's happened, and suggest some ways HQRA (and its discontents) link up with issues of concern to science studies more generally. 

The Science of Structure and the Apologetics of Agency

What do Jonah Lehrer and Sheryl Sandberg have in common?

I think it's productive to see their separate moments in the sun through a shared lens. The way they've been received recently tells us something interesting about the way ideas of structure and agency play out in the popular press, and specifically how science fits into that picture.

Sources: http://www.thenextbigdesign.com/2011/12/brief-post-on-jonah-lehrer.html
and http://www.newyorker.com/images/2011/07/11/p233/110711_r21057_p233.jpg

In Lehrer's plagiarism and Sandberg's "Leaning In," critics have fixated on the relative emphasis the two give to structure and agency. Where Lehrer didn't take enough responsibility for his own agency, Sandberg made too much of hers (or any woman's), at the cost of structural inequalities. Below, I explore how (and why) the two account for structure and agency the way they do, with special emphasis on the role of science in their accounts.

The Ontology of the Patent Law, Part II

Illustration of "native" DNA in the human cell, from the majority opinion in Ass. for Mol. Path. v. Myriad Genetics, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a case the US Supreme Court will hear on April 15th concerning whether genes can be patented. As we get closer to that date, I want to pick up the thread where it was left off.