Science in the Triangle

It hit me when my mind wandered through a blog post by Robert Lee Hotz, a Wall Street Journal science writer, about research that explores the brain during sudden Eureka moments. Also a contributing factor was a book, that, as I’m reading it, makes me wonder whether it’s smarter to be a nematode or a human.

What dawned on me was the beginning of an understanding how the Internet can be so ephemeral and yet so powerful.

I realized that we can follow the nematode’s example and adapt to emerging technologies to further our knowledge exponentially or we can dig in and watch idly while cellphones, Facebook and Twitter change how society works. It’s all a matter of mindset, which we as humans can change thanks to evolution.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications program, lays out how the Internet is disrupting the hirarchical flow of knowledge. With cellphones, Facebook and Twitter everybody becomes a consumer and a producer. That means, information no longer is passed on from a producer to a select group of middlemen, such as journalists, who then distribute it to the consumers. Instead, information originates from multiple sources - including television, newspapers and magazines - and is distributed on the Internet. The multiple sources can then connect with each other and create more information.

To illustrate how different this Internet network of information producers and consumers is from the linear, top-to-bottom model, Shirky points out a successful Internet effort to monitor voting irregularities in the 2008 presidential election. In a reversal of technology transfer trends, the U.S. copied the idea from a less developed country, Nigeria, where it was deployed during an election a year or so earlier.

It seems to me that such a network of producers and consumers would perfectly suit science, which always struggles to solve more problems the more scientists know.

There is, of course, the pesky question whether an exploding amount of information automatically translates into better information. That’s where the book comes in.

Published last year by the California University Press, “Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World” is not only a novel approach to gathering scientific information, it also provides some astonishing insights.

The book was edited by Raphael D. Sagarin, associate director for ocean and coastal policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and Terence Taylor, a former United Nations chief weapons of mass destruction inspector for Iran. In the book, Sagarin and Taylor bring together experts from different walks of scientific life, including marine biologists, an anthropologist, a paleontologist, security experts and a virus researcher, who look at ways nature has developed over millions of years to defend itself against ever-present dangers and what humans can learn from natural defense mechanisms.

The nematode, a worm of about 1,000 cells, is featured in the book, because it has a highly efficient and adaptive immune system that appears to be capable of protecting the worm from all known viral parasites. The nematode’s cells do that through RNA interference, a method that many researchers are currently trying to tap for drug development.

The book’s authors argue that natural defense mechanisms work because nature never puts all of her eggs in one basket. The nematode’s way is different from the ways of bacteria, which are different again from how bony fish or birds do it.

When nature has been able to advance its knowledge base by using multiple methods simultaneously, shouldn’t humans then be able to do the same? In that context, the Internet should reduce the risk of misinformation and improve human knowledge.

Afterall, humans are part of nature and its evolution - a point that is bolstered by brain research.

As the WSJ’s Hotz points out in his blog post, the human brain works better when we’re not single-minded. Brain scans show, he writes, that “our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind wanders and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.”

Aha!