There's An Objection To My Supposedly Slighting "The Public Understanding Of Science" - Hate Mail

TAKE THIS DESCRIPTION from Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python 3, 2nd edition:

The most important difference between a computer and an old-fashioned calculator is that you can "teach" a computer new operations by defining them in terms of old ones.  For example,you can teach the computer(*) that "Take the average" means "add up the numbers in a sequence and divide by the sequence's size."  You can then use the operations you have just defined to create still more operations, each layered on top of the ones that came before.  It's a lot like creating life by putting atoms together to make proteins and then combining proteins to build cells, combining cells to make organs and combining organs to make a creature.

That is from three authors, all of them working at the elite University of Toronto, two of them, Paul Gries and Jennifer Campbell teaching in the Department of Computer Science and Jason Montojo who is a research officer at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the same university.  He writes software for their projects.

These scientists may have given a reasonable description of how computer programming is done but their simile allegedly related to biology describes something which is entirely imaginary and not real, never having been done or observed, something which is science fiction and which has no demonstrable connection to how life came about in the beginning or how life is, in fact, propagated now.   Nor is it mentioned how it's supposed to clarify what was said about computer programming. The complexities of how cells and then a zygote and then a fetus form organs WITHIN A LIVING ORGANISM is not like making programming routines and putting them together, and that's just one aspect of how incompetent that conception of life is.  Our bodies, our cells are not like computer programming, our cells (or "DNA" in the imaginations of the authors, since they talk about protein synthesis) don't work that way and how organs are formed is hardly understood except that it's far more complex than that. I think it's far more likely that the way in which that happens is not discoverable by science as it's deemed to be now. I doubt human beings will ever discover how that happens before our species destroys itself.

I would bet you most scientists who works in the relevant areas would find that description absurd, or would as soon as its absurdities are questioned.  The simile is totally ridiculous but I will bet you not one out of a thousand college-credentialed readers of what is actually a rather good book on computer programming would notice that as they had the general sense that it was accurate based on what of neo-Darwinian lore they'd already imbibed.  I would expect that if they hadn't thought much or read much about it, that simile would enter permanently into their "public understanding of science"  much as Dawkins' "first bird to call out" fable has.

In one of my recent go-rounds on these topics I noted that even fine scientists are pretty much at sea once they've left their own specialty, when they get as far afield as computer science or a casual layman, it gets really absurd.  That Oxford seat endowed for Dawkins by a computer jillionaire hasn't really helped at all.

Essentially the idea that any of us has "an understanding of science," as if science was a comprehensible entity for any one of us is ridiculous, even the most eminent of scientists has no such "understanding" of science. That realization came to me when I was interested in reading about the calculation of an 8-dimensional object back in the 00's when someone said if the mathematical calculation of it were written on paper it would cover the island of Manhattan, I immediately realized that not a single member of the team who worked on it could possibly hold all of that in their, no doubt brilliant, minds.  There is no such a thing as a composite of human understanding, "mind meld" is a creation of cheesy sy-fi.  Someone can only understand as much as they understand, whatever they don't know is not part of their understanding.  

* I have to wonder why we don't call making a gear of a specific size for a watch "teaching" a watch what that does, or, rather, teaching the watch to understand what the movement of the hands of a watch in relation to the face of the watch means. For that matter why not call drawing the clock face "teaching the clock" that the Earth rotates in relation to the Sun.  It is pretty much the same thing as the idea that you can "teach a computer" anything.  Whether it is by making the gear to specification to produce a result or making a routine in a computer program to produce a result, it's the same thing.  It's absurd to think the machine understands it or "learns" anything.

Which reminds me of the idiot professor of psychology I read about who once came up with a chart of the IQs of various entities.  As I recall he said that an alarm clock had an IQ of 5. I almost am convinced that I recall he rated a typewriter higher.  Considering how much the clock would have to "know" to function, I think the man of science did what most everyone who talks "IQ" does, and decides those they don't respect are stupider than what they hold in higher esteem.  Which also falls within "the popular understanding of science," which includes the "understanding" of many esteemed and powerfully influential scientists who are so stupid as to believe that something deemed to be an "intelligence quotient" is determinable, observable, measurable and subject to scientific knowledge is real.