Music About Science

I have an opinion that might be unpopular around here: I don’t like music about science. My love of science and scientific knowledge cannot be impugned — my Ph.D. is all the evidence I need to make my case. I never would have made it through my 14 years of biology education if I didn’t love science. I even love boring science lecture — both hearing them and giving them. Music is also very important to me. I have been a casual musician for most of my life, and listening to music and making music are deeply fulfilling for me. There is a bunch of music out there that is about science, and it would be reasonable to guess that I would love this music. But I don’t. There is a time for music, and there is a time for a boring science lecture, but when I’m listening to music, what I want is not a boring science lecture.

Exhibit A:

Symphony of science is pretty popular. But let’s face it — this is literally just a boring science lecture that has been auto-tuned. The words of Carl Sagan, for example, are inspiring in their own right. I don’t think making them musical adds anything to them. If anything, I think his words are cheapened slightly by the gimmick.

Exhibit B:

I have a lot of love for Baba Brinkman, so I feel a little bit bad for listing him here. He is brilliant, great with words, and a good performer. I respect him a lot for using his medium to explain science. I particularly like the way he used this anti-evolution rally song as a base for this song about the science of political values and religion.

I got to see him perform once at an evolutionary psychology conference, and I really have nothing but love for him. For the times that I actually do want to listen to a boring science lecture set to music, I go straight to Baba Brinkman. But this doesn’t change the fact that his work is still essentially a boring science lecture, albeit spoken very rhythmically.

Exhibit C:

Hank Green’s “I Fucking Love Science” is cute. There are some clever lines, but it’s not what I want out of music. It is literal and a little bit lecture-ey at times. What I mean should be clear in a minute.

Please don’t misunderstand me — there is no judgement here. Musicians should write about whatever they want to write about, and people should listen to whatever they want to listen to. My feelings about the music I mention are just my own feelings. I also don’t mean to disparage any of these artists. I’ve tried writing music myself, and I can’t go around calling the kettle black.

This is not about what music I think people should or shouldn’t be writing and listening to, it’s just about what I want out of music. What do I want out of music? Some poetry. Some metaphor. The language of emotion. And would a drum solo kill you?

When I listen to music, I want to be able to identify with the emotions that are conveyed through the medium.

Take this song:

This song is reportedly about Kurt Cobain’s relationship with Tobi Vail, the drummer for Bikini Kill. You may not like this song as much as I do, but you will agree that at no point does this song, which is about a human relationship, sound like an anthropologist talking about the mating behavior of gorillas. The song is about the emotions, not the details. No boring lectures anywhere.

Kurt Cobain talks about his experience in this song without making the context perfectly clear. But it is deeply expressive and poetic, and it is exactly what I want out of a song.

Take another song about a relationship that ended:

Kris Kristofferson’s take on this topic has much more of a narrative style than Kurt Cobain’s. There is no question about what Me and Bobby McGee is about. But there is still poetry. He could have said, “Now she’s gone and I really miss her.” That would have communicated his point effectively, but there is no poetry to it. Instead, he chose to say, “and I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.” Give me a minute to catch my breath.

I think the mistake that people make when writing music about science is talking like scientists instead of lyricists. There is a reason why we have scientists write our science, and musicians write our music. It has famously been said that, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Each of these media have their style, and limits to their application.

Here is what I would like to see: music about the experience of science, rather than the outcome of science. We have beautiful, poetic music about the experience of love, death, happiness, sex, jealousy, war, fatherhood, dissatisfaction, and basically every other human experience one could have. But very little beautiful, poetic music about science.

Consider, for a moment, Leonardo DaVinci. He was both a great scientist and a great artist. Remember that this was the guy who painted the Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and the Vitruvian Man. If he was going to write a song about science, what would it have sounded like? “If the air passing over the top of a wing is moving faster than the air moving under the wing, it will reduce the pressure above the wing and create lift. La dee dee, la dee dah.” No, probably not.

Through my pursuit of science, I have experienced a wide range of emotions. Scientific discovery can be wonderful, beautiful, painful, emotional, and, at times, even exciting. Where is the music inspired by science that conveys these feelings?

You may disagree, or maybe I just haven’t heard the right music. What’s your favorite song about science?

Have a topic you want me to cover? Let me know in the comments or on twitter @cgeppig

Follow me on Facebook

Advertisement

Are Humans Still Evolving?

Image from telegraph.co.uk

I hear this question come up a lot. The subtext is that, because humans have mastered our environment, we are no longer subject to the same pressures of natural selection that we once were.

First, let’s review what evolution is. Evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles or traits in a population over time. Natural selection is the mode of evolution where the change is based on environmental pressures that cause individuals with certain traits to reproduce more than individuals without those traits. Natural selection does not have a goal, or a more or less advanced state. Natural selection improves a population in that it increases the frequency of traits that cause the members of the population to leave more surviving offspring. It does not improve a population by necessarily making the individuals smarter, faster, stronger, or more complex. A cheetah is not more evolved than a sloth because it is faster. Both were designed by natural selection to do what they do.

Infectious disease was a huge problem for our ancestors. Good thing we cured them all. (In case there was any doubt, that last sentence was full of sarcasm.) While it is true that medical advances have greatly reduced the burden of infectious disease in the west, they are still a big problem in most of the world. Malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, and diarrheal disease each kill over a million people a year worldwide, mostly in developing nations.

Even in the medically-advanced United States, tens of thousands of people die every year from influenza alone. We may not have schistosomiasis or malaria, but we still have people dying of infectious disease in large numbers. If there exist any alleles in our population that confer resistance to diseases that we face, however slight, then we are evolving. If for example, people with a particular allele have even a 0.1% increased chance of surviving influenza, then that trait will increase in frequency in subsequent generations.

If diseases are not killing us randomly, then those diseases are causing us to evolve. If we cure those diseases, then the cure will also cause us to evolve. If a disease is killing people who do not have a particular trait, then the frequency of that particular trait will increase. If we cure the disease, then the frequency of that particular trait will begin to decrease again. Both the increase and decrease of the trait frequency are evolution. I think this is where a lot of people get hung up — because we are not “improving” we must not be evolving.

Our evolution is not limited to the effects of infectious disease. If you look at population growth in the world, it is not the same everywhere. Traits that occur at higher frequencies in the parts of the world with higher fertility rates will get passed on at a higher frequency. This is also evolution.

Average fertility rate by country. Most of the world’s population growth is happening in central Africa. Image from wikipedia.org

Evolution takes place over the course of many generations. Individual human observers will therefore have a difficult time observing human evolution. It may not look like we are evolving, but we certainly are.

 

Have a topic you want me to cover in a future post? Let me know in the comments or on twitter @CGEppig.