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| JD and Dad at Cornell Graduation, May 2013 |
1) Science is a method and an approach, not a collection of facts. For those of you who don't personally know my Father, or haven't heard me speak about him, my Father is a professor in Cornell Univerity's Department of Plant Biology. He is, in short, a scientist. Although the U.S. public education system (New York's, in any case) does a better job than Israel's at informing its students about the fundamentals of science, many people in our society don't really know what "science" is (for my criticism of how the movie industry mis-educates people about science, see this post). Science is not a list, however accurate, of facts about the natural world. Science is the method of collecting data; it is a form of empiricism, but not all empiricism is necessarily science. A true scientist formulates a hypothesis, then designs a replicable experiment, the results of which are capable of disproving her hypothesis. Aristotle made many empirical observations; however, he never once in his life conducted an experiment. Aristotle was not a scientist. Neither were many of the great thinkers of the middle ages, such as Maimonides. Galileo, by contrast, was a true scientist, and designed and conducted experiments. He even used a precision water-clock in order to time very exactly his experiments on acceleration. This lesson which I learned from my Father is something that I encounter time and time again, often when speaking to misinformed people with strong opinions. Interestingly enough, one of my favorite writers produced a short article addressing just this point, back in 1945, in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
2) Thoroughly study subjects outside of your own area of expertise. My Father, as I mentioned, is a biologist. That being said, he is conversant on a number of other topics, including geology, baseball, linguistics, politics, and various fields of history and literature. Knowledge broadens the mind, and the more that one knows, even if the material is outside of one's field of expertise, contributes to one's understanding. It is because of my Father that I make a serious effort to acquire more of the fundamentals of fields other than my own specialty, history. One of the best classes that I took in university was my course on Vertebrates, out of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I distinctly remember that I was the only student in the entire class outside of the sciences, but probably asked more questions than anyone else. Likewise, readers of this blog probably remember my discussion on the books on physics that I have borrowed from Eli recently, and, back when I had access to a university library, I made it my business to investigate books on topics that seemed interesting, which often proved to be some of the most interesting reads. I hope that I am not coming off as self-aggrandizing; rather, I am trying to explain how many of my choices to delve into new books and new intellectual topics have been encouraged by my father.
3) Be considerate around the workplace, and don't take your job for granted. On my first day of my first student job, working as an assistant in the archives at the Kheel Center, my Father told me that I should be ready to work hard, act professionally, and do everything that my supervisor asked of me with a smile on my face. This is what I told myself every single day of my first job, and I believe that, because of this advice, I conducted myself well throughout both of my student jobs; I was a professional, and could not afford to be the child in the room. Although I sometimes have difficulty maintaining all of my composure in my current job as a teacher, and committed an embarrassing mistake during my first month of work, I have since maintained more control over my emotions, and my expressions thereof.
4) Work hard, and take pride in your work. I really don't know anybody who works harder than my parents. My Father devotes many, many hours to his research and to his students. He very frequently has a six-day workweek, entirely self-imposed, and works late. The rest of the family always knows when he is aligning sequence of DNA in his office, because we can hear him playing the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Although I am prey to distraction, which plagues many others in my generation, I nevertheless try to maintain my focus.
5) When you read, read well. When you write, write well. Something that multiple professors of mine in university noted about my work was that it was always very thorough and detailed. This I attribute entirely to method of reading that I learned from my Father. I do not know anyone else who is as careful to read every word printed on every page, not missing any of the details. Regardless of whether the book you are reading is Of Mice and Men or The Mismeasure of Man, the author wrote every word with intention and deliberation, and understanding of a text comes with thorough reading. This is an appreciation that comes with being a writer and an editor. Unfortunately, clear writing, as championed by authors such as E.B. White and George Orwell, is incredibly rare. As someone who peer-reviewed many papers in my years as an undergraduate, I was frequently astonished at the flagrant imprecision and poor syntax of many of my peers, however, gifted they might have been in other fields. Unfortunately, undergraduate education leaves many students with their writing problems even more engrained, and, according to my Father, who is a painstakingly careful editor of his biology publication, poor writing is especially common among students of the natural sciences. One of the most memorable moments of my senior year was reading a Nutrition paper (on the metabolic effects of the consumption of green tea) written by my friend Sarah, and being amazed at the high quality of her writing. Her paper was more clearly-written and more thoroughly-edited than most other papers I had read that year, even when editing Ezra's Archives, Cornell's undergraduate history journal, which demanded a high caliber of writing from its contributors. George Orwell (of whom my Father is also a reader) has made one of the best statementsof why the clarity of writing is important: "If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy... When you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Let's all try to read a little more slowly, to think a little more clearly, and to write a little more accurately.
Happy Father's Day to all!
~JD
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