What is sufficient precision?
Here's my response:I saw a link to this LiveScience report over at Southern Exposure just now.
Now, I’m not going to argue that human civilization hasn’t significantly changed the planet. We have. And I’m not going to argue that we shouldn’t call the current time something new to reflect that. We probably should.
What miffs me is the language. Check out the title of the article:
Humans Force Earth into New Geologic Epoch
WTF? It’s as if the new epoch was coming sometime in the future, but we made it come quicker. WE MAKE UP THE TIME PERIODS PEOPLE!!! We decide when the boundaries are. They don’t frickin’ exist without us!
Let’s look at the first statement in the article:
Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet’s geologic history has begun.
Maybe one can say I’m being nit-picky about semantics, but don’t you see what’s wrong with this? “…scientists say a new epoch…has begun”. Wrong. Scientists are saying we ought to CALL it a new one to reflect these changes. It’s as if the time periods exist somehow and we discovered them, their boundaries, and all their Anglo-Saxon (with some Russian, French, and others) names.
Language is imprecise, and it is more imprecise (arguably) in media targeted to an audience that would understand “scientists say” to imply that “a handful of scientists suggest we ought to call…” I’d draw your attention to the linguistic category of “performative speech acts,” an idea that resides deeply in the realm of semantics. When “scientists say” a new epoch has begun (or whatever), the act of their saying it creates a new “epoch” (even if the Stratigraphic Committee hasn’t ratified it). That doesn’t mean their utterance redirects Earth processes. It means “saying” that a new category exists to describe the planet’s history makes it true that a new category exists to describe the planet’s history, regardless of events on the ground.
If science writers (Disclaimer: I’m a science writer) are dangerously imprecise, where does that put blogging scientists? Look at this sentence from your response above: “By saying a new epoch has begun rather than we (humans) are recognizing that we need to create a new epoch is misleading to me.” “We (humans)” seems maddeningly imprecise. To apply the level of rigor to blog language that you are applying to mainstream science writing, this appears to either make you a spokesperson for humans, or suggest that “humans are recognizing…”, something patently not true since all but several thousand humans have no idea what an epoch is. I would also question the precision of the word “frickin’,” and efficiency of the phrase “By saying a new epoch has begun rather than we (humans) are recognizing that we need to create a new epoch” as the subject of a sentence. Form is content. Besides, everybody knows that you can’t “create” a new epoch because of the Law of Conservation of Epochs (kidding).
My overall point is that science writers and scientists are not enemies. In fact, developments like the NC Science Blogging coference, Science Blogs, and the World Science Festival show that scientists and science writers are starting an “epoch” (wink) of better mutual understanding and collaboration, in an effort to raise the general level of scientific literacy among those who think conversations like this are internecine squabbling. Another argument is that I should take something for sleeplessness.
I think part of the science/journalist rift comes from the scientific principle that one should not extrapolate one's conclusions beyond the reasonable limits of one's data. When bad scientists defy this principle, they often use journalists as unwitting allies, making journalists the fall guys for bad science.
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