The Babylonian Blunder

What can we learn from the Tower of Babel? In the biblical narrative, the Babylonians undertook the construction of a mighty tower unlike ever seen before. Aiming for the height of heaven, they encountered one difficulty. No one spoke the same language. Consequently, the building process came to a crashing halt. If only they knew a couple of phrases in each other’s tongue, the Tower of Babel might have reached the abode of the angels.

Let us compare natural scientists to the Babylonians. A molecular biophysicist talks about how “an excitable medium supports nonlinear front propagation”. ^[1] An evolutionary biologist about how “Hox-type gene Ultrabithorax establishes target specificity of ventrally projecting RP motoneurons”. ^[2]They have no idea that both are talking about the same fruit fly. Unknowingly, they contribute to the same Tower of Babel. Knowledge of some simple words in each other’s jargon would bring them closer together, increasing the efficiency, creativity, and applicability of their science.

Firstly, how have scientists become so segregated into their own fields? The protagonists of early modern science acted in a plethora of fields simultaneously. Gottfried von Leibniz, for instance, contributed to mathematics, philosophy, history, law, geology, and even early computer science. Nowadays, all those areas have grown into huge library sections of their own. Where bright sparks in the Renaissance could acquire a myriad of disciplines, the current specialist is faced with an unattainable ideal of uomo universal. Science has grown out of human proportions.

Another reason for the diverging disciplines lies in the Dutch education system. We ask young scientists to choose early. At the age of 15, adolescents determine their school profiles, cleaving classes into natural science-oriented versus humanities-oriented. ^[3] In many other countries, this happens during the bachelor’s degree. When Dutch young scientists start their PhD, they lost sight of other disciplines a decade ago.

Graduate-entry medicine, like the SUMMA programme, is a marvellous move in the right direction. Many backgrounds are gathered into one community. The most pristine universities abroad, however, take it one step further. They open these courses to any background degree, even French literature. With the aim of reconnecting dispersed branches of science, these decisions are as bold as promising.

Medical science becomes more efficient with an interdisciplinary awareness. In 1994, the medical researcher Mary Tai developed a way for the determination of the area under glucose tolerance curves. She named the method after herself: Tai’s model, publishing in Diabetes Care.^[4] She earned 303 citations, not knowing that she described a method that had been understood for centuries. It is called numerical integration by the trapezoid rule. Although I admire her analytical skills, a brief conversation with a maths first-year at TU Delft could have saved her some valuable time. Ironically, her method was even used by the Babylonians in 50 BCE for calculating Jupiter’s orbital. ^[5]

In 2016, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths wrote a book to explain how computer science applies to many unexpected fields. ^[6] Although most people think that computer science is all about coding and transistor circuits, they illustrated how it also involves problems in everyday life. How should one schedule patients with different urgencies? How many doctors should be on the night shift to guarantee sufficient staff occupation? Should we finance this medicine or develop a potentially better drug? Since the essence of computer science is about communicating vessels, computer scientists are trained in the optimisation of all these problems. Most doctors would not know.

Not only technical studies overlap with medical science. After receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine, neuroscientist Eric Kandel wrote a book to elucidate how reductionism in avant-garde figurative art links to current brain research on cognitive function and perception. ^[7] The aesthetic discoveries of Kandinsky, Pollock, and Rothko are now being reproduced by cutting-edge neuroscience. As the title of the book Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer suggests, other neurologists have found similar connections between art movements and contemporary brain science, ^[8] emphasising how two wildly different cultures might be bridged fruitfully.

Understandably, some scientists will find the connection with art history too far-fetched for a meaningful contribution to their content. How could an avant-garde art connoisseur with a chevron moustache help with my quantum mechanics research? To understand this, we should dive into some basics of group dynamics.

In 1972, the social psychologist Irving Janis observed that people strive for harmony within a group, setting aside their personal convictions. He called the resultative cohesiveness ‘groupthink’. Since peer pressure forces outliers to conform with the crowd, groupthink leads to illusions of invulnerability, unquestioned beliefs, and false suggestions of unanimity.

The Asch conformity experiments are a famous illustration of this effect. Eight college students had to vote on a simple multiple-choice question. All but one of them were actors, who had been given the instruction to vote on an obviously wrong answer. In the experiment, Asch discovered that 75% of the participants abandoned their own judgement at least once. ^[9] He concluded that “individuals are highly sensitive to the structural qualities of group opposition.”

A common cure to groupthink is involving a devil’s advocate in the discussions. This is what an art specialist can offer to quantum mechanics research. An outsider asks questions that nobody asks. On a congress for medical researchers, all participants will implicitly assume that in-vitro studies are worth the costs, also when performed on tiny fruit flies. If a stranger questions this postulate, it triggers new critical reflections within the community. Take my advice; invite a bohemian art connoisseur to your congresses.

Since the Renaissance, science has diverged into disciplines with each a Babylonian level of jargon. Therefore, scientists are unaware of neighbouring fields, leading to double-done work. Young scientists should be allowed to explore other disciplines before anchoring to their own domain. Furthermore, connecting with an interdisciplinary crossover will aid specialists in reflecting upon their own work. If we invest in our awareness of fellow scientists, we are one step ahead of the Babylonian blunder.