The "Ig Nobel Prize" and the stagnation of mainstream science

Trivializing the momentous

The “Ig Nobel” is a kind of Golden Raspberry award for the sciences. It’s basically a way to lampoon research that whoever sits in whatever jury that picks these out finds useless or laughable. Wikipedia also associates it with the “Darwin Awards” and remarks how some organization for the “celebration” of shitty art is normally also present at the ceremonies.

So while the organizers may claim that these awards are tongue-in-cheek and indeed also serve to emphasize and highlight interesting discoveries (one obviously patronizing example of this is in reference to how a study finding Limburger cheese attracted mosquitoes was given the award, a finding which later actually became useful in baiting mosquito traps), their main purpose is obviously to provide a clear demarcation between proper science and trivial, albeit sometimes useful, nonsense. Along these lines, the Ig Nobel awards have been used to mock traditions like homeopathy and even theology.

This is further underscored by how recipients of the actual Nobel Prize, i.e. real and proper scientists, are used to condescendingly hand out this booby prize to their lesser brothers and sisters.

Although this award isn’t extremely influential as such, it’s a great example of gatekeeping practices within the institutions that make up modern science, which tend to undermine or marginalize approaches that threaten established paradigms. This is indeed something we should expect from the basic observations made by Kuhn and many others during the last half-century — sets of scientific theories crystallize into mid-level worldviews called “paradigms” which also reflect vested interests, stakeholders, personal prestige and political power.

These are then taken to represent “proper science” or “the consensus of experts”, or simply as the modern sum total of accumulated knowledge, and if they are threatened, they will often get defended through whatever means necessary.

You know how it goes.

But the amazing thing about this year’s Ig Nobel awards (thanks to Miles Mathis for pointing this out) is that they’re actually poking fun at and trivializing a totally revolutionary discovery.

This. They’ve found that actual, living plants can imitate the shapes of artificial plants close by.

Real plants will mimic plastic flowers.

On the first glance, this may sound rather inconsequential. We know that plants can turn their leaves towards the sun, that they can trap flies when stepped upon, and even signal each other through pheromones when they’re injured or diseased.

But now step back a second and think about this.

PLANTS can mimic the shapes of nearby plastic flowers.

Right? Ok?

HOW DOES THE PLANT, BY ANY CONVENTIONALLY ACCEPTED MECHANISM, REPRODUCE THE SHAPE OF A NEARBY PLASTIC FLOWER?

While the researchers suggest a form of primitive vision could be an explanation, plants do not have synapses. Plants have nothing that resembles an animal nervous system. That they could react to light in some binary fashion is such an incredible distance from plants actually being able to retain the forms and patterns of visual imagery that we’re in entirely different worlds.

Even chameleons' adaptation to colour in their surroundings, that takes place through a currently unknown process of molecular adaptation to wavelengths of light, is a far less complex phenomenon than these plants' actual mimicry of an external form in their own growth process.

And this is obviously a completely revolutionary discovery that implies totally amazing causal connections that current scientific paradigms scarcely have any idea how to tackle.

There’s namely no way whatsoever to explain this process through any of the mechanisms we’ve currently identified in terms of plant communication — because we’re dealing with a situation where plants mimic plastic flowers. No capillaries. No pheromones. No intersecting root systems or what have you.

What’s worse — there’s not even any way to in principle approach this from the current reductionist paradigm that reduces something like patterns and Platonic forms to secondary epiphenomena (or “language games”, for that matter), since the plants somehow preferentially select the plastic flowers as suitable targets for imitation.

So what, do plants, without a nervous system, nonetheless possess some kind of knowledge of what they look like, a knowledge that somehow magically inheres in primitive mechanical molecular interactions?

We’re seeing a glimpse of an entirely new scientific paradigm from behind the curtain here. A clear and unequivocable example of knowledge that does not fit within the narrow framework of our favoured philosophies (but where other traditions have of course gone before):

All ancient and indigenous peoples said that they learned the uses of plants as medicines from the plants themselves. They insisted that they did not rely on the analytical capacities of the brain for this nor use the technique of trial and error.

Instead, they said that it was from the heart of the world, from the plants themselves, that this knowledge came. For, they insisted, the plants can speak to human beings if only human beings will listen and respond to them in the proper state of mind (Buhner, The Intelligence of the Heart, Bear & Co 2004).

But now all of this is cordoned off as a trivial waste of time akin to pseudoscience (and religion) and rendered untouchable for further study.

Ehrenhaft came well prepared. He set up a few of his simple experiments in one of the country houses of Alpbach and invited everyone he could lay hands on to have a look. Every day from two or three in the afternoon participants went by in an attitude of wonder and left the building (if they were theoretical physicists, that is) as if they had seen something obscene.

Apart from these physical preparations Ehrenhaft also carried out, as was his habit, a beautiful piece of advertising. The day before his lecture he attended a fairly technical talk by von Hayek on 'The Sensory Order' (now available, in expanded form, as a book). During the discussion he rose, bewilderment and respect in his face, and started in a most innocent voice: 'Dear Professor Hayek. This was a marvellous, an admirable, a most learned lecture. I did not understand a single word.' Next day his lecture had an overflow audience. In this lecture Ehrenhaft gave a brief account of his discoveries, adding general observations on the state of physics. 'Now, gentlemen,' he concluded triumphantly, turning to Rosenfeld and Pryce who sat in the front row, 'what can you say?' And he answered immediately. 'There is nothing at all you can say with all your fine theories. Sitzen müssen sie bleiben! Still müssen sie sein!'

The discussion, as was to be expected, was quite turbulent and it was continued for days with Thirring and Popper taking Ehrenhaft's side against Rosenfeld and Pryce.

Confronted with the experiments the latter occasionally acted as some of Galileo's opponents must have acted when confronted with the telescope. They pointed out that no conclusions could be drawn from complex phenomena and that a detailed analysis was needed. In short, the phenomena were a “Dreckeffekt” — a word that was heard quite frequently in the arguments.

Feyerabend. Against Method. 256.