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August 26, 2008
Conservatives and intelligent-design advocates are forever accusing science of being a religion. It has its dogmas, they say, that must not be questioned: the theory of evolution and the nondualistic materialism that does away with the need for a Creator (because matter is self-organizing by its own intrinsic laws, life and intelligence could have just happened). It has its prophets (Darwin) and its popes (Dennett and Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens—what’s with all the Ds and Hs? Huxley, too! DUH). And it has its heretics, whom it excommunicates with the ruthless efficiency of a mini-Inquisition; see the movie Expelled. (Or don’t.)
That’s absurd, of course. Science is the opposite of religion. Religion is supernatural; science is . . . super natural. Religion is based on faith; science is based on evidence. Posed against the overwhelming evidence for the common descent of all life and its evolution by natural selection, the verifiable evidence for intelligent design so far is . . . zilch. Scientists are all, like, “So show me!” And religionists can only come back with, “Ya gotta believe!”
Yet there’s something to it, isn’t there?
While science is antithetical to religion, it does some of the work religions do, fills some of the needs. It is a cosmology and an ethos. It provides a sense of order, meaning, awe, and mystery (a friend of mine, Marc Ian Barasch, writes, “Now the views from the Hubble are our stained-glass windows”), and a way for human beings to penetrate and relate to it (truths reveal themselves to those who are honest, rigorous, and persevering). It reconnects us to the greater reality of which we are a part, the root meaning of re-ligio. It has its saints (Albert Einstein with his white halo of wild ideas) and its martyrs (Galileo, Semmelweis). And it has principles as elegant, simple, and foundational as the Christian Credo or Jewish Sh’ma: e=mc². (Am I the only one who didn’t know “c” stands for celeritas?) Principles people feel so inspired and guided by that they will even inscribe them in their own flesh.
Yes: science tattoos!
Science writer Carl Zimmer, the author most recently of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, has provided an invaluable anthropological service on his lively blog The Loom by documenting people’s science tattoos and their stories about them. His ever-growing Science Tattoo Emporium is one of the most delightful and mind-boggling things I’ve found on the Web in a long time. Most of the tattoos belong to young members of the tribe of scientists, or to science geeks and groupies (“not a scientist, but . . . in awe of science”), and they range from the starkly simple (the sigma in the sidebar, the symbol Ø for a null set) to the fantastically elaborate (click to enlarge the microscope in the sidebar).
Like most tattoos, they are carefully thought-out (or totally impulsive), intensely personal statements, emblems of identity or allegiance, or commemorations of a milestone, frequently a master’s or Ph.D.: one budding primatologist has vowed to “get one tattoo for each degree I earn.” A common theme is to get a tattoo of the organism or element that is the subject of your research and therefore a sort of personal totem, your own go-between to the teeming universe. Frequently recurring designs include the atom, a molecule (LSD and the DNA are especially popular), a skeleton, the brain, equations (“my tattoo is schroedinger’s equation for the wave function of a particle”), the golden ratio, Darwin (including Darwin as King Kong), a neuron, a trilobite, and designs copied from ancient mummies or rock art (“I got the tattoo to link me to an ancestral human”). Then there are many that are indescribably unique combinations of symbols and images. And that’s just the first half of the gallery.
In good quantum fashion, Zimmer’s brainstorm is changing what it observes—spurring people not only to put their existing tattoos into his gallery, but to design and get science tattoos in the first place. It has even been woven into one family’s life and death, as a mother decides to get herself tattooed with the entropy-themed design her daughter immortalized on the site before dying in a car accident. I’ll keep coming back to ponder more of these intriguing works of thought and art, clues to an emerging culture that honors the individual, the universal, and the power to ink a direct link between them. It isn’t religion but it is re-ligio, and as in the e=mc² link at the beginning of this post, sometimes the comparison verges on the explicit—whether it’s a wheel-shaped cladistic “tree of life” that looks a lot like a Buddhist mandala, or the “subatomic doodling” of the CERN bubble chamber:
I first saw that image my freshman year of college. It had the sublime, simple beauty that only something made of math and science can have. It stuck with me for 8 more years before I actually decided to get it etched into me. Oddly enough, on Valentine’s Day. I guess it was my Valentine’s to physics and science. Oh, and when people ask who drew it, I always respond “God.”
(Annie Gottlieb) |
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