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Scientific facts are not 100% certain. So what?

Science affects everyone. Generally, people want to trust what scientists tell them and they support science. Nevertheless, groups, such as climate-change deniers, tobacco industry employees, and others, find fertile ground for their obfuscatory messages in the public’s lack of understanding of science. While the entrenched economic, political, or social interests that feed the various controversies are beyond our control, we scientists could make a difference by clarifying what we’re doing.

I think that people are confused by what scientists say. Indeed, on the face of it, scientists often talk in riddles, not to say nonsense. Consider that any thoughtful scientist will acknowledge that no scientific fact can be established as being 100% certifiably true. Then, a minute later, that same person will turn around and solemnly declare that anthropogenic (man-made) global climate change is unquestionably a fact. It’s well underway and an increasing danger to us all. No wonder the public doesn’t know what to believe.

Why don’t scientists do a better job of communicating with non-scientists? I suspect that many of us just don’t have good answers to the questions about the nature of science that we’re sometimes asked. Our education is packed with narrowly-focused, required courses. Our mentors are harried and results-oriented, with little time for, or even frank antipathy to, larger philosophical topics. When I surveyed hundreds of members of biological societies, I was surprised to find that 68% of us had almost no formal training in the scientific method or scientific thinking and reasoning. As a group, we devote even less attention to topics that range beyond our areas of expertise.

Let’s look at the paradox alluded to above: how can we square the tenet that scientific facts cannot be established to be true, with the reality that scientists frequently behave as if their facts were true?

One solution comes from realizing that science is not a unified endeavor.  In particular there is a gulf between the ultimate goals of basic (or pure) and applied science. Basic science seeks knowledge for its own sake, and it is uncompromising: nothing less than a complete explanation of every aspect of nature—everything, everywhere, and for all time—will satisfy it. An unattainable objective, obviously, but that’s the way it is. And it is no more or less foolhardy than pursuing perfection in other aspects of life, as many artists, athletes, mathematicians, etc., normally do. The context of basic science is where we have to keep the dictum of “no 100% true facts” firmly in mind.

What about our attitudes towards climate change? First off, this is an applied science problem, and we can identify applied science problems without knowing all of the details that basic science is seeking. Applied science pursues practicable outcomes, not an abstract ideal of all-encompassing certainty. It relies on the best information currently available and it accepts that the information must be incomplete at some level. There is nothing slipshod or objectionable about depending on incomplete knowledge; we do it all the time.

Take a homely example: the slipperiness of ice. Today, in 2020, science cannot give a complete explanation of why ice is slippery. Early hypotheses about a micro-layer of melted water caused by, e.g. the pressure and friction of a skate blade, were falsified by the finding that ice at temperatures close to absolute zero, where liquid water cannot exist, is still slippery. A full accounting will probably be found deep within a quantum-mechanical framework. Meanwhile, basic physics acknowledges ignorance on this point and keeps on investigating. Applied science can’t and needn’t wait for the answer. If slippery ice is a problem, then put sand or salt on it, mount snow tires on vehicles, melt it, chip it away, or avoid it altogether.

The mere fact that we do not comprehend a problem or its solution in the minutest detail does not preclude sensible action. We don’t need a finished theory of slippery to prevent slipping.

When the sowers of doubt claim that we can’t do anything because not all the data are in, they’re half-correct. All of the basic science data are not in, that’s true. But then all of the basic science data never will be in. It’s wrong to imply that, therefore, applied science is stymied. It’s not. We need to know only whether feasible steps would alleviate a problem and then—guided by the best information we have—take them. For decades, we’ve known that preventative actions can reduce the dangers of climate change, tobacco-smoking, etc. We’ve done little, in part because we’ve been misled by self-interested economic forces that want us to believe that any action must wait for total understanding. Appreciation of the complex nature of science can keep us from being fooled again.

Featured image credits: Jacqueline Godany via Unsplash

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Four women’s quest to end global poverty

Gender matters for policymaking: there is no better evidence than the experience of four women who, twenty years ago, became ministers in charge of international development in their governments and collaborated to develop new approaches to end global poverty. Eveline Herfkens from the Netherlands, Hilde F. Johnson from Norway, Clare Short from the United Kingdom, and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul from Germany became known as the Utstein Four (from the Norwegian Utstein Abbey where they launched their collaboration in July 1999). They came together to challenge the policies of international institutions where decisions affecting global poverty were made and also to reform their countries’ own development programs to ensure they would actually help end global poverty rather than just promote individual countries’ narrow national interests. According to Sir Richard Jolly, “one is left amazed at the boldness of these four women and seriously doubting whether four male ministers would ever have the courage and commitment to do the same.” This is a story of women’s empowerment and the importance of working together.

Research suggests that women thrive in and enjoy cooperative team environments while men are often more attracted to competitive environments. An African proverb says “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” The Utstein Four went together and they went far.   Collaboration is not glamorous. Networking is difficult and time consuming. Effective collaboration means people have to put aside their egos, share headlines with others, and establish processes with bureaucracies in other countries and other cultures.

Image credit: Official logos for each of the Millennium Development Goals. Image by Kjerish. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Utstein Four called their collaboration a “conspiracy of implementation” to contrast their action-oriented partnership approach with lofty but never implemented policy declarations and old-style aid according to which donors always knew better. They focused their attention both on issues affecting poverty globally and on issues of particular importance for women’s empowerment and poverty eradication. Their many contributions range from securing debt relief for poor countries and ensuring that relief actually helped lift people out of poverty to putting developing country partners in charge of setting priorities and implementing programs of assistance to helping promote and achieve the Millennium Development Goals agreed at the UN in 2000.

They worked and spoke less about gender as an abstract issue and more about poverty and the effect it had on women and children in terms of immediate suffering and powerlessness. Their very existence and actions as a group empowered women in developing countries, especially those which they visited. The impact is mirrored in the faces of the girls surrounding them in pictures taken when visiting poor neighborhoods across Africa.

Their policies focused on eradicating poverty, as women and children constituted then—and still constitute today—the vast majority of the world’s poor. Broad poverty eradication programs would need to empower women and girls. This meant first ensuring that all aid programs addressed gender issues. But this was not enough. This also meant requiring separate programs to promote job creation for women. It required changes in legislation to enable women to own and inherit property. And it required increasing and improving spending on education and health. More education for girls helped them to delay marriages, and pregnancies, and made them better able to make informed choices about family planning, nutrition and health. This results in a virtuous circle of fewer children, better fed and educated, with a better future for all.

Their collaboration lasted for only about half a dozen years as the original Utstein Four moved on to other positions. But their influence continued to be felt because their approach to improve aid effectiveness was codified in international agreements and practices of global institutions. Much has been achieved but some lessons have been forgotten and large challenges remain including many new ones.

In 2015, the global community agreed at the UN on a set of sustainable development goals to achieve by 2030. Progress has been much too slow. The world needs a new generation of leaders who can follow the Utstein Four and mobilize international action for sustainable development. It may be that these new leaders were impressed by a visit of the Utstein Four to their village or school 20 years ago, when they were young. Today’s leaders should prioritize encouraging developed country actions to eradicate extreme poverty. Given the limited progress that their elders have made so far, it will probably not be possible to achieve the UN’s goals by 2030. However, it would certainly be worth trying.

Featured Image Credit: Pexels via Pixabay .

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Nine books that make you think about a woman’s role in society [reading list]

Every year in March we celebrate Women’s History Month, a perfect time to be inspired by the triumphs of real-life heroes. Let us not forget the path it took to get this far and the tribulations that these women endured. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Society has come so far, but we still have a ways to go. We have compiled a list of titles that explore the ups and downs of this journey as well as present bold ideas to improve the future.

100 Years of the Nineteenth Amendment edited by Holly J. McCammon and Lee Ann Banaszak
100 Years of the Nineteenth Amendment looks back at the century since the United States ratified the amendment giving women the right to vote. The volume asks: how has women’s political engagement unfolded over the last one hundred years? Read a free chapter hereCabinets, Ministers, and Gender by Claire Annesley, Karen Beckwith, Susan Franceschet
Cabinets lie at the center of governing power. Why are more men than women appointed to cabinets? One chapter identifies formal and informal rules as forces shaping women’s opportunities for cabinet appointment, and introduces the concept of the “concrete floor,” the minimum proportion or number of women for the cabinet team to be perceived as legitimate. Read the chapter here.Ending Global Poverty by Constantine Michalopoulos
Ending poverty is a noble goal and a major challenge for the global community. This book tells a never-before-told story of four female cabinet ministers joining together to fight global poverty. It examines the lessons to be learned from the so-called “Utstein Four,” who joined forces to challenge the establishment policies of international institutions.The Global Gag Rule and Women’s Reproductive Health by Yana van der Meulen Rodgers
In recent decades, the long arm of US politics has reached the intimate lives of women all over the world. Since 1984, healthcare organizations in developing countries have faced major cuts in US foreign aid if they perform or promote abortions as a method of family planning. One chapter provides a detailed examination of global abortion laws and rates. Read a free chapter here.The Inclusion Calculation by Melody E. Valdini
Power-holders and gate-keepers in political parties and governments continue to be primarily men. How are they responding to the increasing numbers of women seeking leadership roles in politics? One chapter offers a new approach to understanding the conditions under which women are included in the political sphere. Read it here.The Politics of the Pill by Rachel VanSickle-Ward, Kevin Wallsten
Long before the federal government required health insurance providers to cover the costs of birth control under the Affordable Care Act, 28 states adopted their own policies mandating coverage of prescription contraceptives. One chapter considers the political, religious, and ideological factors that shaped the passage and content of this diverse group of state-level policies, with a particular focus on the impact of women officeholders. Read it here.The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism by Catherine Rottenberg
The notion of a happy work-family balance has not only been incorporated into the popular imagination as a progressive feminist ideal but also lies at the heart of a new variant of feminism. One chapter argues that progress has come to signify women’s ability to successfully balance work with family. Read it here.The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy edited by Susan L. Averett, Laura M. Argys, and Saul D. Hoffman
Despite decades of progress relative to men in work and schooling, women remain severely underrepresented among top corporate and political leaders. One chapter discusses the current status and recent progress of women in leadership positions, with a focus on the realm of corporate leadership. Read it here.Women as Foreign Policy Leaders by Sylvia Bashevkin
Hillary Rodham Clinton served four years as secretary of state following Barack Obama’s swearing in as president in 2009. Before her, no American woman had risen from White House spouse to elected legislator to top diplomat. This chapter evaluates the trajectory of Hillary Clinton from the roles of first lady, senator, and presidential candidate to secretary of state. Read it here.

This reading list honors all the women who stood up and fought for equal rights in voting, leadership position, poverty reduction, and changes in electoral politics. With more information on these topics, we want to deepen the understanding of women’s contribution to the world, celebrating their advancement, and exploring how we can improve as a society.

Featured image by Libraryofcongress via Unsplash

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Transnational labour regulation and international trade: towards a complementary approach

In today’s globalised economy, the free movement of goods, services and capital impels countries to compete for trade and foreign investment by lowering their labour standards. International trade is therefore widely perceived as instigating regulatory competition between countries, or a “race to the bottom”. The challenge that international trade poses for countries’ labour standards has been a central concern of the International Labour Organization (ILO) since its establishment. As recently as this year, in its Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work, the ILO reiterated the recognition that “in conditions of globalization, the failure of any country to adopt humane conditions of labour is more than ever an obstacle to progress in all other countries”.

In addition, transnational labour regulation can be viewed as challenging international trade. If we think that labour standards increase production costs, the imposition of more protective labour regulation on countries might be perceived as preventing them from fulfilling their trade potential, hampering the advantages expected from liberalised trade. Take for example the World Trade Organization’s Singapore Ministerial Declaration. While referring to a possible positive relationship between core labour standards and trade liberalization, the Declaration also rejects “the use of labour standards for protectionist purposes, and agree[s] that the comparative advantage of countries, particularly low-wage developing countries, must in no way be put into question”.

Are international trade and labour regulation really incompatible? Is it possible to reach a revised understanding of the ‘race to the bottom problem’?

A game theoretical analysis offers a useful conceptual framework to address these questions.

The concern of a race to the bottom under a globalised economy is a collective action problem. Game theory contributes in this respect as it shows that such regulatory competition is ‘destructive’ in a very specific sense. Game theoretical models predict that as all countries will adjust and lower their labour standards in response to meaningful threats of undercutting, no country will gain a substantial comparative advantage from doing so, not even those which are first to defect from these standards; the outcome is sub-optimal for all. That is, each state would be stuck in a low-level equilibrium ‘trap’ with low payoffs in both social and economic dimensions.

However, game theory research has evolved from its initial finding that, as Elinor Ostrom puts it, rational actors are “helplessly trapped in social dilemmas”, where individual rational strategies result in inefficient joint outcomes to the group – to a more nuanced position which reveals the conditions under which individuals and groups can organise and change by themselves “the structure of the situation they face” to increase joint payoffs.

Indeed, the value of game theory further derives from its ability to offer analytical solutions to scenarios such as the ”race to the bottom” problem. Game theoretical analyses have been used in the past to develop institutional solutions to collective action problems arising both within and between states. They are widely understood to be relevant for considering the institutional design of domestic and international labour regulation. How then, can game theoretical models help countries cooperate in order to avoid the destructive outcomes of a race to the bottom?

One potential solution, and a well-known one, is to establish repetition to the relationship in question. The long-term perspective that is achieved in ongoing relationships enables cooperation between actors. Think, for instances, about our tendency to avoid tourist restaurants in favour of more local places. The rationale is that restaurants that rely on local customers are in a situation of a repeated interaction with them: they know that customers’ experience will determine if they will return in the future.

A second possible solution to the race to the bottom problem is to use the assistance of a “correlating device”, a notion that was originally discussed by Robert Aumann. Simply put, by sending common singles to all actors on a suggested a strategy they should follow, it might be possible to coordinate their actions around a mutually-beneficial cooperative behaviour. In these circumstances, assuming that others are following the suggested strategy, then it is in the interest of each actor to also cooperate.

By exploring how these solutions can relate to concrete international institutions: the frameworks for cooperation over transnational labour regulation and international trade, these game theoretical insights can serve as a revealing and fruitful line of research. Overall, the application of these solutions to the circumstances of global labour governance can shed light on the processes by which “destructive competition” can be prevented and labour standards can be incrementally raised along with a country’s wider social and economic development.

Feature image credit: frank mckenna via Unsplash.

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100 years of the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s political action

On 28 August 2020 we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the day the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified. Although the Amendment did not enfranchise all women –African American, Native American, and Latina women would wait decades before they could vote on equal terms– the event is an important milestone in women’s political history.

Suffrage activists on the eve of the Amendment disagreed heartily over how the struggle for women’s equality should continue, and the recent rise in women’s activism in the form of the Women’s March and #MeToo movement suggests comparison to the earlier suffrage work. What can we conclude about the progress towards women’s political equality and what connections exist between this early woman’s movement and the current wave of women’s activism?

In 1920 there were varying expectations about how women would take up their roles as voters. The best estimates suggest that women’s turnout lay more than twenty percentage points behind men’s in the first couple of elections. But since 1980, women have voted at higher rates than men. in the 2016 Presidential election women’s turnout was 4% higher than men’s, and women’s votes have determined some election outcomes. There are also no differences between men and women in how often they volunteer in politics or whether they contact a government official or make a campaign contribution.  The only remaining difference is that men tend to donate more money than women to political causes.

Although thousands of women ran election campaigns  and several, like Jeanette Rankin and Clara Cressingham, were elected to legislatures before 1920, an important remaining barrier for women is gaining elected office. Women constitute less than 25% of the elected legislators in Congress and 22 of the 50 states. No woman has been elected to the Presidency or as Governor in 23 states.  Women continue to face an uphill battle to gain elected office despite 100 years of women’s activism focused on electing women – from the early years of the National Woman’s Party   to EMILY’s List to She Should Run.

The suffrage movement, with its success in gaining the Nineteenth Amendment, serves as a model to later generations on effective women’s organized social movement activism, and the earlier movement and women’s current protest politics are connected in many ways. Most obvious is women’s visible and influential roles in extra-institutional activism. Not only was the 2017 Women’s March the largest one-day protest event in US history, but women have played  pivotal roles in other movements, from civil rights to environmental movements.

Despite their leading role in movement activism, organizing, and leadership, women activists in 2020 continue to experience marginalization. For example, women activists in the Occupy movement confronted gender bias and discrimination that impeded effective organizing.  And just as past gender discrimination mobilized women, so gender inequality today continues to spur women’s activism.

Many other links between women’s movements past and present exist, but there are also clear indications that one important similarity is on the decline. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women’s rights activists were divided by race, with some white suffragists excluding African American women from the movement (and the vote). While these tensions remain, the 2017 Women’s March took an explicitly intersectional approach, purposefully seeking a broad coalition across women of different racial groups, class, citizenship, and sexuality. Such a broad-based coalition to fight for greater gender, racial, and ethnic equality will serve women well should they need the 70-plus years it took women to get the vote to achieve full equality in both electoral and protest politics.

Image owned by Oxford University Press

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How fake things can still help us learn

We often appreciate things that have a certain weathered look about them. From clothes to home furnishings, people find aesthetic value in the distressed, the tarnished, the antique. Yet underlying this interest in the appealing look of age is an expectation that vintage things be of their vintage. Knockoffs, fakes, and otherwise inauthentic things are quick to undermine what aesthetic investment we might have had in their aged appearance.

This response makes sense. If we value the look of age for how it embodies the passage of time, then things whose patina is fabricated rather than earned are bound to leave us disappointed. But if we elevate concern with this kind of authenticity to the primary reason for aesthetically appreciating things that recall the past, we are bound to miss out on broader opportunities for the aesthetic appreciation of history. We should not be too quick to dismiss the aesthetic promise of replicas, restorations, and other “inauthentic” things that can put us in touch with the past in ways that go beyond their simply having been there and sporting the wear and tear to prove it.

I am assuming that our aesthetic appreciation of sensory experiences (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) can be informed by what we know. A particular painting may leave me cold at first, but learning about the artist, their technique, and the context of their work may lead to the revelation of new aesthetic merits that were obscure to me before. When I hold the fossil of a trilobite, I appreciate not only the sensuous surface of the object, but moreover, how that surface manifests geological forces acting over unfathomable millennia—the focus of my aesthetic attention is both this material object and the abstract concepts and knowledge that inform how I experience it. Compare this with philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto’s description of the battlefield at Gettysburg, mentioned in his article “Gettysburg” in the journal Grand Street in 1987:

It is always moving to visit a battlefield when the traces of war itself have been erased by nature or transfigured by art, and to stand amid memorial weapons, which grow inevitably quaint and ornamental with the evolution of armamentary technology, mellowing under patinas and used, now, to punctuate the fading thematizations of strife.

The object of Danto’s aesthetic attention is both sensory and cognitive. He is describing what I would call an aesthetic experience of history, aided by, but not reducible to, the experience of material objects. Some of those memorial weapons are authentic (they were used in the battle), but others are replicas, and it’s not clear that their lack of genuineness inhibits their ability to facilitate aesthetic appreciation that is partially focused on the history of the place itself. Once we recognize that replicas need not be a hindrance to this kind of aesthetic appreciation, we are in a position to see how they can in fact aid it.

At the Montshire Museum of Science, in Norwich, Vermont, there is an exhibit that allows visitors to press buttons to hear representations of how local birds would have sounded at different points in Vermont history. Listening to the recordings, you can appreciate this historical sonic landscape, an aesthetic experience of history akin to Danto’s experience of Gettysburg: The direct object of your attention is the birdsong, experienced with reference to its historical value, representing the local wildlife of a bygone time. But the recordings are not themselves records of the past, but fabrications of what those times would have sounded like. They are auditory replicas. But to simply dismiss them because they are inauthentic would be to foreclose on the opportunities for aesthetic connection with the past that they facilitate.

To appreciate the appearance of age because it embodies the passage of time is already to acknowledge how the past can be an object of our aesthetic attention. Replicas, restorations, models, and other objects often criticized for their inauthenticity hold the potential to augment our aesthetic appreciation of history in novel ways, sometimes granting access to truths about the past that originals can’t provide (for instance, consider replicas that reveal the polychromy of Ancient Greek and Roman statuary). Recent discussions about the repatriation of stolen art and artifacts in major institutional collections have emphasized the potential for creating replicas of the works and returning the originals. While many balk at such proposals, I have suggested there is more to gain aesthetically from these “inauthentic” things than may first meet the eye. Perhaps recognizing the overlooked aesthetic value of such replicas will in turn help museums to do the right thing with the originals.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Man’s Headbust’ by Fine Photographics . CCO public domain via  Unsplash .

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Why law librarians are so important in a data-driven world

For well over a century, law librarians have been a force in leading research initiatives, preservation, and access to legal information in academia, private firms, and government. While these traditional skills emerged in a predominantly print era, there has been a perceptible expansion and recent acceleration of technological expertise. The profession has progressively become infused with new digital tools, evidenced by librarians leading strategies in competitive intelligence, knowledge management, artificial intelligence, and legal analytics. It has become clear that skills in research, collections, data curation, retrieval, and accessibility have meshed well in an ever-increasing>Why law librarians are so important in a>OUPblog.

Bring—brought—brought

Soon after the previous gleanings (February 26, 2020) were posted, a correspondent asked me to clarify the situation with the “prefix” br– in breath and bring (see the post on breath for January 22, 2020). I mentioned this mysterious prefix in connection with Henry Cecil Wyld, who accepted its existence in bring but doubted its validity in breath. From a historical point of view, we have two different components, even if both go back to Indo-European bhrē-. James A. H. Murray thought that br- in breath is a remnant of the root meaning “burn,” as in breed ~ brood, while br– in bring traces allegedly to the zero grade of the verb bear (zero grade is a term of ablaut; in this case, no vowel stands between b and r in br-; hence, “zero”); so Wyld, though, as we will see, the idea was not his. By contrast, in the full grade, as in bear, from Old Engl. beran, the syllable is supported by a vowel. Thus, bhr-1 and bhr-2, if those entities are more that figments of etymologists’ imagination (as they may well be), have different histories. But one feature unites them: if br-eath and br-ing consist of two parts each, both are blends, like Lewis Carrol’s galumph (gallop + triumphant) or Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge).

In the recorded texts of the oldest Indo-European languages, blends turn up most rarely, but in 1937 the German scholar Rudolf Blümel cited a few good examples in Classical Greek, and in 2019 Ryan Seaberg (the University of Minnesota) defended a dissertation on blends in Greek and Latin. Similar “portmanteau words,” typical of colloquial speech, must also have existed in the remotest past, for words have always tended to merge, and there is no great difference between blending and compounding.

Karl Brugmann, 1849-1919. From Wikimedia Commons.

It may be instructive to throw a quick look at the etymology of some verbs having nearly the same meaning as bring. Bring can be synonymous with take, as when we TAKE an object away from our location but BRING it to the place where we are. Engl. take is a borrowing from Scandinavian (German nehmen is the verb, whose cognate English has lost; today, only its semi-obliterated traces can be detected in nimble and numb). Scandinavian taka meant “seize, receive,” etc. Then there is carry, another borrowing, this time from Old French; its main sense must have been “to move.” Fetch is English; it is a cognate of German fassen “to seize, grasp.” Conduct, convey, and transport will add nothing new to what we have seen above. The origin of German tragen “to carry” (cognate with Engl. drag ~ draw) is obscure. Those examples will suffice to show that, though the basic meaning of bring is rather vague, it usually refers to getting hold of and moving an object. Verb-adverb collocations like bring up and bring out show how pliable the verb bring is.

Misery and luxury: two images of overexposure. First image is Defoe in the Pillory. CC BY 4.0 from Wellcome Collection. Second image, dandy, public domain from Wikimedia Commons. Image has been cropped to fit.

The origin of bring remains a riddle. The earliest etymologists of English, German, and Dutch had nothing to say about it. Later dictionaries cited the unquestionable congeners (cognates) and stopped there. Bring has related forms in all the Germanic languages (including Gothic, a dead language, known from a fourth-century translation of the New Testament), except, for some reason, Old Norse. A breakthrough happened in 1901, when Karl Brugmann, a famous German scholar, offered an imaginative etymology of this verb. But before discussing his hypothesis, I would like to mention the musings of Ludwig Laistner, another German philologist. He is remembered for his works on myths, but almost (or even entirely) forgotten as an etymologist. Although he hardly discovered the origin of the verb bring, his suggestions going back to 1888 are worth recalling.

The Gothic verb meant not only to “to bring” but also “to get something done,” approximately like Modern German vollbringen (voll “full”). Elsewhere in Germanic, bringan, the oldest recorded form of bring, must have given speakers grief. There are pairs like Engl. sit and set. Set is a so-called causative verb; it means “to make someone or something ‘sit’.” Bringan also had a causative twin, namely brengan (apparently, from brangjan), which, surprisingly, meant the same as bringan! As a result, the Modern Dutch for bring is brengen. Laistner emphasized the reference of the Germanic verb to accomplishment, regardless of whether the result was good or bad. He cited Gothic –praggan (gg = ng) “to oppress” and German Pranger “pillory,” as opposed to Prunk “splendor” (!). All of them seem to go back to the idea of bringing things to the surface. In those words, initial p alternated with b. Thus, Middle High German brunken meant “to show, expose,” and ge-brunkel can be glossed as “sheen of armor.” In the history of German, b and p constantly played leapfrog, but a Gothic non-borrowed word beginning with p is a great rarity, even an anomaly. As far as I know, since Laistner’s days, no one has thought of bring in the context of –praggan, Prunk, brunken, gebrunkel, and the rest, and yet his observations deserve attention. It seems that the ancient meaning of bring was indeed “to expose,” rather than or at least in addition to, “move an object from place to place.”

Several things are “wrong” with bring(an). First, the alternation b ~ p in the words that may be related to it. Second, its local spread. Perhaps some Celtic forms are akin to bring, but their affinity is open to doubt. Bring has no unquestionable Indo-European relatives and did not make it to Old Scandinavian. Third, the presence of a semantically redundant causative verb. And finally, its conjugation. All old verbs that rhyme with bring are strong, that is, their forms are governed by ablaut: spring—sprang—sprung, sing—sang—sung, etc., while bring is weak (bring—brought—brought, like seek—sought—sought). We seem to be dealing with an anomaly and a linguistic misfit.

Even if brunken is discounted as a false cognate, brengen, from brangjan, shows that bring took part in the ablaut game. The past form brang did occur, but it is usually explained away as an analogical formation. Was it really? In any case, weak verbs were not supposed to have vowel alternations by ablaut. The old verb meaning “to carry (from place to place)” is bear—bore—borne. Who needed bringan? As usual in such cases, some etymologists suggested borrowing from a substrate language. Yet it is better to stay away from the mysterious substrate, even though bring(an) does look like an intruder, for the reason bring made its way into Germanic remains unsolved. Are we dealing with Old Germanic slang? Perhaps, though reference to slang is not an etymology.

I am now returning to Brugmann. He suggested than bringan was a blend of two roots: bher-, as in bear “to carry” and enké– or (e)nek– “to reach” (the second root has been preserved in Greek and can be detected in Engl. e-nough, from ge-nōg ~ ge-nōh). If such was the formation of bringan, this blend was, most probably, slang. Brugmann’s reconstruction does not account for the meaning “to expose,” but at least it makes clear why the verb has no indubitable cognates (very Old Germanic-Celtic slang is quite probable, but, as noted, the Celtic forms are not watertight) and why this verb is anomalous in so many respects. Another etymology exists. Bringan might be beran “to bear” with n inserted into the root: compare Engl. sting and Latin (in)stīgare “to instigate.” However, this scenario is less likely: too many features in the history of bring require an explanation, so that the idea of a slangy blend looks more promising.

Such is the shortest history of br- of bring and breath: not a solution, but at least a reasonable hypothesis. There is some irony in the fact that English has the phrase to bring to bear. Brugmann did not speak English, but he could read it, and, if he had known the idiom, he would have appreciated it as an unexpected tribute to his sagacity.

A weight brought to bear. Public domain from Pixabay.

Feature credit image: Small mouth black bass. Public domain from Flickr.

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How women can support each other to strive for gender equality

Hovering over almost all women who stand up and insist on being heard is a putdown only used in for the female of the species; a word that is particular to the attempt to belittle and silence women. That word is “shrill.”

It was used more liberally by detractors in the early days of feminism, but it has not gone away. That word not only is meant to imply unreasonableness or being out of control. The word is calling attention to the sound of women. A woman’s actual voice seems to be a problem.

How far we have come since the 1970s when as the broadcaster Joan Bakewell remembered “I asked the head of BBC News, `Might a woman one day read the news?’ and was told `Absolutely not!’” We now have visible and vocal women in all forms of media.

But the doubt about a woman’s voice being heard as equal to a man’s is far from eradicated. In many corridors of power, the woman’s voice still attracts demeaning words such as shrill, bossy, feisty and emotional. Remember David Cameron’s famous “Calm down, dear”? You can understand why younger women—particularly performers and comedians—take this criticism and gleefully exploit it with self-acknowledged bolshy, loud “unladylike” voices. Good on them.

But what about the voices of women leaders in business, in courts, in education, in parliament, in more everyday life? How are they perceived? And here, this anxiety about female representation and power gets a little tricky in its manifestation. Because I think it’s not just men who are putting down women. One of the distressing results about us still not having enough audible women in high places is that sometimes it’s other women who cast the doubts and the criticism.

We can work out why men fear powerful women but why do women fear them? We women seem to be fine with groups of women standing up together—women in parliament, the Fawcett Society, the Women’s Equality Party, the Women’s Prize for Fiction—but  the woman who is seen to put herself above others is a tall poppy, the one too big for her boots, with ideas above her station. But isn’t that what we need? Women who do have ideas above their station? Modesty, likeability, and anxiety not to be too grand. These may be qualities we want in our female friends, but we need more than that from women leaders.

I think our anxiety is because though we women make up more that 50 percent of the population, we still feel and operate as if we were a minority group. And that’s not surprising: We don’t see enough women in position of control. It is not yet a normal, unremarkable fact that women have power. Because of that we are therefore highly critical of those who do stand up for us. Like a minority, we feel worried about who presumes to represent us. We look at particular women who are visible but often approve of them only when we feel they truly represent us. When they don’t comply with our views, we seem to want to tear them down and say that is not what I, as a woman, think; she doesn’t represent me.  The obvious answer to this problem of a limited range of female power options is to have more women in power. Of course. We need more of what the BBC broadcaster, Mishal Husain calls “second women”, explaining, “While we owe a great deal to those who smashed the glass ceilings and led the way… the follow up is vital.” It means the first women were not one-offs. We need women in power to be an ordinary everyday fact.

But I also think we need to be highly conscious of this and actively want our women to be leaders and realise they may not be like us at all. The broader the variety, the better. Leaders with real vision have to take tough decisions, make unpopular choices and yes, stand above us. Leaders are not going to be perfect. We need, as women, to think about getting more women into power. We need to call out our own unconscious bias. We’ve not had so many women at the top that choosing a good female leader comes purely naturally—yet. Patriarchy lives deep inside us all.

We will know a new world is here once the sound of women in power feels utterly unremarkable.

Featured image: public domain via Unsplash

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The physics of swarm behaviour

The locusts have no king, and yet they all go forth in ranks, noted King Solomon some three thousand years ago. That a multitude of simple creatures could display coherent collective behavior without any leader caused his surprise and amazement, and it has continued to do so for much of our thinking over the following millennia. Caesar’s legions conquered Europe, Napoleon’s armies reached Moscow: We always think of a great commander telling the thoughtless multitudes what to do.

Statistical physics pioneered an opposite view. When a piece of iron is cooled down to a certain temperature (the Curie temperature), the majority of the atoms align their spins, thereby making it magnetic. No atomic general gives any commands; each atom communicates only with its neighbors, and yet there is an overall alignment. It shows us that local microscopic interactions as such can lead to dramatic global behavior, and this realization brought about a revolution in the understanding of swarm behavior.

Some hundred years ago, serious biologists still thought that the coordination of birds in a flock was reached by telepathy, and the synchronized light emission by fireflies in the Asiatic jungle was attributed to faulty observation by the observer. The introduction of physics concepts in biology has to a large extent resolved these puzzles. Flocks of birds are much more like the atoms in iron than they are like the armies of Napoleon, and the fireflies act much like a laser. Collective behavior in the world of living beings is after all not so different from that in the inanimate world.

The fusion of physics concepts and biological observations has proven fruitful for both sides, and the conceptual transfer worked in both directions. For centuries, physics concentrated on simple systems, since these were solvable by the available techniques. Scientists broke up a large system into many simple little ones, which could be handled. Putting them back together then described the large system. At the turn of the last century, Per Bak, a pioneer of the truly new physics of complexity, noted that “the laws of physics are simple, but nature is complex.” If the Big Bang initially produced an ideal gas of primordial particles, how could this eventually lead to the appearance of Per Bak? A living being is more than a set of molecules, and today we study systems in physics which refuse to be decomposed additively into little subsystems.

The understanding of collective behavior of animal societies can perhaps act as a first step in the search for an answer. Today we can simulate a flock of birds on a computer, allowing each bird to move freely, subject to only two social rules: Follow your neighbor, but don’t crowd him. Putting a large number of such simplistic birds on the computer then produces the behavior observed for flocks of real birds. A primitive way to achieve collective behavior is provided by commands of Caesar or Napoleon; a more subtle and more natural way is to allow a many component system to move subject to the simple clear social rules.

A still more dramatic form of collective behavior appears in insect societies. The whole now no longer consists of identical components. Evolution has found it preferable to have different components designed specifically to carry out particular tasks. In an ant colony, we have workers, nannies, soldiers, drones, and a queen. Each individual carries out specific tasks; it is dependent on the others in order to exist, it cannot survive alone. And no matter how good a worker ant is, it will never have children to whom it can pass on its capabilities. All descendants are produced by the queen and the drones. Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest now takes on a new and unexpected form. It no longer applies to individuals, but rather to the entire collective system. Insect societies thus in a way precede the pattern of modern industrial societies, in which large firms employ different “species” of workers to carry out dedicated tasks. In most human societies, the caste status is not (yet) inherited, and caste transitions are possible. Hopefully, evolution will consider this as dominant.

In any case, human societies have led to one collective feature not paralleled on a comparable level by any animals: we have language. Only the existence of language allows the abstract thinking of humans; we can imagine and talk about the past and the future, the here and the elsewhere. It is probably this more than anything that has allowed humans to take over the entire earth.

Image by  James Wainscoat  via Unsplash

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