The abstract is saying: There is a view that large scale evolutionary change can be broken down to smaller more basic changes. This has caused people to assume that paleontology (while it can document the history of life) can't be used to study the smaller changes that are key to understanding the mechanisms of evolution.
I'm visually impaired so I'm afraid I couldn't read that scientific extract anyway, But that's exactly why I love channels like this, as they make science accessible to someone like me.
I'm very glad you're covering this topic. One of the primary reasons I stopped pursuing higher degrees in biology is because of how unnecessarily difficult scientific papers are to read. The problem is that we were taught to write this way both by example and by having minimum length requirements for our own papers. This only encourages unnecessary bloat and further disincentivizes people like me from pursuing careers in science. I pine for the days when science papers were written poetically and beautifully, a la The Royal Society of the 17th and 18th centuries! Science (literature) is become so sterile these days!
Stu is my go to for showing what a clearly written paper looks like. I remember chatting to him when I was a PhD student and his advice was great. From writing to experimental design. His emphasis on writing helped me when writing for Kurzgesagt. I keep meaning to pick up the book but I'll just borrow it off a mutual friend of ours.
I totally understand why Gould might write his scientific papers the way he did. I was a corporate copywriter for several years, writing webpages, training manuals, press releases, etc. When writing that stuff, I had to be as concise & simple as possible. But in my personal writings... I just HAD to convey things exactly. And though it seemed it was all quite extraneous, in my mind it was the only way to truly communicate to the reader not just what I was thinking, but how I felt, where I was going, & why & how I was to get there. I often considered the excessive wordiness necessary to communicate fully & effectively. I mean, it isn't necessary, & I know it just makes things confusing, but I just... can't. 🤷🏽
"[Darwin's] [...] commitment to viewing [...] small-scale [...] change [...] as the [...] source [...] of all [...] evolution has contributed to [...] the assumption that paleontology [...] cannot [meaningfully advance our knowledge about Evolution]".
This is so important! There is another link in the chain, though. People have to be able to read science papers for themselves. But due to a sadly outdated business model... that can be very, very difficult for anyone not affiliated with an academic institution.
I personally have no issues with science jargon but a little bit of dumbing down is perhaps necessary to make it digestible for the laypeople because misconceptions are where misunderstandings come from. However I do think some scientific terminology like the word 'theory' needs qualifiers because people confuse them with colloquial terms.
Hey there - i just discovered your channel from a 6 year old Trey the Explainer episode. And i want to say i am so happy to see youre still making great videos!!!! I cant wait to dive into all your videos
Peer review 😀 who's peers? Do you mean a bunch of ignorant or lying fools who are paid to keep the status quo?. I can prove Earth is flat, so who is my peer ?
I'm not currently a scientist, but I'm going to have to get a copy as I think that it could easily be transferable to communication in general. A good book for data analysts and others who have to communicate with "stakeholders" who may not have a technical understanding of the information being presented, but who must make informed decisions based upon it. Thanks for sharing the review and the book. I can't wait to read it!
5:37 That’s funny, I thought this example was a great sample of conciseness. Instead of writing “the plants grew larger” and then having to add a sub-clause or two about what “larger” means in that context, the writer communicated both that the plants got larger *_and_* that “larger” in the context of this study means by mass, not length of leaves or thicker stems or any other measure of “larger” you might think of.
@@okuno54 The advantage of the original is that is summarises the entire results *_and_* the method, including the varied variable and the measured variable, in one sentence. Skimming the paper for understanding, I would not need to read any more than that. From that point of view, it is efficient communication. 😏
6:16 With all due respect, I don't think trying to "write the way that we speak" actually results in something easier to read. In fact, I think it's often the opposite. For example, although I agree that the first sentence of that abstract that you shared is difficult to follow, I'm sure it would be much easier to follow if it were spoken out loud. Spoken sentences can afford to be long with numerous nested clauses, because we can provide the intonation to support them. In written language, that intonation is lost, and so it's better to break up complex ideas into smaller distinct sentences. The need to substitute punctuation for intonation is just one of many reasons why our writing needs to be approached differently from the way we articulate ideas in vocal conversation. I don't know about these writers, but personally when I use jargon (whether in speech or in writing), it's because those specific words hold a specific meaning that I consider distinct enough to warrant that word choice. It's not just an attempt to show off. It's an attempt to clarify what specifically I'm talking about by using specific words to describe it. I'd agree that sometimes clarifying your definitions is necessary, but I wouldn't fault people for using jargon that is relevant to the conversation.
My first advisor in grad school always complained about genetics and microbiology papers for the use of jargon to the point that other scientists couldnt understand it
Maybe, but lots of students who toss in excess jargon use it incorrectly which loses more points (at least for the reports I wrote and ones I graded). Its a lot better to be correct in a paper than sound smart while being wrong
I couldn’t figure out what that sentence meant but asked chatgpt: “Darwinism, which is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, has many important ideas. One of these is based on the work of Lyell. It suggests that the small changes we can see happening in living things today are the only cause of all the big changes in life forms over a very long time. This idea has led people to focus mostly on these small changes, called microevolution, and to think that studying fossils can show us the history of life but doesn’t give us new theories about evolution.”
Yes, that's what happens when the defined goals are not set correctly. Pay a programmer by the line of code, and you'll get the biggest code base you've ever seen, will it be good tho 🤔 ?
Great point! The problem there is how a dissertation is set. A max word limit is good, but concise under that should be rewarded - as long as everything needed is still done.
I'm writing a 80k+ word PhD and simple writing is better because I can break down concepts and explain everything in great detail. It not only forces me to think more clearly, I end up writing a lot more.
As a scientist, most of it doesn't come from trying to sound smart. Word counts and page limits have a weird affect on writing, on the one hand they encourage concision, on the other hand they cause people to use lots of acronyms and compressed terminology. If you read older papers (70's and earlier), some of them are long and bloviated, but they are often so much easier to read. With space to breathe, the authors can take more time to explain things. Moreover these older papers often give a more personal account of a study, presenting the authors thinking, data, and decision making in chronological order. In modern papers there's just no space, and scientists present the work in an order that's supposed to convey a story post hoc, but without the missing context this is still often hard to follow. 50 years ago scientists had more job security and some had the luxury of being able to publish papers in many parts over several years - something that seems completely absurd today. In today's hyper competitive world, we need to cram as many experiments as possible into each paper and conform to restrictive word limits, which leaves very little space for contextualization that would make our work easier to follow. I think another problem is that scientific writing is inherently defensive. When a scientist writes a paper they are almost never thinking about a lay person, or even grad students or scientists from other fields - they are thinking specifically about the colleagues within their own field. These are the people who will review the paper, deciding whether it will be published at all, and also the people who will need to believe it for it to gain traction in the community. In gradschool, I took a writing course where I polished the intro to my prelim proposal - at the end of the course, the intro was clear and easy enough for a highschooler to follow... But then I showed it to my thesis advisor (who believes good, accessible writing is VERY important by the way), and she immediately said "well you have to include this, and this, and this and this"... Basically I needed to cover a much larger foundational body of material, not in order to get the point across, but in order to prevent the hypothetical reader from poking holes in my project and tanking my proposal. The campbell biology-like intro I had polished was completely in tatters, and in order to get it back under the word count, the explanations that would have made it more accessible had to go.
That first sentence is, without a doubt, exesivily verbous. One of the reasons I (had to) drop out of univerisity, and still have trouble visually reading (I'm ok with audiobooks). It all kinda makes me queasy...
4:31 Gould is saying that Lyells view of Uniformitarianism was adopted by Darwin and because of this an emphasis and predominance was placed on the importance of micro evolution (as opposed to macro evolution) which caused Paleontology to be pushed aside as a helpful side subject to learn of the history of life, but not as a primary driver that can lead us to learn more about evolution itself. It's really not all that difficult and I may of had some college but I also left school in 7th grade before that when I was young. If I can figure that out with being basically self taught in geology and evolution than It doesn't seem like people should find it too complicated, and what I wrote above is only slightly less complicated but there is not really a shorter way to write it 😂 But as someone who is self taught, I sure as hell am not going to try to disuade scientists from writing with more clarity if the more complicated phrasing and vocab ain't needed. Almost as if there are remnants of 18th and 19th century European upper class protectionism involved 😂 god save the Queens in the Castro
As i understand Gould's abstract, he's saying that the assumption that we can see the history of life in fossils but we cant learn anything new abt evolution from it is due to the evolutionary idea that all the complex systems we see in life happened by small changes that add up over time.
@@StatedClearly thank you 😊! btw i wanted to say i agree with the whole concept in your video that we should be writing as we speak more. I try to do that as much as i can in my writing too. I saw someone's comment here that it cant always work bc intonation isn't recorded in text, & theyve got a point, but it still doesnt mean that text should be written in excessively verbose styles. I find it silly how it's so hard to read so many papers & books for no other reason than bc the author wanted to sound cool or something. That being said, i actually didnt have trouble understand your second example of the plant growth 😄. the Gould one wasnt hard to parse either (tho there were some words i had to guess the meaning of) but it did take longer for me to parse it than a regularly spoken sentence when it really didnt need to, so i still agree with you on that in principle. Also last point i really enjoy your videos (both from this channel & from your stated casually channel that you recently renamed)
@@StatedClearlyIn your video ''what is the evidence of evolution'' there is a user named 4th_intellegent_eye who is a creationist that keep spamming comment about science/evolution denial nonsense . we need to report that user for spamming
I do agree with your message, there is some thing to be said however for how people in a sense have become less litarate in the modern day age, as befor the written word was our only form of communication\ entertainment. People took more pleasure in reading and writting expressive complex litatiture.
@@iMushroomify You were bemoaning the decline in literacy in a comment littered with spelling mistakes and poor grammar. Kind of an irony, wouldn't you say? I thought it might have been on purpose.
My brain is weird and naturally speaks in these kinds of weird twisty sentences, but even in Gould's abstract, I have yet to identify the main verb of the sentence 0.o
Gould's opening line is verbose but intelligible to those with a better than average vocabulary and a good grasp on the history of evolutionary thought and application. .02
Abstract...Have any of you folks created a "buzzword"or "bullshit" bingo card for evolutionary scientific papers? There are a few candidate phrases here...Lyelian uniformitarianism, causual hegemoney and contingent history"
It's not just scientist with the word salad. Business meetings are chuck full of unnecessary jargon and overuse of abstractions. Oh, and buzz words, lots of buzz words.
In old, British English, you are correct. But I'm a modern American, which is why I specifically said in the video "In modern, American English that means: Take No One's Word"
Actually, there is a nuance difference. The nuance difference lies in the level of directness and the specific instruction provided: - "Nullius in verba," on the word of no one, sets a general tone of skepticism and intellectual independence but doesn't prescribe a specific action. - "Take nobody's word for it" is a direct instruction to verify information before accepting it. While both convey the idea of not blindly accepting claims, your translation "Take nobody's word for it" is more explicit in its directive.@@StatedClearly
It exists for a reason. I understand some people need dumbing it down, but that's generally not the audience scientific papers are aimed at. "Why use big word when small word do trick" is not a good argument.
I’d agree but it’s established that clarity should be preferred over style when the explicit role of a scientific paper is to explain something new. So in this context “why use big words…” is a good argument. It doesn’t mean journals should restrict those who do, but a note saying the paper could be simplified can be a good thing.
I agree. The clarity of what is being said should not come at the cost of the precision and specificity of what is being said. "The treated plants grew larger" is imprecise enough compared to "the treated plants gained more biomass than the untreated plants" that it's up to interpretation, and that could harm reproducibility.
So just a brief response from a creationist, a big issue that a lot of us have is the litteral interpretation of the book of Gennisis. Its possible that all of evolution is complete bullshit, and just a bunch of lies, however its not very reasonable to say that. However you want to interpret the book, we agree on a few things. The order of creation, that being the universe, then stars, then earth, then the plants, then the sealife, then the landlife, then humans. There are a lot of ways to interpret gennisis, some of witch being the litteral one, the gap theory, and the complete metaphore theory. However, one thing many seem to forget, is that the creation is a secondary issue, meaning even if evolution is true, it litterally has absolutely no impact on theology whatsoever, meaning if my great great grandpa is a monkey, it doesnt change that Jesus rose from the dead. However, we agree on more than we both think, the universe, time, space, matter, ans gravity all popped into existance at the same time, we agree on the fine tuning of the universe, such as the laws of nature, time-space/gravity, the "coding" of the universe(all of nature running on math) the constant speed of light. We agree on all of this, but some things we dissagree on is the "timeframe" of things, and the fossile record. The timeframe, meaning dinosaurs coexisting with humans n such, while you may think its stupid, there is evidence that humans saw dinosarus, there are rocks and cave paintings founs that describe all type of dinosaurs, made by humans. They've found footprints of humans and dinos right next to each other. The fact that they've found living bloodcels in dino fossils, that should be long gone if it lived billions and billions of years ago. And that leads into the fossile record honesty being better proof of a a global flood, which even that we agree on, as well as both dinos and the flood being a constant thing in ancient cultures. To get a fossile, the creature needs to be buried alive, with a ton of mud, water, volcanic ash. Therefore the evolutionists explination of the fossile record is basically impossible by their explination. All flood myths are very similar, that being the entire earth was covered, and only one famipy of 8 people survived by putting all creature on a boat. Before you say "thats stupid and impossible" it wouldnt be if you put a bunch of baby animals on the boat, especially with how many animals lay egs. That would need a lot less room, as well as recorses to manage. And looping back to human dino overlap, while yhe word dinosaur is never uttered by a single ancient culture(mostly because we made that word up when we found dinosaurs) dragons are a tale told by litterally every single culture that had ever existed throughout the ancient world. Dinos could have easily been dragons. And most likely, we probably hunted them to extinction long ago. It is very possible that this is correct, especially given the things we've found in the fossil record, crocodiles, spearm whales, lobsters, celocanth, the little hourseshoe guys(dont remember their names tbh) as well as snails have all been found to live in todays world, with the biggest difference being size. Same with the insects. We agree there was a flood(look into the meltwater pulses if you dont belive me) we belive that the continents were once a giant continent, and that it got ripped apart. Dragons, and giants are in the bible as well as in ancient tales, as well as the fact we have giants to this day(litterally andre the giant suffered from gigantism) as well as the kamoto dragon, witch may be unimpressive, but honesty so is the dino dragon explanation. However, the holes in evolution are something from litteral nothing, as well as intelligent infrormation coming from organic matter. Quantom physics shows that if you crate a void, electrons can actuall just pop into existence, however in a post big bang existence there is no true void, meaning you cant remove time or gravity from the question, i.e. not a true nothing. In true nothing there is litterally nothing. Therfore unscientific and impossible. As well as non living matter producing information, i.e. dna. These gaps are filled in easily by the existance of God and his creation of everything. How cpuld all of this fit together? Well, the universe is expanding, so at one point everything was closer together. Therfore time would have been wonky due to time dilution. Hypithetically, billions of years could have passed like one litteral day and has been slowing down with the expansion. Dont just write this off as some stupid Christian spewing nonsense, and look into it yourself. While youre at it, look into all of the descovories that have been made because of the bible, the expansion of the universe, string theory, the currents in the ocean, mountains underwater, the cycle of the rains, the fact that a dino is described in the oldest book in the biblez that being the book of job, just to name a few. This is all written back when all other cultures thought the sun was a living god thst got eqten by a dragon every eclipse. The romans thought rain was the gods nutting on us, and most of this stuff, such as the expansion, litterally could not have been known by people living 3500bc, especially because a lot of this wasnt even known unil the 19th-20th centry. Just food for thought
Please remove the thumbnail, it's needless and pointless anti catholic imagery. And you DO take other people's words as evidence for the world, how else would someone that never went to Indonesia know what the capital of Indonesia is? It's just you having informed faith in the people online or in the books that report that the Indonesian parliament is in Jacarta and therefore you believe them.
I take your point about the thumbnail. I'll play with some other ideas for it. On your second point: If I doubt Indonesia has a capital, I can go there and see for myself. All valid scientific claims can be double checked. Nullius In Verba!
@@StatedClearly Yes, all scientific claims can be double checked, but not all true claims can. If Indonesia never gives you a VISA, or if you couldn't afford the trip, would you be justified in doubting what the capital is? No, because individuals have informed faith in institutions or other in people. It's foolish to forego that informed faith on a whim. The point of christian apologetics is to show that you can have informed faith (or trust) in the church as an institution, and from that you can have faith in the promises and statements from Jesus and the prophets.
It's fine for people to have faith in things, but it's not science. This video is about science. Also, if you were denied the right to see the capital of Indonesia, you're fully welcome to doubt its existence. As the saying goes: That which is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Also, I changed the thumbnail for you. Not sure if it shows up for you yet (the server takes time to switch, depending where you live). I didn't think Catholics were still sensitive about Pope hats (mitres) since Francis came in and made so much fun of them himself, but I looked it up after hearing from you and it seems a bunch of people still are highly sensitive about it. Also, it seems Francis' own mocking of the pageantry was exaggerated in the media. He still wears a mitre for certain ceremonies. I was not aware of this. I thought he did away with it.
@@StatedClearly Thank you! God bless you! If you want to get further in the conversation about faith and evidence, I have contact info in my username. I don't disagree with any of the statements you made, but I'd add needed distinctions.
The abstract is saying:
There is a view that large scale evolutionary change can be broken down to smaller more basic changes. This has caused people to assume that paleontology (while it can document the history of life) can't be used to study the smaller changes that are key to understanding the mechanisms of evolution.
There's a saying in the world of copywriting: "Behind every great writer is an even better copyeditor." 😊
I'm visually impaired so I'm afraid I couldn't read that scientific extract anyway, But that's exactly why I love channels like this, as they make science accessible to someone like me.
I'm very glad you're covering this topic. One of the primary reasons I stopped pursuing higher degrees in biology is because of how unnecessarily difficult scientific papers are to read.
The problem is that we were taught to write this way both by example and by having minimum length requirements for our own papers. This only encourages unnecessary bloat and further disincentivizes people like me from pursuing careers in science. I pine for the days when science papers were written poetically and beautifully, a la The Royal Society of the 17th and 18th centuries! Science (literature) is become so sterile these days!
Stu is my go to for showing what a clearly written paper looks like. I remember chatting to him when I was a PhD student and his advice was great. From writing to experimental design. His emphasis on writing helped me when writing for Kurzgesagt. I keep meaning to pick up the book but I'll just borrow it off a mutual friend of ours.
I totally understand why Gould might write his scientific papers the way he did. I was a corporate copywriter for several years, writing webpages, training manuals, press releases, etc. When writing that stuff, I had to be as concise & simple as possible. But in my personal writings... I just HAD to convey things exactly. And though it seemed it was all quite extraneous, in my mind it was the only way to truly communicate to the reader not just what I was thinking, but how I felt, where I was going, & why & how I was to get there. I often considered the excessive wordiness necessary to communicate fully & effectively. I mean, it isn't necessary, & I know it just makes things confusing, but I just... can't. 🤷🏽
"[Darwin's] [...] commitment to viewing [...] small-scale [...] change [...] as the [...] source [...] of all [...] evolution has contributed to [...] the assumption that paleontology [...] cannot [meaningfully advance our knowledge about Evolution]".
It's not that hard to understand, it's just his describers for Lyells Uniformitarianism that's pretty weird
This is so important! There is another link in the chain, though. People have to be able to read science papers for themselves. But due to a sadly outdated business model... that can be very, very difficult for anyone not affiliated with an academic institution.
Black libraries *cough* *cough*
Ah, sorry about that. Seems to have got something in my throat...
I personally have no issues with science jargon but a little bit of dumbing down is perhaps necessary to make it digestible for the laypeople because misconceptions are where misunderstandings come from. However I do think some scientific terminology like the word 'theory' needs qualifiers because people confuse them with colloquial terms.
Couldn’t have said it better.
Science ends where profit-loss begins.
Hey there - i just discovered your channel from a 6 year old Trey the Explainer episode. And i want to say i am so happy to see youre still making great videos!!!! I cant wait to dive into all your videos
I thought this was going to be about how to read and interpret scientific papers... that's what I need to learn
so basically, this is “State Clearly: The Book”
Peer review 😀 who's peers? Do you mean a bunch of ignorant or lying fools who are paid to keep the status quo?. I can prove Earth is flat, so who is my peer ?
I'm not currently a scientist, but I'm going to have to get a copy as I think that it could easily be transferable to communication in general. A good book for data analysts and others who have to communicate with "stakeholders" who may not have a technical understanding of the information being presented, but who must make informed decisions based upon it.
Thanks for sharing the review and the book. I can't wait to read it!
5:37 That’s funny, I thought this example was a great sample of conciseness. Instead of writing “the plants grew larger” and then having to add a sub-clause or two about what “larger” means in that context, the writer communicated both that the plants got larger *_and_* that “larger” in the context of this study means by mass, not length of leaves or thicker stems or any other measure of “larger” you might think of.
Then replace "larger" with "more mass" and it's _even clearer_, no?
@@okuno54 The advantage of the original is that is summarises the entire results *_and_* the method, including the varied variable and the measured variable, in one sentence. Skimming the paper for understanding, I would not need to read any more than that. From that point of view, it is efficient communication. 😏
6:16
With all due respect, I don't think trying to "write the way that we speak" actually results in something easier to read. In fact, I think it's often the opposite.
For example, although I agree that the first sentence of that abstract that you shared is difficult to follow, I'm sure it would be much easier to follow if it were spoken out loud. Spoken sentences can afford to be long with numerous nested clauses, because we can provide the intonation to support them. In written language, that intonation is lost, and so it's better to break up complex ideas into smaller distinct sentences. The need to substitute punctuation for intonation is just one of many reasons why our writing needs to be approached differently from the way we articulate ideas in vocal conversation.
I don't know about these writers, but personally when I use jargon (whether in speech or in writing), it's because those specific words hold a specific meaning that I consider distinct enough to warrant that word choice. It's not just an attempt to show off. It's an attempt to clarify what specifically I'm talking about by using specific words to describe it. I'd agree that sometimes clarifying your definitions is necessary, but I wouldn't fault people for using jargon that is relevant to the conversation.
My first advisor in grad school always complained about genetics and microbiology papers for the use of jargon to the point that other scientists couldnt understand it
maybe people use a lot of jargon, because it used to help with getting better grades when your teachers were grading your papers.
Your hypothesis is a paradigmatic exemplar of innovative conjectural reasoning!
Translation: You're probably right!
Maybe, but lots of students who toss in excess jargon use it incorrectly which loses more points (at least for the reports I wrote and ones I graded). Its a lot better to be correct in a paper than sound smart while being wrong
I couldn’t figure out what that sentence meant but asked chatgpt: “Darwinism, which is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, has many important ideas. One of these is based on the work of Lyell. It suggests that the small changes we can see happening in living things today are the only cause of all the big changes in life forms over a very long time. This idea has led people to focus mostly on these small changes, called microevolution, and to think that studying fossils can show us the history of life but doesn’t give us new theories about evolution.”
Lol when you're at university and you're given the task of writing a 12,000 word dissertation, you have to use the science jargon.
Yes,
that's what happens when the defined goals are not set correctly.
Pay a programmer by the line of code, and you'll get the biggest code base you've ever seen, will it be good tho 🤔 ?
Add fat.. add extra fat... no More fat
Great point! The problem there is how a dissertation is set. A max word limit is good, but concise under that should be rewarded - as long as everything needed is still done.
I'm writing a 80k+ word PhD and simple writing is better because I can break down concepts and explain everything in great detail. It not only forces me to think more clearly, I end up writing a lot more.
@@sohu86xWhat is your thesis on?
As a scientist, most of it doesn't come from trying to sound smart. Word counts and page limits have a weird affect on writing, on the one hand they encourage concision, on the other hand they cause people to use lots of acronyms and compressed terminology. If you read older papers (70's and earlier), some of them are long and bloviated, but they are often so much easier to read. With space to breathe, the authors can take more time to explain things. Moreover these older papers often give a more personal account of a study, presenting the authors thinking, data, and decision making in chronological order. In modern papers there's just no space, and scientists present the work in an order that's supposed to convey a story post hoc, but without the missing context this is still often hard to follow. 50 years ago scientists had more job security and some had the luxury of being able to publish papers in many parts over several years - something that seems completely absurd today. In today's hyper competitive world, we need to cram as many experiments as possible into each paper and conform to restrictive word limits, which leaves very little space for contextualization that would make our work easier to follow.
I think another problem is that scientific writing is inherently defensive. When a scientist writes a paper they are almost never thinking about a lay person, or even grad students or scientists from other fields - they are thinking specifically about the colleagues within their own field. These are the people who will review the paper, deciding whether it will be published at all, and also the people who will need to believe it for it to gain traction in the community. In gradschool, I took a writing course where I polished the intro to my prelim proposal - at the end of the course, the intro was clear and easy enough for a highschooler to follow... But then I showed it to my thesis advisor (who believes good, accessible writing is VERY important by the way), and she immediately said "well you have to include this, and this, and this and this"... Basically I needed to cover a much larger foundational body of material, not in order to get the point across, but in order to prevent the hypothetical reader from poking holes in my project and tanking my proposal. The campbell biology-like intro I had polished was completely in tatters, and in order to get it back under the word count, the explanations that would have made it more accessible had to go.
That first sentence is, without a doubt, exesivily verbous. One of the reasons I (had to) drop out of univerisity, and still have trouble visually reading (I'm ok with audiobooks). It all kinda makes me queasy...
4:31
Gould is saying that Lyells view of Uniformitarianism was adopted by Darwin and because of this an emphasis and predominance was placed on the importance of micro evolution (as opposed to macro evolution) which caused Paleontology to be pushed aside as a helpful side subject to learn of the history of life, but not as a primary driver that can lead us to learn more about evolution itself.
It's really not all that difficult and I may of had some college but I also left school in 7th grade before that when I was young. If I can figure that out with being basically self taught in geology and evolution than It doesn't seem like people should find it too complicated, and what I wrote above is only slightly less complicated but there is not really a shorter way to write it
😂 But as someone who is self taught, I sure as hell am not going to try to disuade scientists from writing with more clarity if the more complicated phrasing and vocab ain't needed.
Almost as if there are remnants of 18th and 19th century European upper class protectionism involved 😂 god save the Queens in the Castro
When is there gonna be a new drop???
As i understand Gould's abstract, he's saying that the assumption that we can see the history of life in fossils but we cant learn anything new abt evolution from it is due to the evolutionary idea that all the complex systems we see in life happened by small changes that add up over time.
I think your summary is the cleanest so far!
@@StatedClearly thank you 😊! btw i wanted to say i agree with the whole concept in your video that we should be writing as we speak more. I try to do that as much as i can in my writing too. I saw someone's comment here that it cant always work bc intonation isn't recorded in text, & theyve got a point, but it still doesnt mean that text should be written in excessively verbose styles. I find it silly how it's so hard to read so many papers & books for no other reason than bc the author wanted to sound cool or something. That being said, i actually didnt have trouble understand your second example of the plant growth 😄. the Gould one wasnt hard to parse either (tho there were some words i had to guess the meaning of) but it did take longer for me to parse it than a regularly spoken sentence when it really didnt need to, so i still agree with you on that in principle. Also last point i really enjoy your videos (both from this channel & from your stated casually channel that you recently renamed)
I live in Honduras and shipping would be hard. Is there an online or downloadable version?
There is a Kindle version (digital) you can get on Amazon. You just need an account with Kindle to use their reading tool.
@@StatedClearlyIn your video ''what is the evidence of evolution'' there is a user named 4th_intellegent_eye who is a creationist that keep spamming comment about science/evolution denial nonsense . we need to report that user for spamming
I do agree with your message, there is some thing to be said however for how people in a sense have become less litarate in the modern day age, as befor the written word was our only form of communication\ entertainment. People took more pleasure in reading and writting expressive complex litatiture.
The irony is strong with this one
@@oldnelson4298 your comments a little lost on me, do you mean to say I am not literate?
@@iMushroomify You were bemoaning the decline in literacy in a comment littered with spelling mistakes and poor grammar. Kind of an irony, wouldn't you say? I thought it might have been on purpose.
He's back!
Simplicity is the highest level of complexity. If people need complex sentences to define a phenomenon, they haven't understood it well enough.
My brain is weird and naturally speaks in these kinds of weird twisty sentences, but even in Gould's abstract, I have yet to identify the main verb of the sentence 0.o
Steven J Gould coming through with the retro encabulator of biology
Thank you! ❤
Gould's opening line is verbose but intelligible to those with a better than average vocabulary and a good grasp on the history of evolutionary thought and application.
.02
Thanks for the video :)
Sounds to me that "I know the lingo (see Appendix a) but here is my work stated clearly" need a sexy logo!
Hmm, I wonder who can design such a logo? 🤔
Abstract...Have any of you folks created a "buzzword"or "bullshit" bingo card for evolutionary scientific papers? There are a few candidate phrases here...Lyelian uniformitarianism, causual hegemoney and contingent history"
It's not just scientist with the word salad. Business meetings are chuck full of unnecessary jargon and overuse of abstractions. Oh, and buzz words, lots of buzz words.
4:36 Abstract: Lyellin's theory sucks hard ngl, everything just disprove this snot fr fr no cap
Get Keen!
❤❤
Great video!
I see the same behavior in politics
Is this book useful for computer science papers?
Yes, general tips aimed across all types of science. And even some social sciences.
Plz make more videos
Holy W
That's an add.
Big words
Love your videos and am subscribed and will always be. I’ll mention that $30 for a paperback isn’t the most accessible for a good chunk of people…
Try requesting it at a local library. My experience is that the library will buy it if you request it.
observation rules supreme except when dogma blocks one's view....not you stated clearly, just an observation
I felt like Beavis after reading the highlighted abstract you presented tbh lol.
"Nullius in verba" means on the word of no one.
In old, British English, you are correct. But I'm a modern American, which is why I specifically said in the video "In modern, American English that means: Take No One's Word"
Actually, there is a nuance difference. The nuance difference lies in the level of directness and the specific instruction provided:
- "Nullius in verba," on the word of no one, sets a general tone of skepticism and intellectual independence but doesn't prescribe a specific action.
- "Take nobody's word for it" is a direct instruction to verify information before accepting it.
While both convey the idea of not blindly accepting claims, your translation "Take nobody's word for it" is more explicit in its directive.@@StatedClearly
Someone show this to Jordan peterson.
It exists for a reason.
I understand some people need dumbing it down, but that's generally not the audience scientific papers are aimed at.
"Why use big word when small word do trick" is not a good argument.
I’d agree but it’s established that clarity should be preferred over style when the explicit role of a scientific paper is to explain something new.
So in this context “why use big words…” is a good argument.
It doesn’t mean journals should restrict those who do, but a note saying the paper could be simplified can be a good thing.
It exists for a reason but its used in gross excess which is counter-productive
I agree. The clarity of what is being said should not come at the cost of the precision and specificity of what is being said. "The treated plants grew larger" is imprecise enough compared to "the treated plants gained more biomass than the untreated plants" that it's up to interpretation, and that could harm reproducibility.
Turkish subtitles please
Selamun Aleyküm
@@SignsBehindScience aleyküm selam
@@nsTurkish Ben Pakistanlı
@@SignsBehindScience memnun oldum dostum. Güzel kanal
Hey look who uploaded
fascinating video
Lol
In the abstract, it's ok, a bit over complicated but he uses the word 'extrapolationist', I call bullshittism on this one.
So just a brief response from a creationist, a big issue that a lot of us have is the litteral interpretation of the book of Gennisis. Its possible that all of evolution is complete bullshit, and just a bunch of lies, however its not very reasonable to say that. However you want to interpret the book, we agree on a few things. The order of creation, that being the universe, then stars, then earth, then the plants, then the sealife, then the landlife, then humans. There are a lot of ways to interpret gennisis, some of witch being the litteral one, the gap theory, and the complete metaphore theory. However, one thing many seem to forget, is that the creation is a secondary issue, meaning even if evolution is true, it litterally has absolutely no impact on theology whatsoever, meaning if my great great grandpa is a monkey, it doesnt change that Jesus rose from the dead. However, we agree on more than we both think, the universe, time, space, matter, ans gravity all popped into existance at the same time, we agree on the fine tuning of the universe, such as the laws of nature, time-space/gravity, the "coding" of the universe(all of nature running on math) the constant speed of light. We agree on all of this, but some things we dissagree on is the "timeframe" of things, and the fossile record. The timeframe, meaning dinosaurs coexisting with humans n such, while you may think its stupid, there is evidence that humans saw dinosarus, there are rocks and cave paintings founs that describe all type of dinosaurs, made by humans. They've found footprints of humans and dinos right next to each other. The fact that they've found living bloodcels in dino fossils, that should be long gone if it lived billions and billions of years ago. And that leads into the fossile record honesty being better proof of a a global flood, which even that we agree on, as well as both dinos and the flood being a constant thing in ancient cultures. To get a fossile, the creature needs to be buried alive, with a ton of mud, water, volcanic ash. Therefore the evolutionists explination of the fossile record is basically impossible by their explination. All flood myths are very similar, that being the entire earth was covered, and only one famipy of 8 people survived by putting all creature on a boat. Before you say "thats stupid and impossible" it wouldnt be if you put a bunch of baby animals on the boat, especially with how many animals lay egs. That would need a lot less room, as well as recorses to manage. And looping back to human dino overlap, while yhe word dinosaur is never uttered by a single ancient culture(mostly because we made that word up when we found dinosaurs) dragons are a tale told by litterally every single culture that had ever existed throughout the ancient world. Dinos could have easily been dragons. And most likely, we probably hunted them to extinction long ago. It is very possible that this is correct, especially given the things we've found in the fossil record, crocodiles, spearm whales, lobsters, celocanth, the little hourseshoe guys(dont remember their names tbh) as well as snails have all been found to live in todays world, with the biggest difference being size. Same with the insects. We agree there was a flood(look into the meltwater pulses if you dont belive me) we belive that the continents were once a giant continent, and that it got ripped apart. Dragons, and giants are in the bible as well as in ancient tales, as well as the fact we have giants to this day(litterally andre the giant suffered from gigantism) as well as the kamoto dragon, witch may be unimpressive, but honesty so is the dino dragon explanation. However, the holes in evolution are something from litteral nothing, as well as intelligent infrormation coming from organic matter. Quantom physics shows that if you crate a void, electrons can actuall just pop into existence, however in a post big bang existence there is no true void, meaning you cant remove time or gravity from the question, i.e. not a true nothing. In true nothing there is litterally nothing. Therfore unscientific and impossible. As well as non living matter producing information, i.e. dna. These gaps are filled in easily by the existance of God and his creation of everything. How cpuld all of this fit together? Well, the universe is expanding, so at one point everything was closer together. Therfore time would have been wonky due to time dilution. Hypithetically, billions of years could have passed like one litteral day and has been slowing down with the expansion. Dont just write this off as some stupid Christian spewing nonsense, and look into it yourself. While youre at it, look into all of the descovories that have been made because of the bible, the expansion of the universe, string theory, the currents in the ocean, mountains underwater, the cycle of the rains, the fact that a dino is described in the oldest book in the biblez that being the book of job, just to name a few. This is all written back when all other cultures thought the sun was a living god thst got eqten by a dragon every eclipse. The romans thought rain was the gods nutting on us, and most of this stuff, such as the expansion, litterally could not have been known by people living 3500bc, especially because a lot of this wasnt even known unil the 19th-20th centry. Just food for thought
Not breif at all, I know, but yeet skeet
Please remove the thumbnail, it's needless and pointless anti catholic imagery.
And you DO take other people's words as evidence for the world, how else would someone that never went to Indonesia know what the capital of Indonesia is? It's just you having informed faith in the people online or in the books that report that the Indonesian parliament is in Jacarta and therefore you believe them.
I take your point about the thumbnail. I'll play with some other ideas for it. On your second point: If I doubt Indonesia has a capital, I can go there and see for myself. All valid scientific claims can be double checked. Nullius In Verba!
@@StatedClearly Yes, all scientific claims can be double checked, but not all true claims can. If Indonesia never gives you a VISA, or if you couldn't afford the trip, would you be justified in doubting what the capital is? No, because individuals have informed faith in institutions or other in people. It's foolish to forego that informed faith on a whim.
The point of christian apologetics is to show that you can have informed faith (or trust) in the church as an institution, and from that you can have faith in the promises and statements from Jesus and the prophets.
It's fine for people to have faith in things, but it's not science. This video is about science. Also, if you were denied the right to see the capital of Indonesia, you're fully welcome to doubt its existence. As the saying goes: That which is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Also, I changed the thumbnail for you. Not sure if it shows up for you yet (the server takes time to switch, depending where you live). I didn't think Catholics were still sensitive about Pope hats (mitres) since Francis came in and made so much fun of them himself, but I looked it up after hearing from you and it seems a bunch of people still are highly sensitive about it. Also, it seems Francis' own mocking of the pageantry was exaggerated in the media. He still wears a mitre for certain ceremonies. I was not aware of this. I thought he did away with it.
@@StatedClearly Thank you! God bless you!
If you want to get further in the conversation about faith and evidence, I have contact info in my username. I don't disagree with any of the statements you made, but I'd add needed distinctions.
I see the same behavior in politics