Which Rules, Law or Science?

The class I am helping teach this semester, Biology and Society, invites scholars dealing with relations between science and society to give several guest lectures. After a well-received lecture about the implications of history of embryology on embryonic stem cell research from Jane Maienschein on Tuesday, today we had Gary Marchant from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law talking about the intersection between law and science. Designed as an undergraduate lecture, Marchant’s talk gave a general survey of the legal issues that need scientific contributions to resolve. What struck me most, however, was his description about the grave challenge in bringing scientific facts to the consideration of legal procedures.

In theory, the hiatus between scientific disciplines and legal arenas should not be too big. As Marchant pointed out, both science and law “are rational, evidence-based approaches for making decisions.” In addition, from Aristotle to the Enlightenment, the meanings of natural law and civil law shared a co-evolution from being taken as given by God to a mundane status that was seen as more flexible and malleable. In reality, however, to integrate scientific knowledge to the practice of law can be problematic. As Marchant summarized, “law is normative, jurisdictional, and hierarchical, while science is empirical, universal, and somewhat democratic.” One example about this divide is that although established scientific paradigm can create inertia sometimes, legal ex ante regulations write such hegemony into the very rule of the game. The consequence of the intrinsic inertia of legal regulation can be appalling. The Delaney clause (1958) banned the food additives that were reported to cause cancer based on an outdated scientific literature in the 1950s. This decision was only repealed in 1996, many years after the vintage science being debunked (Marchant 2005).

Even on the surface, the atmosphere of splendid court dramas diverges significantly from that of careful laboratory ruminations. Having gone through law school that inculcated a huge set of argumentative skills, its students only learn to appreciate and absorb those aspects of evidence that can be readily transformed into well-recognized preponderance. Marchant recounted his own experience of an 11-month law case about chemical additives: whenever the real chemists started to testify, most of the lawyers began to snooze. The “technologically illiterate judges,” on the other hand, often claim they make judicial decisions primarily based on each expert’s “demeanor and tone.”

Provided the huge gap between law and technology, Maienschein’s and Marchant’s pursuits in educating current federal judges and the next generation of lawyers with scientific knowledge and understanding are invaluable. However, I wonder whether there is any space to objectify the legal procedure itself as well. For example, certain mathematical models that assign different evidence with different weights may be incorporated into the process of evaluating preponderance, so that the decisions of judges have a machine calculation-based output as their references. Can complex algorithms save some flaws of blatant rhetoric? This may be a naïve thought, and I welcome opinions regarding how bridges between science and law can be constructed in helpful ways.

Marchant half-jokingly ended his lecture with a cartoon depicting a party of lawyers quaffing wine with self-congratulatory postures. The caption reads: “The best thing about the information age is, we lawyers are still in charge.”

Whoever rules, let's talk.

Marchant, Gary E. “Law, Science, & Technology,” in Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Carl Mitcham ed., Macmillan Reference 2005, 1707-1715

Last Scattering Surface and other marriages of science and art

Artist Josiah McElheny and cosmologist David Weinberg gave a public lecture on Tuesday night about the former’s sculpture, Last Scattering Surface. This new installation has a glowing core with many dazzling glass globes and discs shooting from it, much like a bizarrely decorated, shiny hedgehog. The artist tries to capture a representation of Big Bang processes through this design. The surface of the bright core stands for the black scattering surface, where universe transforms from the opaque state filled with dense electrons to the transparent form. The many glass globes and discs surrounding the bright core symbolize many galaxies – the current state of the universe.


Their talk attempted to grasp tremendous ideas not only because this work is about the creation of the universe. By building his art based on scientific knowledge, McElheny’s first effort is to negotiate how art can be constructed according to precise models, as science has been done. He also tries to convey the ideas derived from science in a way that they can shed lights on the nature of humanity. If, as the Big Bang proposes, the universe has no absolute center and everywhere can be seen as a relative center of the universe, what does it tell about humanity? How can any system of places, people or thoughts gain supremacy to others, if the places they reside in are equal? Also, if the universe was made possible by its imperfection, maybe we should not try to define a perfect state and tag humanity as nature’s corruption or its ascension. By presenting the equality and plurality of galaxies, he tried to overturn hierarchical, utopian world views, which may be what he means by “modernism”.

In light of both intriguing and confusing feature of the “Big Bang”, it was no wonder that the cosmologist Weinberg attracted most of the questions. (Hooray, Science!) When people realized the faithfulness of the sculpture’s design in presenting cosmology and how little was added for art’s sake, the philosophical, ideological notions the artist argues seemed a little bit arbitrary. Consequently, the artist seemed rather like an “under labor” of science, as philosopher F put it, although the artist must think differently.


However, there are other artists who claim themselves as labors for science. Some of them, such as Felice Frankel, even do not categorize their profession as artist. (Thank Professor J for her introduction.) Frankel views her photographs as “phenomena” rather than art. How the hydrophobic and hydrophilic material forms regular grids (right), for example, assumes more a question to investigate than an esthetic experience. As such, she may never have to label her work as modern or post-modern under the mantle of a research scientist. Ironically, these “artistic scientists” are more likely to use generic scientific processes as a tool to create arts (e.g. “brainbow”) than those self-claimed scientific artists.


Too bad that I do not know much about Monet, Picasso and other experimental pioneer's works. Due to this and many other ignorance, I can only post some pictures as instances of marriage between science and art here, rather than give a fuller account of its spectrum.


Galelio: Saturn's rings -- Art as minimal as a scientific shorthand.

Mitosis won the first prize in Princeton's Art and Science Competetion. It was created in superimposing a microscopic cell image and a floral pattern, overlaying elements of art on science.

Art by Jennifer Rea.

Kepler's Platonic solid model. How blissful he would have felt if he had an opportunity, like what McElheny provided to Big Bang, to build this into a concrete form.