The book biologists hate to read but love to cite
Вставка
- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- The book (public domain): www.gutenberg....
The book on amazon: amzn.to/49oLbyT
Editing by Noor Hanania.
Thank you to Neele Elbersgerd, Tree Smith and Marcus Karam from the University of Melbourne for helping with research and the script for this video.
I read a description of the book, and the writer said "The book is essentially wrong, but it is wrong in a very interesting way".
I think that's the case for a lot of fundamental works in various fields. Though personally I would say flawed more than wrong. Often a field changes quite a bit over time, but the initial questions raised and the pathways explored are still very much of interest and iterated upon.
if not repeating often rhyming those starting blocks of intuition.
Why is it wrong?
@@midshipman8654agree. People mistake science as black and white
What do you mean "why is it wrong?" did you not watch the entire video? The book is clearly flawed and/or wrong in many areas.@@redx11x
@@redx11x I mean the basic idea/principle of the book is clearly not wrong, because a lot of shapes and structures in nature ARE defined by physics and mathematics and we know that today. But it seems what the original comment meant is that the book is wrong about a lot of the details in some areas. That doesn't mean the book in general is wrong about everything tho so i think its poorly worded.
The honeycombe cells start perfectly circular. Due to the development of the comb, which also results in increasing pressure on the outer sides of the cells, the hexagonal form developes, which sees to it that evenly divided pressure also results in the most economical use of space and a very strong, durable structure overall.
Yeah, but the fact that the scientist is wrong every so often makes it possible for other people to actually believe that they can become scientists as well. The problem, though, is that ONE SCIENTIST was supposed to GET THE JOB DONE so that we wouldn't be FACING THE SAME HORIZON which we were facing BEFORE SCIENCE BEGAN. Any detective would agree. Not to mention that the M**** Carta ruined everything and the scientist who wrote the book was just trying to see How Much His Writing Could Hurt Lamarck (and then laugh because "humans are so weak that they can die without being physically attacked".
Slow-cooling liquid basalts also form vertical hexagonal prisms because of the even thermal contraction.
Not all of the cells are perfect hexagons but the closer you get to the center of a single pool the better they get
(X)doubt
@@TheAgamemnon911 there's nothing to doubt... bees build honeycombs out of round tubes but if you squish bunch of tubes together, they will converge into hexagons. Because hexagons are the bestagons
@@justADeni Yeah, each sounds plausible. But the conclusion of throwing them together is complete BS. Honeycombs are not pressurized.
During my graduate research, one paper was cited by basically everyone in the field, because it was the "first" on the topic, so I wanted to include it as well. One problem: the original was in French and all the papers I read were English. "That's fine", I thought, "I'm sure someone's translated". But I couldn't find an English translation (only the original in French). So I asked my school's research library to search for it (they can call up other university libraries in the world and ask for pdf scans). After months, they couldn't find an English translation either. So I'm pretty sure the hundreds of papers that cited it never read the original paper! That's quite poor practice!
Some of them may have done that, but it's also possible many of those authors just know French.
Did you maybe consider the fact that some people can speak French
During undergrad, I heard a similar story about a math paper. The article was written by someone from Georgia (the country) in their native language of Georgian. The author then did a talk about it in English at an international mathematical conference. Someone who attended this talk then cited one of the theorems in their research. People then read this research and cited the same theorem until tens of papers relied on research that was only available in the Georgian language. Eventually, the University of Georgia had to be contacted for assistance in translating the original paper to ensure that it really proved what tens of subsequent papers claimed it did.
This might just be one of those stories that gets passed around academia but I thought it was pretty funny
@@LegendaryWizardPSI doubt he was the only one who didn’t know French… it’s poor practice absolutely
@@garrettw6532the problem isn't that none of the people read the papers, it was that basically everyone cited it, but the paper is so prevalently cited that there is no way that many researchers read the paper. And having a significant portion of researchers in the field not read that paper is an alarming problem
I could smell the book each time you turned the page.
2:11 i remember salvador dali was fascinated by these "crowns" as he called them! He drew them a lot! That's just goes to show how much thought went into these paintings.
Thank you for a succinct video on a weighty tome.
I applaud anyone asking hard questions. Maybe a hypothesis is true, or perhaps it is false, but progress is only made when everything is questioned.
When i watched this video i felt shivers, though, it's not cold where i am. I love learning, and this video gave me excitement shivers. Sometimes i wish i could be immortal so that i could study every subject and "learn everything." I just want to thank you for the joy this video has brought to my day.
A similar biology/maths cross-disciplinary book is Schroedinger's What Is Life, where he uses mathematical principles to theorise what the molecular structure of genetic material might be (ie what was later discovered to be DNA). Truly mind-bending to see how much of the complexity of life can be explained by mathematical rules!
If they are going to take pages out what's stopping them putting pages in...
This is one man's life work!
I remember we learned about this book as an example of how arguments from analogy can be very appealing while being flawed
Thank you for your very helpful summary of Thompson's important ideas as well as his limitations. I look forward to assimilating your other efforts.
Yup, immediately knew which one the Tibees was talkin' about, before the title was revealed. It just had to be the one : that stands out like a mountain, few people have ever climbed. I tried, but it grew kinda dense on me. But, someday i'll tackle it again.
Yup, that's the big-head yup. Yup, yup, yup.
As soon as I saw this book's description, I was immediately appealed to read it completely ... but I'll just cite it
This is a wonderful summary of the work and importance of Thompson’s ideas, but I will add one point that was missed. “On Growth and Form” is a foundational book for the entire field of geometric morphometrics (GM), which applies his ideas in a modern and quantitative framework. If you want to study how an organism changes shape across development or how groups of organisms have evolved anatomical differences, GM is a critical tool to visualize, quantify, and test for the significance of differences in shape. For modern evolutionary anatomists, this is equivalent in importance as Darwin’s or Mendel’s ideas to biology more widely. This is my own research field, so I’m excited to see more people talking about this book!
Awesome. Please write a book on this topic so that people like me, who are not mathematicians , can also dwell in the joy of this knowledge of geometric morphometrics.
The same can be said for primer and PCR references
No one reads the basis for the 16S and COI gene primers classical papers, and I know they don't because it's nearly impossible to find them. Nevertheless, they each gather more than 10k citations
That's going to be a problem if your departmental librarian throws out anything that's more than ten years old. A book more than 100 years old would have been binned in the 1980's or 90's and only get back in if it was republished in paperback.
@@faithlesshound5621 that's not even the problem
Those references are from the early 90's, but not preserved in accessible PDF's for some reason
That`s because you are expected to cite the original work and not work that has built on it. In most cases, there is absolutely no need to read those old papers and books. Knowedge has advanced much further in biology. In Physics, there are old papers that are still relevant and worth reading, but not so much in Biology. Not many biologists today have read Darwin`s "on the origin of species" and they don`t have to. We have a much better understanding of Evolution today.
Some of the stuff has become common knowledge and you don´t really have to city stuff that is common knowledge anymore, but some people still do.
Oh, as a Classicist I _love_ D'Arcy Thompson. I have a copy of his _Glossary of Greek Birds,_ a book sought after among Classicists. A man with many a string to his bow!
Wow I'm going to buy that book. I started out as a biology major and then became a physics major. This book is fantastic! 😁
W major to L major
It's online as free pdf.
I started as a physics major and now I'm a biology major!!!!
@@uIteriormotivesL major to W major
I love how I already know what book the title is refering to.
This is such a well produced video. A lot of comments about the book but the editing really makes this very captivating, there's really challenging ideas being illustrated here
Surprise encounter of hexagons being bestagons! CGP Grey would be proud.
Thank you so much for the overview of the book and the history. Deeply insightful.
I think the main takeaway from this is that enduring structures, be they bioogical or not, are enduring precisely because they take a form that minimizes internal stress.
I've noticed this too during a short stint studying Crystalography - their structures and defects follow many of the same rules living tissue does. Atomic interactions favour certain structures' longevity, which in turn favour certain celular structures' longevity and so on...
the scope of the book is so large that I'm not surprised that it gets cited a lot.
A lot of people working on a lot of different things can find something relevant in there for them to cite.
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
Love the book , my brother gave me a copy for giving a helping hand with his architecture finals. Fascinating would be my one word summation .
For some reason, I did not expect this to be a book I had.
Remember, when someone asks you for a source, slap them.
_harder_
A wonderful introduction (and invitation) to this book.
Man imagine if D’Arcy knew calculus. Vector field transformation and optimization functions would have blown his mind.
I disagree; such prospects are more linguistic than meaty. I'm a maths major for reference.
on the minds that were inspired, we can count also mandelbrot, who pushed the study of patterns even further and now has numerous citations on his own.
4:09 another reason why hexagons are the bestagons
The only two reasons that matter are "credentialism" and "publish or perish". Every year academia cranks out an ever greater number of people whose entire careers, such as they are, depend on publishing an ever growing number of articles that must meet an ever growing demand for citation and influence. The natural result of this is the extraordinary inflation of bibliographies and publication from a means to an end unto themselves. Even a short paper from a student these days isn't accepted unless it's got dozens to hundreds of "citations". Journals have gone from repositories of scientific practice and investigation results to a culture of circular citations designed to prop up each others' careers while also manufacturing and enforcing ideological orthodoxy. This is why it's trivial to publish even outright word salad so long as it superficially sounds like it's making the right political genuflections.
I love this video. I love this channel. I really like your first channel, but I absolutely love this one.
2:15 how those pictures were taken in 1917? Films were not very sensitive at that time to capture so short moments. Probably a very bright light source like nitrocellulose, magnesium, aluminium powder, or even an arc lamp, i bet on the latest as you would not need to sync the flash.
i initially wondered if the "hate to read" aspect would be due to Thompson's style of writing. Say, if he wrote like James Hutton.
To me base on the video, his works seems more math/physics focus than a biologist may like
Book is called "On Growth and Form"
As a software developer I want to challenge the notion that we can now simulate all these ideas and find out if they are correct. That is of course true from a purely computational resource stand point but writing this kind of code requires serious programming skill in addition to a strong intuitive understanding of both math and physics, a combination that is very difficult to find.
I get suspicious when simulations are used to confirm notions that have many unknowns. I also think that while it is normal to just buy super computer time, why aren't we using actual slime molds to solve problems rather than using simulations of slime molds? Which process is more sustainable? I know how to recycle a slime mold. I don't know where I can ethically recycle a cluster of super computers.
@@Kitsaplorax you don’t have to recycle a digital simulation.
@@vast9467 Computers aren't recycled-they end up burned in dumps overseas for their metals. That's the reality.
Slime molds don't use electricity. The trade off is time for energy and non-renewable resources.
where did you the get pig to human illustration from?
Your description reminded me of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), which also urged to look beyond pure survival of the fittest as the reason for evolution.
Simply beautiful... thanks for the effort put in making this video...
Figure 76 at 1:28 got that fade going
I’m a biologist, never heard of this book. EO Wilson was who was cited EVERYWHERE (& rightly so) when I was at university.
In biology and medicine there are something like 5000 to 10000 papers published every day. 10,000 citations is therefore not "a lot" and undermines the whole thesis.
Excellent videography and script. One critique is the *clicks* from the audio can be somewhat distracting.
i swear you just seem to create the most interesting vidoes. i was just watching the thumbnail and i was like this seems very interesting, not even looking at who posted the video and then i looked at it and it's you! im not surprised (in a good way!!!) lol
In Kabbalah, there is an understanding that there are 4 realms of "intelligence of life". The first level is that of the mineral or basic elements; it is responsible for structure. Next is plant, plant introduces the "intelligence" of growth and reproduction; the simplest plant would be plankton as it gathers nutrition from minerals and uses sunlight to produce it's food. Growth and reproduction allows for the "intelligence" of structure to undergo various iterations for maximum benefit to further growth and reproduction. Next is animal, and it adds a level of mobility and emotion to the "intelligence" of structure, growth, and reproduction. Emotion and mobility adds a level of psychosocial influence to the "intelligence" of growth and reproduction as seen in mammalian proto-social hierarchies and migration influencing the next generation. Humans possess the 4th level of "intelligence" in the form of metacognitive awareness of structure, growth, reproduction, mobility, and emotion to make meaningful, voluntary changes to the world.
This is the most interesting thing I've ever heard about biology.
Imagine this same application in regard to building from Quantum fluidic states to these higher level states
I remember finding this book in my college biology library. Constraints of material properties allow for amazing structures with very economical instructions. I love how you are branching out in content. Too bad we don’t have Darwin’s transcripts.
I was just expecting it to be “biologists got info from somewhere but forgot where they got it from so they cited a random commonly cited book.” Guess I’m the only one.
A beautiful video. As always. Thank You, Tibees!
TLDW: the book is "On Growth and Form, by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson"
As someone from from physics and pure math background, this looks like a great book to crack into the biology of living organisms without the boring rote learning.
definitely changed my framework on "why should I need physics for a biology degree"
the book would probably be a great resource for 3d artists
I love the cities skylines sounding music, with the french horn and the flute lol. What's the title?
A first edition of this will retail for about $2000
Never read it, but never cited it either. It does look like a fascinating book.
I see Araki was also inspired by this book.
What actual Biologist cites Ernst Haeckel? Please!
What "actual" biologist cites Dawin? Most cited doesn't mean the best, Karl Marx is the most cited author on economics. They get cited a lot because they introduce the themes in a way that understandable to the layman, while maybe lacking for people who dedicated their lives to the subject.
@@emmastrange5557 You don't cite an author for stuff that is no longer science ... Marx is still relevant to Economics.
So, is it just Tibees*s or is it supposed to be Tibees * Tibees? This is important
Well... I would imagine "Tibees" is meant to be interpreted as a single term. Like how if one wrote pi^2 I would interpret that as π^2 and not -p haha
So I guess we're molded by the universe itself. Nice.
23y11y summary D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's influential book "On Growth and Form." Published in 1917, it revolutionized the understanding of biology, mathematics, and the relationship between them.
What makes it special is Thompson's interdisciplinary approach. He explored how mathematical principles and physical forces contribute to the forms and shapes of living organisms. Thompson's work challenged conventional thought by emphasizing the role of physical laws and mathematical patterns in shaping biological structures, such as the spirals in shells or the growth of organisms.
His methodical exploration, blending biology with mathematics and physics, offers a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental principles governing the shapes and structures found in nature. The book's timeless relevance lies in its ability to bridge the gap between seemingly unrelated disciplines and inspire new perspectives on the interconnectedness of life, form, and scientific principles.
Everything formed from clouds. They can look like anything.
Thanks for showing contents of this beautiful book 📖
What interesting ideas. I love these kinds of videos.
Thank you, im going to read this book for sure.
I have a PhD in biology and doubled majored in biology and math and somehow I've never heard of this lol
hexagons are bestagons
that math is witnessed in everything goes back thousands of years, so, no it wasnt ground breaking
awesome vid! thanks for introducing me to this work
(tibees)(tibees)
To think the author came up with these thoughts before the chaos theory. I am guessing it lead to inspire that theory.
Just another example of scholastic dishonesty that is tolerated by educational institutions, lazy Professors and even lazier Peer Review groups. An example...the vast majority of papers presented on Decompression Theory or Diving cite Paul Bert's "La pression barometrique" but few have actually read it. It is unfortunately common for people to populate a paper with citations that they haven't actually read that deal with commonly held notions, laws or principles just for appearances.
Practice yourself, for heavens sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.
How do you know they haven’t read it?
That’s purely your speculation.
Sounds like Chaos Theory and Fractals
793 pages. Interesting, 12th star number.
I guess he was right in one aspect. Fractals are found everywhere in nature due to their physical property.
I’ve never heard of that book and I studied biology in undergrad 🤔 I’ll check it out
Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.
My takeaway is that evolution seems to function within a set of rules, some of which we can glimpse through a mathematical lens. I always thought of it as mostly chemistry in various forms, but nothing exists in a vacuum. Chemistry is maths as well.
The fun thing about outdated famous works is that they are very cool and interesting in both their discriptions and illustrations. Then you reach the part that insinuates that flowers look vaguely like water drop splashes because of surface tension. You then give thanks to modern education.
At 5:51 I started getting sleeeeepy. Verrrry sleeeeepy.
It's a beautiful story!
Seems odd that someone focused on physical principles would be adversarial to the darwinist approach. It seems intuitive that fitness would often follow suit with given situational physical situations. If there is an efficient physical shape or process, it stands to reason that natural selection would tend towards that path. or the other way around, chicken or the egg. Seems like bedfellow principles.
Maybe it was more a discursive technique to shift focus to another angle in a field galvanized in a different way.
Wiki advises "On Growth and Form explained in detail why he believed Darwinism to be an inadequate explanation for the origin of new species. He did not reject natural selection, but regarded it as secondary to physical influences on biological form."
I have read this book but it is just abit dated
Just because something is cited does not mean its citing publication supports it. It's usually just citing historical advances. In fact I would bet most of those actually cite is as part of an introduction, how the field has evolved, for posterity purposes, for criticism, etc. That's done literally all the time. Yet you act as if all those citations actually are trying to support it.
Very interesting insights! scientist 🧪 back then are so amazing. They pushed the boundaries and dogma back then
Another underrated biology book about neuroscience is the Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
Varela and Maturana are under appreciated. So is Mauss, whose work "The Gift" is fundamental to understanding societies. Mauss researched and wrote this after his experiences in WWI. Context matters a lot in scientific research and writing.
Thank you both. Had not heard of Maus.
Francisco Valera is such a legend.
ohmygod yes
Being a Chilean Biologist myself, I truly consider the work of Maturana and Varela as groundbreaking. However, I've never liked their writing style. They wrote more like philosophers than like biologists, too wordy and not necessarily clear.
Thanks for bringing this book out into modern daylight. Ernst Haeckel. "Art Forms of Nature" is a sort of precursor, though Haeckel wrote decades before. I've had Haeckel on my shelf for decades. It is sobering to realize that all authors in any field of study will have holes poked into their ideas in a half century or less.
This is about how Lamarck prepared us for a An Infinite Future of Genetic Engineering, and you all sociopathically threw our futures ("our brains") in the garbage disposal when you sided with D'Arcy Thompson.
Darwin was "unique" because he resorted to becoming a reformist of CHRISTIANITY (he was super Xtian and tried to do his work within the paradigm of Xtianity) due to him being fed up with the post-M** Carta strife -- which eventually killed him -- yes, he DEFINITELY died from being drowned in the Suffocating atmosphere of that "world" JUST to be able to convince himself that he'd made a coherent statement Once In His Life which might Actually Reach Anyone Else Whom He Would Have Considered Human. In other words, he was too scared to be a detective, but he dreamed of being "more than a" victim of the M** Carta.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was, specifically, an anti-Lamarckist. He pioneered the irritating way which most "scientists" nowadays seem to claim that every [new] aspect of Phenotype exists for a "utilitarian 'Purpose' [for which Each Aspect of Phenotype was ostensibly '*PRE-destined*' to take the form of Something Which Is Being Integrated Into The Phenotype of an Organism throughout any portion of its mortal life, in order to 'task the organism with' being occupied with 'self-awareness', in That regard, for the duration of the organism's lifespan']".
In other words, the M** Carta ruined the world, and Thompson shouldn't have been taught how to read. He wanted "to leave some footprints behind after he died". To be honest, Lamarck was the last guy who ever stood up for me.
Postulate, and iterate! Communicate, and collaborate! Some scientists are like Bernoulli's family arguing like wild dogs, others like Euler quiet and dimure. It takes all types to address every angle of a problem.
Edit this: This is about how Lamarck prepared us for a An Infinite Future of Genetic Engineering, and you all sociopathically threw our futures ("our brains") in the garbage disposal when you sided with D'Arcy Thompson.
Darwin was "unique" because he resorted to becoming a reformist of CHRISTIANITY (he was super Xtian and tried to do his work within the paradigm of Xtianity) due to him being fed up with the post-M** Carta strife -- which eventually killed him -- yes, he DEFINITELY died from being drowned in the Suffocating atmosphere of that "world" JUST to be able to convince himself that he'd made a coherent statement Once In His Life which might Actually Reach Anyone Else Whom He Would Have Considered Human. In other words, he was too scared to be a detective, but he dreamed of being "more than a" victim of the M** Carta.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was, specifically, an anti-Lamarckist. He pioneered the irritating way which most "scientists" nowadays seem to claim that every [new] aspect of Phenotype exists for a "utilitarian 'Purpose' [for which Each Aspect of Phenotype was ostensibly '*PRE-destined*' to take the form of Something Which Is Being Integrated Into The Phenotype of an Organism throughout any portion of its mortal life, in order to 'task the organism with' being occupied with 'self-awareness', in That regard, for the duration of the organism's lifespan']".
In other words, the M** Carta ruined the world, and Thompson shouldn't have been taught how to read. He wanted "to leave some footprints behind after he died". To be honest, Lamarck was the last guy who ever stood up for me. @@Leadvest
@@seanrowshandel1680 Rock on dude, Lamarck's idea of applying erosion to biology is very creative. Funny that he and Mendel were both alive during the 1820s.
I have heard people talk about biology that way, but I've also heard people on several occasions describe biological processes as successful rather than efficient. The old blood will eventually run as thin as it is cold, just give it time.
@@seanrowshandel1680why are you censoring Magna Carta? This whole thing sounds downright deranged.
This is a splendid short exposition of Thomson's work. He did have contemporaries. A notable one was "The Curves of Life" by Theodore Andrea Cooke published in 1914.
This to me is the best kind of science/philosophy (in the rudimentary observe and hypothesize that lays the foundations)- that which gives you new, useful frameworks to think about things.
The particulars may not always be correct, but it at least points to the questions to ask.
Science (in the Western world, at least) derives from what was called "Natural Philosophy". I am interested in the intersection of philosophy and science (in this case, neuroscience) based on the works of Maurice Merleau-Pony, particularly Phenomenology of Perception (his magnum opus).
Was not expecting to see the mini biography of my dissertation advisor (Dr. Arkhat Abzhanov) in the first minute of the video, but I am excited to see someone else appreciating this foundational text for quantitative studies of anatomy, ontogeny, and evolution!
Thank you for this beautifully-formed trip down memory lane.
My father, who was a medical consultant, introduced me to this book when I was in my teens. He would have loved the possibilities offered by computer modelling of these ideas.
I hadn't thought of it in decades but now I have to go and find a digital copy...
It is in print right now via Dover Books.
@@cbooth2004 thanks for that!
I actually found several versions on Kindle, but if anyone else is interested, watch out for dud versions, check the number of pages. I picked one that's the original 1917 edition, and despite being really cheap, all 1000+ pages seem present and correct - including diagrams and hyperlinked footnotes - so all credit to the publisher.
As a physics grad student, this book made me interested more in biology.
Biology gaaaaaaang
Nice video! You might be interested to know that there are tons of books like this in the social sciences/humanities. You will find authors like Geertz, Foucault, Derrida, and so many others referenced countless times, but most citing scholars will only give it a cursory read, as there's simply not enough time to do a deep-dive into their work.
I've read Foucault. The only thing I garnered was the man had an unhealthy obsession with prisons.
It's de rigeur to cite one of the "Four French Frauds" if you want to be credible yourself.
Why bother reading? We're all just making shit up anyway. The only thing you learn from other people is what they're thinking. Which often isn't worth learning about.
@@johnopalko5223 Faucault was making a point about society's obsession with prisons and other normative practices.
I refuse to believe that anyone in history has ever actually read all 10 000+ incredibly dull pages of Das Kapital, even Marx died before he finished writing the whole thing, and that’s not even getting started all the other loooong books of Marxist theory that people pretend to have read. Postmodernists also quote Lacan like his words are holy scripture lol
Thanks for the summary, now I too will be able to reference this book without having read it
This is a phenomenal treatise, with some magnificent illustrations. I can see why this book took 30 years to write. Thanks for shining a light on this, cheers Tibees!~
I remember seeing that diagram of the fish; warped, stretched, and scaled; in a book about biology I had as a kid called "The Way Life Works"