The two languages of science

Abstract

If we allow ourselves the license of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do?"-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: p. 88 "I've made agents out of system 1 and system 2 because everybody finds it easier to think about agentswith propensities and traitsthan about abstract categories.Agents make powerful subjects because they're active and they do things."-DanielKahneman, personal communication In no small part, the amazing success of modern science in learning about our world is rooted in its rigorous structure: scientists clearly lay out assumptions, design conclusive experiments with the appropriate controls, and use statistical methods to assess our confidence in the results.These processes form the core of what Francois Jacob called day science [1,2].To utilize these strengths, we speak in a highly precise and metaphor-free language when we describe our work in manuscripts and at conferences.Acquiring this language is an important part of our formal training as day scientists.But there is an equally important second language of science, which is rarely taught explicitly and often overlooked.This is the language of night science-the creative part of our work, where we come up with the first, hazy versions of the very ideas to be tested by day science [1,2].In night science, insistence on precision becomes a hindrance, while metaphors and anthropomorphizing-the personification of nonhuman objects such as cells, proteins, and genes-impart us with powerful intuitions about the unknowns we explore.Once we have identified an idea in our night science explorations, we can translate it into respectable day science language, so that an experiment can be designed and executed using the rigorous day science tools at our disposal.To avoid misunderstandings, the distinct language of night science must be clearly labeled when we speak.But developing it as a complement to the formal day science language is an important step in our development as a creative scientist.Do not anthropomorphize genes, they do not like it "We are survival machinesrobot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" [3].When it was first written down in the preface to

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