Science Friday - How Metaphor Shapes Science | Intertwining The Lives Of Moths And Humans Through Music

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Metaphors can help us understand complicated scientific concepts. But they can also have a downside. And, a pair of musicians wrote a concept album inspired by moths—and found that humans have more in common with the insects than they expected.How Metaphor Has Shaped Science, For Better Or WorseHere at Science Friday, we’re big fans of metaphors. They can make complicated scientific concepts easier to understand, for both non-experts and scientists themselves. For example, “the big bang” helps us visualize the beginning of the universe. Or we can understand DNA’s role better as a “building block of life.”But some of these scientific metaphors also have a downside, and can even set research back.Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff are the hosts of the podcast series “The World According to Sound,” and they sat down with Science Friday’s Director of News and Audio, John Dankosky, to talk about their new project, “An Inexact Science.” They discuss a special two-hour episode that explores how language and metaphor have shaped science, for better or worse.Intertwining The Lives Of Moths And Humans Through MusicBefore the pandemic, Peter Kiesewalter didn’t think much of moths. Like a lot of people, he’d thought of them mostly as pests. But when his brother Tobi, an interpretive naturalist for Ontario Parks and moth enthusiast, showed him macro photos he’d taken of them, he was blown away. “[They were] absolutely stunning,” Peter says. “The amount of colors and hair were just extraordinary.”Peter is a Grammy-nominated musician based in New York City. He’s composed music for ABC News, Monday Night Football, and even a “Winnie The Pooh” show. As COVID-19 spread in 2020, work for him and his partner Whitney La Grange, a professional violinist, dried up. So they hunkered down at the family cottage in Ottawa, Canada, along with Tobi’s family. Peter was looking for a new show idea, and when his brother opened up the world of moths to him, he was hooked. “I had to find a way to interpret moths artistically,” he said. “And I started to find connections between them and us.”That led to “The Moth Project,” a concept album and stage show that combines moth science and visuals with a whole ecosystem of musical genres: 80s pop, funk, classical, covers, even spoken word. Each song ties a stage of a moth’s life (emergence, flight, migration) to a universal human experience. But for Peter, a lot of these songs turned out to be far more personal than he initially thought.SciFri producer and host of our Universe of Art podcast D Peterschmidt sat down with Peter and Tobi Kiesewalter and Whitney La Grange to find out how this album came together and how understanding moths could better help us understand ourselves.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

What happened when a pair of musicians decided to make a concept album about moths? It sounded really weird to me, but the more I looked at these incredible creatures, I just was blown away. It's Tuesday, October 22nd, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Deep Peter Schmidt. You might not have thought about it before, but humans, in a sense, go through a lot of the same stages of life that moths do. Migration, emergence, emulation. Well, a pair of musicians discovered these connections during lockdown in 2020 and created the Moth Project, a concept album and stage show that combines songs of a whole ecosystem of genres, including 80s pop, funk, and classical.

And they learned that we have a lot more in common with moths than you might think. We'll have that story a bit later, but first here's Science Fridays, Kathleen Davis and John Dinkowski talking about how metaphors can help and hurt understanding of science. Here at SciFri, we're big fans of metaphors. They can help make complicated science concepts easier to understand, both for the public and for scientists themselves. Take, for example, the Big Bang. That helps us visualize the beginning of the universe. Or we can understand amino acids as the building blocks of proteins. But as our next guests have shown, these scientific metaphors can also have a dark side, and they can even set research back.

Sam Hartnett and Chris Hoff are the hosts of the podcast. series, The World According to Sound. And they're here to tell us about their new project, an inexact science. It's a special two-hour episode that explores how language and metaphor have shaped science, for better or for worse. Here's Cy Fris John Dankosky. Sam Hartnett and Chris Hoff. Welcome back to Science Friday. Good to have you guys here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, nice to be here. Okay, so first of all, why did you want to do a series about language in science history? I mean, what gave you this idea? Yeah, I think it's, It's a, what appealed to me is that a metaphor seems on its surface like the most unscientific thing, right?

I mean, when you hear metaphor, you think about poetry. And it's by nature kind of an imprecise way of expressing things. But when you look back at the history of science, metaphors are integral to some of the biggest discoveries, to even doing basic science. And I think in a bigger sense, metaphor is a window into how social and cultural forces shape science, everything from what we think science is. to how it should be done, to who can do science, is shaped by social and cultural forces. And that's really evident when you start looking at the metaphors we use in science. It's interesting, too, because I think especially around election years, we think about metaphor in the context of trying to sway people's opinion and something that's used in politics an

awful lot. But I think in science, you've got to sell your ideas too. And I think metaphor is kind of come in handy there. Right. But the more that we looked at the history of science, the more that you see that metaphor is essential to the theories themselves. And I think evolution is a great example. I thought of Darwin really as this like this, you know, hyper-rational scientists who gather all this data and then came up with this theory. But in reality, he didn't have enough data to conclusively prove his idea. So what he had to do is to craft a story. And so he had all of these data points and then he crafted a story and he used metaphor to craft that story. He labored over which metaphors to use. If you look at his journals, you know, they change many times.

And things like natural selection or the tree of life or the tangled bank. I mean, these are essential to the theory itself. Yeah, and I also just would add that like the sheer complexity of so much that's going on in science. Like if you look at, say, a black hole, unless you're in a super advanced mathematician, there's really no way to make sense of a thing like that. And so you have to use this kind of language that does make sense to our everyday lives. And that's what a metaphor is. It's just a way to take this really complex.

idea or phenomenon and put it in language that makes sense to us. Okay, so I'd like to get to one of the words that you, did you look at? It's the word cell. Okay, so some of us might remember from middle school biology that there's a 17th century scientist named Robert Hook, and he gave us the name cell, and it was inspired, I guess, by the rooms of a monastery, the place where monks lived, which are also called cells. But there's like more to this story here, right? Yeah, the cell one is interesting because it's the first person to sort of observe them under a microscope, this guy, Robert Hook, and they destructurally looked like a room with four walls, like this four-walled thing. And so he said, okay, I'll call that a cell. Of course, over time,

we find out more and more and people keep building off this idea, like this guy after him, Franz Unger, he starts calling them building blocks. But like all of these words, they're really inaccurate. Like a cell is not at all like a room. It doesn't function at all like a building block. these things are fluid, like things can move in and out of them. Like, it's just actually totally wrong. Like, the metaphor is wrong. And that's a really good example of sort of a metaphor actually kind of blocking advancement, blocking progress, because we're thinking about them in this term that it just is not at all. And so that's like a, yeah, it's a good example of an inaccurate metaphor actually hindering scientific progress. I'd also add that there's this whole

history of personifying the cell, which again comes from this idea of it as an individual unit, eventually cells got to be thought of kind of as like miniature organisms. And they got sort of ascribe personality as if they were actually the same as an animal. And in a similar way, kind of block the idea that, you know, that they functioned together and collectively. I think one of the things that I'm so fascinated by is the idea that the metaphor turns out to be completely wrong. It's not a cell at all. But yet the word persists for hundreds of years. We're probably always going to be talking about cells. So, why is it so persistent despite its inaccuracy?

I think it's two things. One, I think it's a good cautionary tale. A lot of these metaphors, they can be misleading in terms of research, but they could also have social and cultural biases that have a big effect on what people study and why. But the second thing I'd add is also it points to the importance of just interrogating the metaphors all the time. I mean, you can't do science without metaphors.

As Chris was saying, you can't really conceive of a black hole without a metaphor. We need them. And so the story of cell is a indicator that we should constantly be thinking about these metaphors. Are they apt? Are they not accurate anymore? Do they have biases in them? You actually tell a different story about brain cells called Glea. Let's take a listen. Once Glea were recognized as important agents in the nervous system, the metaphor shifted again to masculine ones. Construction supervisors, architects, board members, creators and defenders. Brain wardens, Lord of Central Nervous System Development, one cell to rule them all.

I like one cell to rule them all. So tell us more of that story. Sure. So this is based on a wonderful essay by two academics, Meg Upchurch and Simona Fitova. And what they do is they trace the evolution of different metaphors used to describe glia. And glia are cells in the brain like neurons. And at the start, glia were thought of to be nothing more than sort of packing material. And so the first metaphors were, you know, packing material or waste or sponge-like cells. But then they realized, oh, these glia are actually kind of doing something. They seem to be helping the neurons. And the neurons were cast as like the stars of the show.

And so the neurons got the male metaphors. You know, they were the actors and the stars. And the glia then were given more female-coded metaphors. You know, they were thought of as nursing the neurons. neurons or cleaning up after them. They were cleaning the house, right? Caregivers. Yeah, caregivers. And then as they found out more, they realized, actually, these gleea are really important, and actually they're really diverse. And at that moment, that's when the metaphors shifted back to male metaphors. And as you just heard, they sort of then got these masculine metaphors. So in the

story, you hear like inherent sexism. But then also a lot of these metaphors that were years of certain periods of time, again, kind of they dismissed the glia and researchers who were sort of disincentivized from working on this unglamorous, you know, caregiver or attendant cell as opposed to the star of the show, the neuron. Chris, I guess I'm wondering if there are some examples of some metaphor that you have learned that really had positive outcomes for science, where the metaphor itself really, really helped us understand something a bit better. Yeah, that's a good question. I have a good sort of negative example of that, but you can kind of flip it and see where the positive would be. I think that we did a short little story about how we often talk about diseases and specifically cancer or AIDS or something that's really kind of horrendous and bad.

And metaphors we almost always use around that are like basically war and fighting metaphors, right? like we are battling cancer. I lost my battle with cancer. We have to fight COVID. We're on the front lines on the battle against HIV. But if, I mean, there's no logical reason why we have to talk about them that way. And in fact, if you talked about them in a totally different way, there's a lot of actually science that gets that that you get more positive results. So if you talked about it is more of like, oh, I'm I'm cohabitating with cancer or I'm living with this thing. Like, in the end, you know, my body produced this thing. So why should I be sort of rebelling against it? I should just be living with it. And so you could see if you actually change your viewpoint on the metaphors that you use. There are, there's actual results where people are getting just better outcomes as a result. Now, I would, I would add, you know, there's a story of evolution, which I think evolution would not exist without the metaphors it's based on. I mean, that's a big part of Darwin's work. But one metaphor that we came across that I really liked was the metaphor of quilting. And there's a professor who used quilting as a metaphor to describe the process of science, of doing science, was like stitching together a quilt. And she wrote this essay about quilting as a metaphor as a counterpoint to a lot of the aggressive masculine metaphors that dominate the way we think about science. You know, science is about discovery and conquering and a lot of things that are coded as masculine. And she wrote this beautiful essay just recasting all science as quilting.

And it shows the power again of if you change the metaphor, it sort of changes the whole nature of how you understand something. Suddenly, science is, it's collaborative, it's painstaking. It's, it's this act of, like, putting together all these different scraps of fabric into something new. It's not this, like, individually led conquest. So the idea that one little work is sort of changed the whole way we think about things. And that's, this is not to do science, but it's how we think about science. I guess at the end of all this, did, did you come away with a couple of, I don't know, best practices? Because there's a lot of people who are involved in science and the sciences who listen to this program and probably are listening to this thinking, hmm, no, there might be a better way to use language in the work that I do that could, I don't know, help people understand it, help me sell what I'm trying to do.

What are some takeaways that maybe you have for the scientific community from what you learned? Yeah, I think the first major one would just be to really interrogate every sort of word choice that you're using, especially when you're communicating your work. you know, if you're talking about disease again and you're using battling and war metaphors, like you could just think about that and think about the effect that it could have on the reader and just think about also how it's influencing your own thought about your own work. And I would add that, you know, there is this perception that science is somehow hyper rational and objective in a way that's very distant from other work in academia that's distant from the humanities and social science. And if you look at the history of science, there's actually a lot of

overlap, it's more of a thing to embrace, you know, to think about the ways in which science is not totally precise and objective and rational. And in thinking about that, you will, A, recognize times when you make mistakes, but B, I think there's more things to investigate when you think that way. And it's something we've covered in the past in the program, but maybe it's not such a bad idea for scientists to, I don't know, take a poetry course now and again. Right. Exactly. Sam Hartnett, Chris Hoff, they're co-producers of the podcast, The World According to Sound. Sam and Chris, as always, great to talk to you guys. Thanks so much for bringing us these stories.

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having us. Emergence, flight, migration, immolation. If you're a fan of moths, you'll recognize these words as important stages in their lives. But as a pair of musicians discovered during lockdown in 2020, they can also apply to us too. So they created The Moth Project, a concept album and stage show that combines songs of a whole ecosystem of genres. 80s pop, funk, classical, covers, and even spoken word, combined with stunning photos and videos of these creatures. And they learn that we have a lot more in common with moths than you might think.

SciFri producer and host of our podcast, Universe of Art, D. Peter Schmidt, sat down with them and has that story. In 2020, Peter Kieselalter was at a small family cottage in Ottawa, Canada, taking in the summer night with his brother Toby. I'd been watching Toby while I was down at the campfire making another gin and tonic, and watching these moths flutter around. I remember one night saying to him, what's that about? Why do they go to the light? Why do they go to the flame? And the first night I saw images from his camera, I was blown away. In the last few years, I've really been turned on to moths. Toby is a park ranger, an interpretive naturalist for Ontario parks, and he'd been getting into mothing, which is like birding, but for moths.

He learned how to photograph them and showed Peter some of his pictures. It was absolutely stunning to see when you zoom in on them, they look like shag carpeting, the amount of hair and colors were just extraordinary. Peter's a musician based in New York City. He's a Grammy-nominated artist, and he's composed music for ABC News, Monday Night Football, even Winnie the Pooh show. In spring 2020, he was about to go on tour with another musician, but that fell through when COVID rolled around.

So he went up to the cottage in Canada with his family. What's this one? Holy smokes. That year, we were all trying to find ways to deal with our anxieties. Some people got really into sourdough bread. Peter got obsessed with moths. Oh, hello, you. That's a big one.

and that one that looks like a leaf, it's not a leaf. You got to remember, I'm also a product of where I live, and in Western civilization, they get a bad rap. You know, moths are known as the critters that eat your clothes and have deforested great swaths of forest around the world. So I really didn't know anything about them until I started to think of my own situation, or what can I create a show about?

And Toby had a book recommendation for Peter, grading sweetgrass by Robin Woodrow. Wal Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation. And she brings those two perspectives together into a celebration of the natural world around us. That book helped him see Moths in a new way. You know, in some indigenous cultures, they're casting a completely different light than what we see them as. And in some cultures, they're viewed as guardians of dream time, which is a really cool and beautiful way of looking at them as opposed to, like in the Bible or any reference in Shakespeare,

always casts them as harbingers of death and destruction. One of the book's central questions is, what can you give the earth and return for all the earth gives you? This at Peter Hart at that point in the pandemic. And she says, if you're an artist, create transformative works of art. And that was my epiphany reading that, saying, aha, I can do that.

I can create something to pay back the earth. I saw a similarity between these moths and my own life. I saw residents also in this whole thing to the flame. I thought, well, I'm kind of like that. And I'm kind of drawn to things that might be harmful to me. I think my parents often thought that I was a bit reckless with the way I lived my life not really knowing months to month or year to year, how I was going to pay the rent and raise a family.

But in starting this, I realized this is not going to pay the rent for a few years. but nevertheless, here I go. His partner, Whitney LaGrange, is also a musician. She's a violinist who plays regularly in Broadway orchestras and with artists like Billy Joel and Smokey Robinson. But when Peter told her he wanted to make a concept album about moths and that he wanted her to play on it, she had a different reaction. I just said, what?

It sounded really weird to me, but the more I looked at these incredible creatures, I just was blown away. I went from what to wow. This is awesome. So I had to find a way to interpret moths artistically, and I started to find connections between them and us. Those connections became the track titles on the album,

basically taking a stage of the moth's life and relating it to a human experience. The universal themes of, migration, life, death, and especially metamorphosis and transformation. So I started to write some tunes, but also given the sheer diversity of moths, and there are a lot of them, I wanted the music to reflect that. Here's one of the first tracks on the album. It's a fokey song called Migration. Some moths make these very perilous migratory journeys. You know, most of them probably don't make it.

There's this one moth called the Death's Head Hock Moth. It's the same one from Silence of the Lambs. And every year, it travels over 2,000 miles from Europe to Africa to have its offspring. I saw some parallel story there with my parents. Peter's parents were born in Germany, and they both grew up during World War II. He told me they had some harrowing experiences. By the end of the war, his dad was 10, and his mom was 6. In the late 1950s, they met while working at a shop in Cologne.

and got married, but they wanted to leave the country. A lot of people were getting out of Germany because, I mean, it was pretty decimated. So, they emigrated to Canada and had kids. Some of their family came with them from Germany, but Peter's maternal grandfather, a science teacher, he didn't make it out of the war. Her only memory of her father is of him pointing out the big dipper to her when she's a little kid. And this cottage, when we stand on our dock, It's literally right in front of us, the big dipper, during the summer months.

It's believed that moths use the stars to navigate at night, which is when they're active for the most part, right? Scientists believe moths are able to make these long journeys with the help of the moon and the stars. Actually, the reason they circle lights at night is likely because they incorrectly assume it's a celestial object. High-speed footage shows moths constantly adjusting to keep their backs to an artificial light source,

just as if it were flying horizontally in relation to the moon and stars. So it felt like my mom had also been navigated to this place by the Big Dipper, because there it is. And every night, she comes down to the dock. She says the same thing. Look, Peter, the Big Dipper. As you might know, moths have a similar life cycle to butterflies. They hatch, they grow into a caterpillar, and they try to survive until they can spin a cocoon for its metamorphosis. Inside the cocoon, they turn into a kind of soup, their bodies break down, and then they emerge transformed.

the coming out of these winged adults in these fabulous, incredible colors after trying to stay hidden for the bulk of their life, just felt like, ah, there's something here. Because, you know, when I think of moths coming out of their cocoons, my mind goes to 80s pop, obviously. It's out on a hard drive for 10 years, and I pulled it out and revamped it, and I just felt it led itself to the word emergence. You know, I've been shut away in this cocoon a long time. This feeling, this force, it's got a lot of power. And it makes me feel like, it makes me feel like, I love emergence, it's just dancing. It's just filled with life.

It seemed to me I was writing sort of a coming out anthem, but it really had a very universal thing of, well, at some point in life, aren't we all trying to annihilate ourselves and emerge as a new human being? The Moth Project also helped Peter re-contextualize some difficult experiences in his life. He reworked another unreleased song called In My Dream that he produced with a Canadian musician years back. She wrote the main song in lyrics, and with her permission, he added this autobiographical section at the top.

Some indigenous cultures believe that moths are the guides of dream time. That you should pay attention if a moth visits you in your dream. In 1990, Peter and Toby's brother passed away after living with cancer for three years. And that for a few years after his death, I had the same dream every single night for two years. And while I was not having a dream about a moss, I was having the exact same dream about my brother every night. It's autumn. We're walking with his dog, and no one is missing. So that song sort of frames that experience for me. I still cry, like sometimes while we're playing it because it's very, very moving piece.

And it just shifts into what really does feel like a dream state. It's really beautiful. In late 2022, Toby was invited to speak at a conference for interpretive naturalists to talk about why interpreters and scientists should collaborate more with artists. It is such an honor to be up here in front of you tonight. And he convinced the organizers to have Peter and Whitney perform the Moth Project in full for the first time for a big audience, which they'd finished a few months prior. Projected behind them were Toby's photos, along with macro pictures of moths from other scientists and nature photographers that Peter reached out to.

But even though Peter and Whitney are no strangers when it comes to performing live, there were some pre-show jitters. I was really nervous because I thought, well, We're talking about science. I hope we got it right, Peter. So folks, please welcome from New York City, Whitney LaGrange, Peter Kieselwalter, and The Moth Project. Listen to my stereo. Have the gift of choice. Of gratitude, joy.

Thanks so much. And then when we finished the show, I felt like a rock star. They were like, woo-hoo! They had the standing ovation clappy. just loved it. Afterwards, they came up to us more than a handful in tears. The fact that so many scientists were emotionally moved by it was quite a surprise to me. It made me feel really good, like a stamp of approval.

So that was a great show. I mean, Peter, did you think this would end up being so personal when you started it? No. I was just trying to find ways to sing, write, talk about mom. in a way that meant something to me. And it was slowly, became evident that, actually, I think this show is about our parents and our family. So it revealed itself slowly to me that, yeah, this is quite personal. And I've never done anything quite so personal before.

If you want to catch The Moth Project Live, Peter and Whitney actually have a few performances coming up in Madison, Wisconsin, St. Paul, Minnesota, in Lincoln, Nebraska, from October 24th to 26. You can find out more, listen to the album, and see visuals from the Moth Project at Science Friday.com slash moths. I'm D. Petersburgman. And that's all the time we have for today. A lot of folks help make the show happen, including Annie Niro, Emma Gomez, Charles Bergquist, Danielle Johnson. On tomorrow's episode, we'll dive into new research that shows how the brain changes during

pregnancy. I'm CyFri producer Dee Petersmith. See you then.