David Parrish Makes Science Interesting

David Parrish loves biology and science, and he wants you to love it too. In “The Gyroscope of Life: Understanding Balances (and Imbalances) in Nature,” Parrish explores the scientific murkiness of concepts that we often consider to be binary – dead or alive? Male or female? Plant or Animal? And perhaps most controversial – science or religion? Parrish also lays out a biological timeline of life on earth, plus what he considers to be Mother Nature’s “House Rules” for survival. In brief – Adapt, keep it together and reproduce.

Running through it all is the story off a boy who grew up steeped in religion, and became a man who loved science, and sees the good in both. If all scientists were as good at storytelling (i.e. conveying scientific principles in an accessible way) as David Parrish, I think we might see a lot less anti-science bias in our public discourse today,

The insight that really sticks with me is the idea that the scientific method can’t actually “prove” a definite cause for an observed phenomenon – it can eliminate hypotheses, or demonstrate that a hypothesis is true under the experimental circumstances, but that is never enough to prove that the matter is settled. True scientists know this, and in a strange way it makes me trust science more.