LeBron James and Reductionism in Science
A subscriber to this publication asked when I was going to write a piece on LeBron James.
I had no intention of writing a piece on LeBron James in a publication on science. However, I have been told by Very Knowledgable People (VKPs) who understand marketing and growing a readership that it is critical to listen and engage with your audience. The reader / customer is always right even when they clearly didn’t read the fine print on what your publication is actually about. And so by popular demand I cast LeBron James in a one-act play about reductionism in science. Because his fellow superstar Kevin Durant is known as a philosopher baller, I have added him as Socrates to complement ‘Bron’s Simmias.
Source:All-Pro Reels, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
[Scene 1: An extraterrestrial visitor (ET) has arrived on earth. Part of the delegation that greets the visitor includes NBA commission Adam Silver (Silver), Lebron James (‘Bron) and Kevin Durant (KD) to explain to the visitor about Earthlings’ past-times].
ET: “Lo, what is that inert sphere Earthlings (pointing to a basketball)?”
Silver: “That is what we call a basketball.”
ET: “Tell me about this thing you call ‘basketball’.”
AS: “Like other balls it is spherical. It is typically made of leather from an animal’s skin or synthetic leather, which is a product derived from petroleum. This is the exterior layer of the ball. The next layer is made of rubber – again synthetic or naturally derived from the rubber tree. Three lateral strands and one vertical strand of visible rubber segment the ball into patches of roughly equal area. The ball has a hole or more properly a one-way valve that can be missed on casual inspection. A needle can be inserted into this valve and air can be added to the basketball under pressure. Typically, balls are inflated to 7.5 and 8.5 pounds per square inch or around 55 kilopascals and it is the air pressure that gives the basketball its characteristic shape.”
ET: “Fascinating. Go on, go on. My minions are eager for details”.
Silver: “Oh certainly, there is much more to tell about this ball…”
‘Bron: “Um Adam aren’t you going to mention that a ‘basketball’ is used in a game that is also called ‘basketball’? Like what is the ball without the game?”.
KD: “Good point, ‘Bron. You see ET, the word ‘basketball’ is a polyseme. It can mean that spherical object Commiss has been telling you all about. But it is also the name of the game Bronny and I play."
ET: “Do I need to understand that game to understand the object?”
‘Bron: “Oh, yeah. The Commiss is geeking out on you, ET, but the truth is knowing about me and KD will tell you more about basketball than just looking at that object. Those segments of rubber Commiss told you about, that’s not an accident. No, that’s so I can confidently palm the ball, delivering future Hall of Fame assists to my teammates or fake out my defenders with a step back jumper.”
KD: “True, true. I get where King James is going with this one. You see, the ball is exactly half the diameter of the rim. Coincidence, I don’t think so. If it was bigger, I wouldn’t be able to have my ridiculous shooting percentage this season. And if the pressure were more or less, or it was not a perfect sphere, it would be hard to dribble. The pressure and shape of the ball is a Goldilocks solution to the challenge of dribbling the ball down a court. Not too hot, not too cold. Same with the size of the ball and the size of the rim - not too hard to make a shot, not too easy. You can’t understand the ball without understanding the game in which it is embedded.”
ET: “So the ball only makes sense when you consider the game?”
‘Bron: “Exactly!”
KD: “Let’s take another example. See that thing (gesturing to the shot clock above the basketball hoop)? That’s called a shot clock. It counts down from 24 in second intervals - which you may know as 9,192,631,770 transitions of the Caesium-133 atom. You go up there and take that shot clock apart, look at its diodes, its crystal oscillator, its copper wires and you will never understand its purpose. Dissecting that thing, is never going to tell you how it came about.”
ET: “How then do I understand the purpose of a shot clock?”
‘Bron: “Oh, that’s easy. You look at the highlight reels of me and KD, heaving up three pointers with 1 second left on the shot clock to understand its purpose. Its purpose is to keep the game interesting and fast paced, to force athletes like me and KD to come up with the big shot or go home. That’s its purpose.”
KD: “The shot clock harnesses and sustains the thrill of the audience.”
Silver: “And, I might add, the vast dollars that come with the entertainment of the crowd. Let me know if you are interested in broadcast rights on your planet.”
End of Act 1
Ok, I think you get the point. It’s a simple one, but it eluded some of the most famous scientists in history. No less a scientific luminary than the late Nobel-prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg argued in 1994 that we can only seek to explain the big by understanding the small or in his words, “the arrows of explanation point downward”.1 And that’s been the basic perspective since the Enlightenment.
But many people in science today understand that simply isn’t true. No analysis of electrons is ever going to illuminate politics in the Middle East anymore then looking at a basketball is going to explain the cultural cache and brand of Lebron James and Kevin Durant. Even much more simple examples illustrate this phenomena. For instance, the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci gives the example that even the behavior of the humble water molecule is hard to predict from its hydrogen and oxogen components.
Closer to my own subject, biology texts have units on ‘single cell organisms,’ but to paraphrase John Donne, “No cell is an island”. We now realize that even humble bacteria arrange themselves in “biofilms” that exhibit metabolic co-dependence and this matters in practical ways including how we treat bacterial infections and how we address the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Causality in these systems is complicated and explanatory arrows point not just downward. Rather, like a topsy-turvy guide post in a Dr. Suess book, the source of explanation does not always reside in the most elementary constituents even if these constituents predated the emergent phenomena.
I originally read this line in Stuart Kauffman’s article “Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred”. Kauffman’s argument in summary is that even if we knew the positions of every atom for a complex thing and had a computer powerful enough to simulate it all, we still wouldn’t be able to do it as emergent properties of systems are fundamentally not reducible to their parts. As my shot clock analogy shows though, knowing the positions of every atom in an object in probably unhelpful if that object is embedded in a much more complex system.