The presumption of this post is that you are a well-educated person, but an amateur in the scientific field of interest. That would be me in the case of ancient DNA, and what it tells me about my ancestors narrowly, and human history generally.
I’ll assume you have read David Reich’s excellent book—or the equivalent in nutrition, cosmology, or whichever other scientific field interests you. And the same procedures I outline here will apply to Humanities and Social Sciences topics too, such as, What was the nature of the stock market before the Civil War, or, How did banks work before there was a central bank? But that historical rather than scientific inquiry gets a separate post, dedicated to books.google.com
Yah—nobody’s got my precise range of interests.
Of course, you can use Google, Bing or search engine of choice and enter “Yamnaya,” “ketogenic diet,” “Bank wars,” or any other topic of interest. But all you’ll get from those general engine searches is Wikipedia, journalism or the blogosphere equivalent. Search engines link to the most linked, which will always be a journalistic inquiry at a major media site, one or two steps from the underlying science.
You can definitely start there, and the more casual your interest, the more this simple search strategy will work for you. Any scientific topic of broad interest attracts a penumbra of journalistic re-presentation. Try “human evolution news” as a search term in your favorite engine, or even “quasars,” and you’ll see what I mean. Journalists are good at what they do: provide a 5 minute read that’s informative, and not wrong.
But my assumption in this post is, that quick hit will not be enough. You want more than 500 words, and you don’t want a filter between you and the new scientific finding.
Can you do better? Yes, courtesy of today’s internet resources, and yes, if you know how to “eat like an owl” when you read.
How does an owl eat? An owl swallows the entire mouse, digests all the good parts, and spits out the rest. That’s your process, as an amateur reading science.
Scholar.google.com
A long time ago (when I was young), scholarship, including scientific scholarship, was held close within the temple precincts. If you didn’t have entre to a University library, an elite one like UC Berkeley or Stanford, the scholarship simply wasn’t available to you. In fact, forty years ago I actually got a grant to travel to these libraries so I could get more complete access to the literature then of interest to me: Greek tragedy, specifically Sophocles’ Oedipus. It was the 1970s: there was no internet. The computerized card catalog, available only on site, through a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe, was a wonder of the age. I got money to travel to the temple and do my reading.
I repeat: no one has quite my spectrum of interests …
But now, scholar.google.com lets you search essentially all of the scholarship available in an area (if you know how to search, see below). Even ten years ago, that search would have produced mostly just abstracts, and then a link to an opportunity to pay $10, $20, or $50 to obtain the full text of the underlying article (with an extra come-on to subscribe for somewhat more money to the scholarly journal in question).
But things have changed. Now, if there was any kind of grant support for the research, as there almost always is with an ancient DNA article or other scientific paper, the work has to be made public. And scholars themselves have migrated to the practice of posting preprints on free sites prior to or coincident with publication. Scholar.google.com hoovers them all up. If the hoi polloi can access the article somewhere somehow, there will be a link right there on scholar.google.com to the relevant html or pdf file. You do not have to enter the library temple. You do not need a student or faculty ID.
The precious artifacts of the temple have been spread out in the public square for all to see… If you know where to look.
Forward citation search
A classic gambit in scholarship, already ancient when I was in graduate school four decades ago, was straightforward: in order to learn more, check out the references. All scholarship contains references, whether in the form of footnotes or as a standalone bibliography.
A typical instruction for new Ph.D. students was to find a recent state-of-the-art paper in the field of interest (not uncommonly authored by your advisor), and then track down and read all the references that seemed relevant. You’d quickly get up to speed on that topic area, and could begin to formulate a research question of your own. In short, standard citation search looks backwards: what was written before the focal article?
Forward citation search works a little differently. If you are the target of this post, you are an amateur. You still need to find a focal article, same as that new Ph.D. student. This can be a reference in David Reich’s book, such as Haak et al. 2015, one of the first demonstrations that today’s Europeans descend in part from Steppe invaders during the Bronze Age. Or it could be a nutritional study referenced in Dr. Fung’s book on obesity. Or a paper on black holes.
You have to find a scholarly article from which to start—you need a seed. And that article, written in high academese, won’t be an easy read (more on coping techniques below). But once you find that seed, scholar.google.com is your friend.
Scholar.google.com indexes the scholarly literature; it is a special purpose search engine. You can quickly find your focal article by entering a unique phrase from the title. Once you do, notice the linked number at the lower left bottom preceded by: ‘citations’. That link is your ticket to further learning.
Due to the wonders of modern databases (and the rigid patterns to which scholarly articles must conform), scholar.google.com knows of every author who published after the appearance of your focal article, and who chose to cite it in their reference section. Scholarly norms require that all relevant and acceptable prior work be cited; peer reviewers will tell the authors if they left anybody out (especially if the omitted papers came from the reviewer or one of their students :-).
Accordingly, once you find a focal article from a few years back, clicking on the citations link in scholar.google.com takes you to a listing of the subsequent citing articles. If there are a lot of these, you can screen for ‘published after’, and get the most recent follow-on work. Ancient DNA research had a hinge date about 2015; screening for articles published after that date (or after 2018 or 2019) brings you right up to date.
Result: you no longer have a filter of journalism between you and the burgeoning topic of interest—ancient DNA in my focal example. You’ve got access to every paper that comes downstream in the topic area, right up to a few days ago.
How to read that illuminating article once you find it
Maybe I over-estimate your abilities; but I like to think that any college graduate could follow the advice I give here. Yah, I’ve got a Ph.D., a license to learn; but I don’t think that is an entry requirement for the amateur ‘research’ described below.
Remember, you must eat like an owl: perusing the entire scientific article while spitting out the indigestible portions.
Insider tip: the good stuff will be in the sections headed by Introduction, and especially, Discussion. The Results section may be a mixed bag, depending on journal norms, and how many of these papers you’ve ploughed through. It can be full of acronyms, close to gobbledygook, or a relatively straightforward account of what the tables and figures show, written in something close to English.
But the part that you as an amateur can always spit out is the Methods section. No amateur need ever read a Methods section in a scientific paper, unless you are retired like me, and have taken to reading dozens of papers in an area, so that after some time, you decide you just have to learn what “Bayesian skyline plot” means.
Methods sections are written for reviewers, whom the authors want to win over, and as armor against adversaries, whom the authors fear will reject the work as amateurish at best, incompetent at worst. If you are a normal person, not part of the Ph.D. fraternity, you just can’t imagine how technically obtuse the language in these sections can be. Trust me: I wrote my share of similarly obtuse methods sections in the course of my academic career as a consumer psychologist.
An amateur need never read a Methods section. There’s no point: You can’t criticize it—you’re an amateur, and only professionals in the (narrow sub-specialty) have the wherewithal to find flaws in the methodology of what the authors did. Freed of the need to read this highly technical section, you may find that the best science (in the remainder of the paper) is written quite well, certainly better than the dreck you’d find in a postmodern Humanities paper written by a similarly eminent scholar from as prestigious a university in an equally ranked journal (!).
Minus the acronyms and technical terms, I find the prose quality in the typical Nature or Science article on ancient DNA to be quite high. As you descend down the journal hierarchy, maybe not so much. But still: science lends itself to declarative sentences. And these are far easier to understand than the cat-and-mouse, I-know-more-than-you sentences, so very elliptical, that have alas proliferated within too many corners of Humanities and Social Science scholarship.
To eat like an owl means, in sequence:
- The title found in the forward citation search seemed worth a look: “Ancient Irish DNA.”
- The abstract (always free and one click away) either did or did not motivate you to continue.
- If yes, you plow through the introduction. The very first paper you read within a stream—Haak et al. as an example—will be a mixed bag. Each scientific paper is part of an ongoing conversation in a community of scholars of which you are not a member and whose history is unfamiliar to you. But if you persevere, by the tenth instance, you get pretty facile with “EBA” (early Bronze Age), “Yamnaya“ (steppe ancestry), “Corded Ware” (a particular pottery distribution and time horizon in Central Europe), and so forth.
- Next you take a stab at reading the results. If you can understand the sentences, and/or the figures look relevant to your needs (Did my Scottish ancestors come from Ireland? How much Norwegian ancestry should I expect given my Argyll ancestry?), then you plow through it as best you can.
- You read the discussion carefully. Afterwards, it won’t hurt to articulate, What did I learn from this paper?
- And then you either return to your keyword search (“Scottish DNA”), or you check out the (forward) citations of the exciting and interesting paper you just read.
Sometimes you’ll hit the jackpot: a paper published two years after your focal paper, whose own citations seem even more worth exploring.
Alas, if you transition to the more archaeological or anthropological literature, where grant support is thinner, and the scientific literature is more likely to be hidden behind paywalls, then you may need library access to continue. Here it helps to be a retired professor–I can get access to almost any such paper through my University library.
But the ideal of the public library continues to shine in America; if you are a resident of a major metropolis, you can probably get at that paper–just not on your couch using only your phone.
Last, if it’s a hot scientific area, like ancient DNA research, the papers never stop coming: you can repeat fruitful searches a few months later, and find new state of the art papers.
Enjoy!
Epilogue: So what?
Great: now you know how to keep up with scientific research in a field of interest. But what will you do with that knowledge?
Here, it probably does make a difference if you have training as a scholar, or have a Ph.D., M.D., or LL.D.—doctoral degrees that require you to synthesize diverse and partially contradictory evidence into a coherent narrative. Or maybe the heralded liberal arts education can do the same for you(?).
What good does “keeping up with scientific advances” do on its own? Maybe not so much; rather, you need a point of view.
Here is an example from the ancient DNA literature. Recent evidence shows rather thoroughgoing gene replacement in Europe at various prehistorical junctures, most notably the Bronze Age. Was it due to war and slaughter? Was it plague, introduced by invaders, or happenstance? Was it a knock-on consequence of climate change-induced famine?
It makes a moral difference, I think. I like to know who I am and where I came from. Seems important somehow.
Is the opening sequence from the movie Conan the Barbarian an accurate representation of European pre-history? Did horse-borne, sword-wielding invaders from the East slaughter the male peasants in the village, rape all the women, enslave the children, and found the society to which I must trace my ancestry? Seems important somehow to know the truth of the matter.
In this vein, if you read the scientific literature, you can find very different explanatory scenarios that do not involve slaughter and rapine. You do not need to assume that, say, Niall of the Nine hostages fathered four male children on each of a dozen enslaved concubines. Rather more innocent and innocuous scenarios can be envisaged—if you’ll take the trouble to read the scientific literature.
If you are an otherwise educated person & yet you succumb to a naïve, racist, and unscientific view of your ancestry—our ancestry—because you didn’t take the trouble to keep up with ancient DNA research: what moral status can you claim?
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