Science Corner: All Papers Great and Small

Summer vacations have come to an end, classes are starting up again for the fall, so we all know what that means: Time for the Ig Nobel prizes! Serious about snake bites? Got questions about polar bear kisses? Curious about the nutritional merits of cockroach milk? The Ig Nobels have you covered with awards for research on those topics and more.

It may be tempting to think of the Ig Nobel Prizes as the Razzies of science, a “worst of” complement to the “best of” Nobels. I suppose the naming invites that mindset to a degree, as does the timing about a month before the Nobel announcements. But as I’ve discussed before, and a big reason why I keep coming back to them, the work itself is representative of the quality level of all science. These folks are not being singled out for poor methods or low quality results–and certainly not for the sort of actual misconduct like manipulating or fabricating data that could get your work labeled bad science. Rather, they are being celebrated for applying the exacting standards of scientific rigor to questions off the beaten track.

Take this year’s prize in Biomechanics, which went to

Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West for devising a more precise definition of kissing—“non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”—in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.

Anybody can kiss. Anybody can be smitten by a photo of cute animals nuzzling. To make it science, you need a question to answer and a systematic way to collect data that can answer that question. While you wouldn’t know it from the Ig Nobel citation, the point of the paper isn’t to decide what a kiss is, or which animals kiss and which don’t. Defining kissing was just one of the first steps Brindle, Talbot and West needed to accomplish in order to label their data and start answering their actual questions: when in natural history did kissing emerge and why?

The actual work involved a literature review, along with watching videos of monkeys and apes, to identify which species kiss and which do not, as well as determining various other traits related to mating, diet, and food sharing. Then they constructed phylogenetic trees and worked backwards to determine when in the ancestry of primates different traits likely emerged. The authors admit that their data is likely incomplete, and treating kissing as a binary (ever observed/reported kissing or not) possibly too simplistic. But within the limitations of available data, they were as rigorous as they could be. The results may not be paradigm-shattering, but they shed some more light on common human experiences and bring a little romance and light-heartedness to science. Why not celebrate work like that?

If you peruse the other celebrated scientists, you may notice that this year’s prize in Biology went to a paper that has been retracted. The Ig Nobels make no mention of this fact; that is not the reason for recognizing the paper. I encourage you to read the retraction notice; it is brief and straightforward. The work involved constructing various controlled scenarios in which snakes and humans interacted and then observing whether the snake attempted to bite. The question being asked was which details of the encounter, such as snake age & sex, ambient temperature, time of day, and how the human & snake interacted, increased the probability of a bite. The protocol was reviewed and approved by an ethics committee, but after the paper was published the committee felt the work had exceed the scope of what had been approved by including newborn snakes and by using a technique of softly stepping on the snakes as one form of interaction. That discrepancy led to the paper being retracted by the journal.

Retraction is a rare but important part of the scientific publication process. But not all retractions are the same. Some papers are retracted because of deliberate misconduct like fabricating data. Others are retracted when the authors or others discover honest mistakes that substantially impact the findings. The snake paper is a third category; there is no suggestion the results are inaccurate, but rather that the data may have been improperly sourced. Ethical treatment of research subjects, human and nonhuman, is important, and a move like this signals how seriously it should be taken. Without knowing any of the details, I’m willing to believe this could be a case of either of miscommunication, where the authors thought they had been comprehensive in describing their protocol, or perhaps a field judgment where the researchers made an adjustment they thought was in scope with what had been approved, and either way the committee disagreed.

Whether the Ig Nobels intended to highlight this particular part of the scientific process or not, it is probably just as well that they did. It’s easy to get a romanticized and sanitized view of science from paying attention to Nobel prizes. The Ig Nobel prizes tend to shed more light on the day-to-day ups and downs of being a practicing scientist.

Perhaps there’s a good spiritual practice here in the celebration of the everyday and the ordinary. After all, the Bible makes clear that God is not just in the big moments, and it is not just the most successful or most adored who bear God’s image. Nutrionally dense cockroach milk, the smell of new babies (and teens), and monkey kisses are all just as much God’s creation as the Higgs boson and CRISPR gene editing. So let’s celebrate more of these meetings with God and God’s work.