Written in Fire

TIME Magazine

10 Questions for Sherman VanMeter

Dr. Sherman VanMeter has made a career of unpacking the densest areas of scientific endeavor in accessible—if not polite—terms.

You’ve written books on everything from astrophysics to zoology. How are you able to achieve expertise in so many disparate fields?

There’s a perception that scientific disciplines are separate countries, when in fact science is a universal passport. It’s about exploring and thinking critically, not memorization. A question mark, not a period.

Can you give me an example?

Sure. Kids learn about the solar system by memorizing the names of planets. That’s a period. It’s also scientifically useless, because names have no value.

The question mark would be to say instead, “There are hundreds of thousands of sizable bodies orbiting the sun. Which ones are exceptional? What makes them so? Are there similarities? What do they reveal?”

But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity?

You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions.

Sounds more like mysticism than science. How do you draw the line?

That’s where the critical thinking comes in.

I can see how that applies to the categorization of solar objects. But what about more abstract questions?

It works there too. Take love, for example. Artists would tell you that love is a mysterious force. Priests claim it’s a manifestation of the divine.

Biochemists, on the other hand, will tell you that love is a feedback loop of dopamine, testosterone, phenylethylamine, norepinephrine, and feel-my-pee-pee. The difference is, we can show our work.

So you’re not a romantic, then?

We’re who we are as a species because of evolution. And at the essence, evolution is the steady production of increasingly efficient killing machines.

Isn’t it more accurate to say “surviving machines”?

The two go hand in hand. But the killing is the prime mover; without that, the surviving doesn’t come into play.

Kind of a cold way to look at the world, isn’t it?

No, it’s actually an optimistic one. There’s a quote I love from the anthropologist Robert Ardrey: “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.”

You used that as the epigraph to your new book, God Is an Abnorm. But I noticed you left out the last line, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Why?

That’s where Ardrey’s poetic license gets the better of his science, which is a perilous mistake. We aren’t “known among the stars” at all. The sun isn’t pondering human nature, the galaxy isn’t sitting in judgment. The universe doesn’t care about us. We’ve evolved into what we are because humanity’s current model survived and previous iterations didn’t. Simple as that.

Why is a little artistic enthusiasm a perilous mistake?

Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.