Ep. 838 SOS Special | Everybody Needs A Bit Of Scienza

Welcome to our special SOS. Everybody needs a bit of Shanza installment. This is a shout out to all the wine geeks out there. We need some feedback on the professor's new book, the English version of jumbo shrimp guide to the origins evolution and future of the grapevine. The Italian wine podcast is part of the mama jumbo shrimp brand and mama jumbo shrimp It's all about breaking down difficult concepts into small bite sized pieces. The issue here is that the new book is well a bit difficult to chew at this point. So we want to invite one lovers out there to give us their input and advice to make the final product more reader friendly. So have at it, wine lovers. Don't be shy. Send your comments to info at italian wine podcast dot com. Now on to the show. Welcome to another episode of everybody needs a better chance at the SOS edition. I'm here with Richard Huff. Hello, Richard. Hi, Joy. How are you? Good. Here we are again. Yes. We're gonna do this narration of Shenza's new book. As I I'm standing in for Stevie. She is, off jet setting around the world doing via. She's a new Why we're stuck in a bit Yeah. Yeah. She's in New York at the moment. So let's see here. I will, talk a minute about why we're doing this. So you're reading these chapters for Shenza. His book. He's an Italian scientist who has done so much work, we'd be here till next Christmas if I was to, talk about, all his, you know, accolades and work, but he essentially he writes an Italian. This is a very scientific book, but We're trying to make it for the everyday wine drinking person international community. We're making it accessible. We're looking for feedback so that people can and we're gonna put it on our mama jumbo shrimp series of books. So it has to be, you know, easy for people to understand. And so, yeah, it's it's it's a really awesome book. You've translated it. And now, you know, we need to make it accessible. So, yeah, go ahead and and and read read some of it, so that people can hear and then, we'll, I'll start talking again. Okay. Just to give you some some background on this chapter, this is chapter twelve, which is provisionally titled science skeptics. It's slightly less. Complex, I think, than the previous chapter, but it focuses on a very topical issue, which is skepticism towards science and towards scientists mistrust of science. It also addresses the issue of science education and the rapid pace of technological advancement. What has any of this got to do with wine? I hear you ask, well, with climate change and genetic engineering science is going to have an increasingly significant impact on wine production through the idea behind this chapter is that it's to help, readers to have a grasp of the moral ethical and scientific issues behind these important scientific challenges and developments. Okay. So this is chapter twelve science skeptics. Hostility or skepticism towards science which philosophers more kindly call the criticism of science has accompanied modern science from its origins with conflicting attitudes ranging from gloomy prophecies about the end of civilization and inevitably the scientific origins of the Holocaust. Regrets about the passing of the middle ages as an organic community based epoch and the exaltation of primitive agricultural civilizations or the magical world of alchemy are often evoked even in our advanced modern era. More recently, waves of skepticism have returned cyclically since the revolt against science of the early nineteen hundreds, the era of the romantic rejection of newtonian science in the nineteen thirties and the anti science and anti modernism of the late nineteen sixties This skepticism is based on a pseudo humanistic interpretation of the inhumanity of science made up of individuals ready to sell themselves to multinationals or as unknowing slaves to power. From this perspective, science is regarded as an ungodly and even Musaffarian enterprise that craves dominance violates nature and is directly responsible for social exploitation and inhumanity. It is almost as if in our age of well-being, it is a sense of nostalgia for less comfortable times. Intelligence have a strong propensity for the unspeakable and during the last century, they have found themselves in the hands of the vilist political regimes, but the pessimism and the preaching of an imminent apocalypse pays off in popularity hostility towards science so intensely propagated is now in danger of becoming a common way of thinking. Young people above all believe in the sunset of civilization and identify nature with innocence bringing together in a hardly novel mixture, right wing traditionalism, and left wing utopianism. In nineteen seventy two, the Austrian British philosopher, sir Carl Popper, although better known for playing down the powers of science expressed his full agreement with Darwin stating that science is perhaps the most powerful tool for biological adaptation ever to emerge in the course of organic evolution. Almost a century earlier, Mendel had claimed that genetics was evolution in the hands of man. We have just emerged from a century that has almost always had a negative relationship with science even if this is apparently paradoxical. The rapid pace of technological advancement has created major imbalances, the effects of which are difficult to absorb in the short term. The flood of inventions and discoveries are a constant feature in our media with a daily bombardment of new scientific breakthroughs. The results seem for now only partial, genetic recombination, genome editing, cisgenesis RNA interference, mapping the genome, new fertilization techniques in vitro cell research, nanotechnology, and new bioengineered products. As to the strategic destination, there is now only one almost absolute certainty. Suddenly we are on the other side. Why then at a time when it seems to achieve more spectacular results every day is mistrust of science growing. In the past, one of the most striking examples of this phenomenon was the suspicious surrounding genetically modified organisms. Now the rift has shifted onto the vaccination issue. In the technological world, the old is generally unusable and inert. It no longer exists. There is only the new, which is full of ideas for the future. The consequence is that the scientific dialogue in many fields of today's research takes place not only among peers, but also between contemporaries. This kind of uniformity also removes geographical distances, making the work of a Milan researcher almost completely indistinguishable from one in California. In such a context, the perception of history can be linked to the concept of obsolescence, akin to what the past is to technology, a warehouse of old redundant models. This is how the ancient principle of Historia Majistra Vite formulated by Chichiro in the oratorre is interpreted, meaning that the most distant history is less interesting and less relevant to the circumstances of the present. This has led to the revision of history of literature or history of art programs and put in perspective their expected reduction The syndrome we are now experiencing is the matter opposite of that suffered by classical antiquity, then it was the technology that did not keep pace with the leap forward made in other fields of knowledge, including philosophy, law, art, and the ideas of democracy that shaped civilization. Today, we risk being crushed by the opposite imbalance. A technological search that cannot find the cultural and social framework capable of bearing its weight. A declining prestige of culture in the traditional sense, humanistic mathematical and natural sciences is increasingly accompanied by the growing prestige of technical disciplines and the influence of a culturally impoverished ruling class increasingly influenced by the myths of triumphant technology. The basis of this is the affirmation of a model that in recent years especially in the post war period has contrasted the human sciences with a technological scientific mass, more and more technical and less and less scientific as it has been perceived by a part of society. In education, STEM is the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEM in English is the stem of a flower in a conceptual sense. In a linguistic sense, stem is the root and suggests something essential necessary for subsistence. In this way, it activates a powerful amphibology as linguistics call it. A phrase that is linguistically ambiguous. In fact, the acronym developed by the American National Science Foundation in the 1990s for a program dedicated to the enhancement of certain scientific and technological subjects in schools, which primarily involve the training of one hundred thousand new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to replace retiring baby boomers who had been ill equipped for this kind of teaching. In those years, Farid Zakaraya wrote in the Washington Post. A liberal education centered on the liberal arts in the sense of the humanities is irrelevant. Technical education is the new frontier before adding the United States excelled in economic dynamism, innovation, and entrepreneurship, thanks to the educational system that we would now like to oust Similarly, the Japanese government in twenty fifteen announced in very explicit terms its intention to drastically downsize the humanities faculties in favor of disciplines that would better anticipate the needs of society, a position shared in England, which in twenty fourteen defended stem as it created more opportunities for young people and opened the doors to all types of careers. It would be illusory to think that the sacrifice of humanistic culture on the altar of the urgency of technological primacy is the immediate and logical consequence of the social development in the West. In reality, this sacrifice is also realized in the closed regimes of the Islamic theocracies. You cannot avoid the issue by trying to suppress the power of technology. Instead, it is necessary to gradually adjust to the new reality to establish cultural political and moral framework capable of absorbing the impact of change without political or ethical delays. Politics is in crisis because it feels that life is leading it. It is technology that determines our way of life and shapes our standard of living. Politics lags behind. Feeling to understand a revolution in which it is a mere bystander. That's actually odd. That was a that was a good chapter. I like that. Yes. It really raises some really interesting and really topical issues quite challenging as well in in some respects. So, yeah, yeah, I think it is one that's gonna hopefully provoke some, some conversation and some, some feedback What do you think about his style of writing? Like Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, he has a very particular style of writing, which without wanting to quote controversy is is probably quite common in the academic world and and certainly in the Italian academic world, and that's fine. That's great. But, obviously, what what we're trying to do is is to create something that is more digestible. So the question is whether we need to be more explicit and making some of these arguments and make them even more digestible, I suppose, for a for a wider audience. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly it. Well, I think that, with that in mind, we should probably, you know, address the listeners and, you know, just say if you have any thoughts, any opinions, any advice on how we can do that. You know, it would be really helpful as we continue to work on and, bring this book into into fruition for a wider audience. Of course, you've you've translated it into English. And so, you know, now it's up the point where we need to figure out what what is gonna be done with it. So, go ahead if anybody is, has listened, has any thoughts, and contact, Richard directly at Yes. My email address is hoff, which is h o u g h at just do the work dot I t. Okay. So h o u g h at just do the work dot I t. Yep. Cool. And then we, of course, in the notes and the show notes, if you just scroll down on wherever you get your pods, you will see a list of our social media handles, and you can go on hop on there, you know, like Twitter at etail Y podcast. Just yeah, leave a comment. It doesn't have to be, you know, anything, you know, groundwork. Just, we, or we really need a bit of interaction. Yeah. Even just a thumbs up or a thumbs down probably would be enough to Yeah. That would make us feel good. So, alright, Richard. Until next week, That's all we have. You know, as always, keep listening to the Italian wine podcast, like, subscribe, go on to our Spotify, give that some love, and of course we have our mama jumbo shrimp YouTube channel that has been doing some awesome things. There are so many videos on there, with some great wineries all over Italy that Stevie has been visiting. She's been really busy. She's actually in New York right now, doing her thing. So until next time, that's wrap. Thank you. Goodbye, Johnny. Bye. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Himalayev, them and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time, teaching. Hi, guys. I'm Joy Livingston, and I am the producer of the Italian wine podcast. Thank you for listening. 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